Updates
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Petition to make the Equality Act clear – campaign webinar
Tuesday 6th December, 7.30pm to 8.30pm Join Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce of Sex Matters, and campaigners @MsGiveZeroFox and @satiricole. Since our petition was launched in early November, more than 38,000 people have signed, calling on the government to update the Equality Act 2010 to make clear that the protected...
29th November 2022
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Our response to the NHS interim service specification consultation
The NHS’s public consultation regarding the interim service specification for youth gender services ends on 4th December. We would encourage people to respond, including parents, teachers, school leaders and clinicians. We have published our full response. Sex Matters joins Transgender Trend and the Gay Men’s Network in welcoming the broad direction...
29th November 2022
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Mass harassment in HM Prisons and Probation Service
As reported in The Telegraph today, HM Prisons and Probation Service’s Pride in Prison and Probation (PiPP) staff network has circulated documents for Trans Awareness Week telling MoJ staff to recognise a series of words and phrases as “transphobic dogwhistles”. The PiPP is an official staff network, with a...
20th November 2022
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Helen Joyce speaks at Caius College
On 25th October 2022, Sex Matters’ Director of Advocacy Helen Joyce spoke at an event at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, entitled “Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced”. This page documents the events surrounding the talk. Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced...
15th November 2022
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Lib Dems revise “transphobia” definition
The Liberal Democrats have revised their definition of transphobia in the light of recent legal cases. The previous policy which drew on the work of “organisations such as Stonewall and TransActual UK”. But following advice from two KCs (one, from Karon Monaghan KC, has been published), it has now...
14th November 2022
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Trans rights are human rights!
Sex Matters is a human-rights organisation. We believe that universal human rights form a powerful framework for thinking about how a diversity of freedoms can be respected, while protecting against harm and maintaining an open and prosperous society. It is sometimes argued that those who call for clarity on...
9th November 2022
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Toilets Matter: a Sex Matters webinar
Friday 18th November, 7pm to 8pm Join Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce of Sex Matters, and journalist Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, in the run-up to World Toilet Day. World Toilet Day is a chance to focus on an issue that is too often deemed unmentionable. Rose...
8th November 2022
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Why are judges still calling rapists “she” in court?
The Equal Treatment Bench Book is a guide to judges on how to run an inclusive court room. But it is not based on the law, and it is leading judgments astray. Sex Matters has published a new report on the problems with the Equal Treatment Bench Book. In...
7th November 2022
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Sex Matters welcomes headteachers’ guidance
Sex Matters offers a qualified welcome to the new Guidance for maintained schools and academies in England on provision for transgender pupils published by the Association of School and College Leaders, Chartered College of Teaching, Confederation of School Trusts (CST), Institute of School Business Leadership, National Association of Head...
7th November 2022
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New guidance for barristers curtails freedom of speech and promotes discrimination
The Bar Standards Board has been holding a public consultation on its new guidance on the regulation of non-professional conduct use of social media by barristers. Barristers are bound by their duties “not to behave in a way which is likely to diminish the trust and confidence which the...
6th November 2022
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Open letter to Minouche Shafik of the LSE
Members of the Open University Gender Critical Research Network have written to Baroness Minouche Shafik, Director of the London School of Economics, to ask for an independent review into the LSE’s Department of Gender Studies. Sex Matters joins them in calling on the LSE to launch an independent investigation...
6th November 2022
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We launch the petition champions
Campaign update 2: After just three days we are over a quarter of the way to the 100,000 signatures needed to prompt a parliamentary debate. Thank you to everyone who has already signed the Make the Equality Act Clear Petition. Every signature helps! If everyone who has signed could...
5th November 2022
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Campaign update: Day 1
Yesterday we launched the Make the Equality Act Clear petition, calling on the government to clarify, with a legislative amendment, that sex means sex in the Equality Act 2010. It got an amazing response. In less than 24 hours, 15,000 people signed the petition, and the number is continuing...
3rd November 2022
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We call for a “Cass Review for Education”
Sex Matters together with Bayswater Support Group, Fair Play For Women, LGB Alliance, Safe Schools Alliance and Transgender Trend have written to the new Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, to draw her attention to the problem of gender ideology being promoted in schools. We ask her to:...
1st November 2022
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Sex Matters writes to the new Chair of Stonewall
Iain Anderson is Stonewall’s new Chair of Trustees. This morning he made his first public appearance, on the BBC. Laura Kuenssberg asked him about engaging with women who are “gender critical”, saying they are asking questions about the trans rights debate and “feel like they have been shut out...
30th October 2022
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Is Sex Matters a feminist organisation?
The Sex Matters team is just back from a fantastic time at FiLiA, Europe’s largest feminist conference. But Sex Matters is not a feminist organisation. We simply subscribe to the radical notion that women are human beings, with full human rights. We also attended the LGB Alliance. But Sex...
27th October 2022