Define “equality”
The first two sentences of this Spectator piece by Stephen Daisley need a post of their own before I read the rest.
Sir Keir Starmer’s interpretation of the Equality Act has caused something of a stir. The Labour leader cited the Brown-era legislation to support his assertion that ‘trans women are women’ and that this ‘happens to be the law in the United Kingdom’.
What does equality have to do with the assertion that “trans women are women”?
Even if the Act does say that (which apparently it doesn’t), what does equality have to do with it? Nothing. “Equality” doesn’t mean “you get to force everyone to agree with whatever you say about yourself.” Even if the fatuous repetition of “trans women are women” made it true it still wouldn’t have anything to do with equality. It’s a different subject, and equality doesn’t come into it. It’s hard to say what the subject is, exactly, because it’s all so peculiar and twisted, but it’s definitely not equality.
Equality: If women get to be women, surely men get to be women too? It’s only equal!!
That probably is the idea, to the extent that there is a real idea.
After reading that, I clicked over to this article which I thought you might appreciate:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/JK-Rowling-trans
Rowling’s Razor
Which of these is more likely?
A person who is otherwise socially liberal and tolerant has taken a position on sex and gender that is driven by prejudice and hatred.
That person has some concerns about how changes in sex and gender law could have consequences for women and girls.
You’re quite right: the purpose of the Equality Act is to ensure that people with protected characteristics are treated equally to those who do not. It means that such people cannot be lawfully discriminated against other than in cases where certain exemptions apply. The exemptions are there because discrimination isn’t always bad. Examples of exemptions include issues involving age (we’re allowed to refuse to serve alcohol to children) and sex (we’re allowed to have single sex spaces/services according to some extremely broad and easy to meet conditions). Stuff like that.
And that’s all there is to it, really. The act has absolutely no bearing on who is or isn’t a woman. This is what the EA has to say about the protected characteristic of sex:
and this is what it says about the protected characteristic of gender reassignment:
That’s more or less it. There is (genuinely) more about hovercraft(!) in the act than there is about sex or gender reassignment.
This is what the official guidance to the EA says about sex as a protected characteristic:
The ‘of any age’ might seem confusing, but remember that age is also a protected characteristic. What this section is saying is that for the purposes of the act, ‘woman’ is a female of any age. Nobody is compelled to accept that definition, we just need to abide by it with respect to equality law.
There’s a section about gender reassignment in the guidance, too. It does not say TWAW or anything like it. In fact, it talks about gender reassignment as a process or an intention rather than any state of being. It’s an intention to ‘live as’ the opposite sex and any steps that might be taken to achieve that.
So TL;DR: the UK’s Equality Act definitely does not say that trans women are women. This is just one of the many presumably deliberate misinterpretations of the act you’ll find lurking in just about every sordid corner of the internet.
These wilful misinterpretations drive me crazy for a variety of reasons but mostly because it’s such a terrible tactic. If I wanted to get into women’s spaces, I’d argue that the EA was unfair or that the exemptions were unnecessarily or cruelly restrictive or that sex ought not to be a protected characteristic. But TAs don’t tend to do that; they just lie barefacedly about what the act says. I keep meaning to write something about these misinterpretations, I’ll probably get around to it one day.