Updates • Page 5
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NHS Confederation: leadership needed
“It is now — not the good times — where all that work you did on purpose and values matters. Like a winter coat, integrity is only tested in storm.” Matthew Taylor The NHS Confederation is the membership body for NHS services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its...
26th August 2022
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Sex Matters writes to the NHS Confederation
The NHS Confederation is the membership body for NHS services in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its members employ over 1.5 million staff, care for more than a million patients a day and control £150 billion of public expenditure. It recently sought bids for a piece of work to create:...
24th August 2022
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Converting minds or bodies?
A riposte to the Good Law Project’s published advice on conversion therapy
16th August 2022
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Sex and the law – share our short guide
What does intersex mean? Are you allowed to mention someone’s sex if they don’t want you to? Has someone with a gender recognition certificate changed their sex? Do you have the right to privacy when you’re taking your clothes off? Is it discrimination to keep male people out of...
4th August 2022
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What Hilary Cass needs to tell schools: social transition is incompatible with safeguarding
On 28th July Dr Hilary Cass, the eminent paediatrician commissioned by the government to review paediatric gender-identity provision in the NHS, made an announcement that vindicated everyone who has criticised that provision, often at considerable personal cost. The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), England’s sole NHS clinic for under-18s...
29th July 2022
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Employers must reconsider their policies and relationship with Stonewall after Allison Bailey’s victory
Allison Bailey has won her claims of direct belief discrimination and victimisation against Garden Court Chambers. The Employment Tribunal unanimously found that Miss Bailey was discriminated against and victimised by her barristers’ chambers on the basis of her gender-critical beliefs. Importantly, the judgment recognises that the whole of Allison Bailey’s...
27th July 2022
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If you can’t say sex, how can you say sexual harassment?
An employment tribunal in Leeds has handed down judgment in a case involving catering staff at a Sheffield NHS Hospital Trust. A female employee reported that a male colleague had asked her to go into a private room and then had quipped about removing his underwear. Another reported having...
20th July 2022
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Why do single-sex services matter?
In February 2022 Sex Matters undertook a survey to find out why single-sex services matter to people. The response was astonishing. In a little over a week we received over 7,000 replies, nine out of ten of them from women. Many included details about how the loss of everyday...
19th July 2022
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Will the next Tory leader #RespectMySex?
Boris Johnson is on his way out, and the contest to decide who will replace him as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party will begin shortly. At the time of writing, there are at least 15 potential contenders, but there is no obvious favourite, as there was...
8th July 2022
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What does the Forstater judgment mean for employers?
On 6th July 2022 an employment tribunal found that Maya Forstater had been directly discriminated against by the Center for Global Development because of her beliefs. This follows on from the precedent-setting judgment of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in June 2021, which found that the “gender critical” belief “that...
8th July 2022
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A win for free speech and sex-based rights
Sex Matters’ Executive Director, Maya Forstater, has won her employment tribunal case against her former employer. Here is her press statement: Maya Forstater, who took a claim for belief discrimination against her former employer, the Center for Global Development, has been vindicated by a ruling that she was unlawfully...
6th July 2022
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![Trans rights activist recused: “The evidence of the lay member’s position [...] must again lead that observer to conclude that there would remain a real possibility of unconscious bias.”](https://sex-matters.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Lord-recused.png)
Edward Lord recused from hearing gender-critical belief case
A recent hearing of the Employment Appeal Tribunal considered whether trans rights activist Edward Lord was a suitable person to hear a case of gender-critical belief discrimination. The case of Kristie Higgs v Farmor’s School concerns whether restrictions of the free-speech rights of critics of the transgender movement are...
5th July 2022
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Information Commissioner strikes down secrecy of Stonewall scheme
The Information Commissioner has ordered the University of Oxford to disclose the scores and feedback it received from Stonewall as part of the lobby group’s controversial Workplace Equality Index scheme. Following a Freedom of Information appeal undertaken as part of the “Don’t Submit to Stonewall” campaign initiated by Legal...
1st July 2022
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Male and female in the Equality Act
Last week Old Square Chambers hosted a seminar about single-sex services and the law. Barristers Nicola Newbegin and Robin Moira White argued that biological sex is something that “popped up” recently in relation to the Equality Act. The meaning of the protected characteristic of “sex”, they said, is ambiguous and...
21st June 2022
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Who is Edward Lord?
Can a person who accuses everyone who disagrees with radical gender ideology of “transphobia” be the right person to hear a case about discrimination for gender-critical belief?
20th June 2022
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Sex Matters response to “More in Common”
More in Common is an organisation that seeks to “build societies and communities that are “stronger, more united, and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarisation and social division”. Perhaps as a response to this challenge from Maya Forstater, it has applied its approach to the gender wars....
16th June 2022