Sitting in on the AEA vs EHRC JR Permissions hearing.

Good to hear the EHRC defence saying it "can't be right" that a trans woman who has transitioned for many years but doesn't have a GRC can be discriminated against without any worries

It's a pretty rough case to be listening to as a gender abolitionist so far and it's nice to hear that the EHRC are willing to uphold the rights of trans folks to our basic rights.

AEA's case so far as been that for trans women without a GRC we can be discriminated against anywhere single sex services apply including toilets (which we were using long before the EA2010!)

IE, as someone as some point summarised - this would mean that indirect discrimination against trans woman would be pretty much always legitimate.

AEA also raised the Hampstead pond which...

Err trans women were using that even before the equality act too.

One of my takeaways from the hearing so far is that equality law around trans people and sex IS complicated, that the EHRC have done a lot of work trying to balance it and fundamentally cut that by saying trans people are usually protected because otherwise we'd be usually...

...subject to discrimination and that's not striking any sort of balance at all.

The world as gender crit jurisprudence would have it basically can't allow any provision for trans people IMO.

AEA's claims in the JR hearing are basically ignoring what indirect discrimination is in law altogether. Complete joke.

(This was called out by the judge, less dismissively than I would have but I'm not a legal expert)

Decision in 20 minutes lads.

Still waiting for the decision but the fact that the core argument in this case is "We want it to be legal to discriminate against trans women as men, not as trans women, so it's fine, there's no indirect discrimination against them for being trans" is pretty astounding.

As if 90% of the discrimination trans women face isn't based on calling us and treating us like men.

People crossing the sex divide are very obviously indirectly discriminated against in most places where rigid binary sex differentiation happens. The law makes exceptions only for *proportionate* exceptions to protections of trans folks in order to enable this.

It sounds like people are publishing the skeleton legal arguments so look forward to reading those later and you should probably refer to them for an understanding fo the case. I'm not a legal expert much less your legal expert, and I'm not trying to live tweet it here really.

Judge said permission denied. LOL

Get rekt TERFs

Judge now explaining why, and basically it's much of the above.

"It is not difficult to see how exclusion generally of transsexual women from single sex spaces would create such a discrimination".

BOOM>

"The defendent is seeking to provide concise and generally applicable advice. There is ano error in an applicable area of law"

Just to point out that for 3 years at least now, Fair PLay for Women, Women's Place UK, and AEA and various others have been lying that the EHRC are wrong about the Equality Act, and this case just confirms that.

Wishful thinking or lying? Hard to tell. But distorting reality.

I don't want to live tweet the judgement because I can't do it fast enough.

"Parliament has chosen in the 2010 equality act to put transsexual individuals in a different circumstance [to their birth sex]"

"I consider the claimant's construction of the act to be clearly wrong for the reasons I have summarised".

I'm going to break out cry laughing.

Answering the question of the delay: "The code came into practice in 2011..." "The claimant should be entitled to such claims being made promptly. The occured on the 23rd of march 2020"

Noone is objecting to electronic copies of the legal bundles being made available.

I wasn't ready to hear a judge do an ELI5 on indirect discrimination law to a QC but it was a thing to behold.

Wandering around GC social media looking for salt like I'm on spiro.

Computer, enhance quadrant 15 to 24

Apparently this isn't a hate forum, this place where this attitude to trans folks celebrating our legally protected rights under the equality act is seen as a personal violation.

It's not the EHRC who decided GCs were wrong but they're taking this loss as proof that the EHRC are institutionally captured for having defended their own legal position in a case against them.

Absolutely bizarre.

The grounds for appeal they imagine here are that the judge is a wanker and they want another go.

"ordinary people" don't have a hundred grand to blow on abstract philosophical cases in law.

They imagine they're the little people here they're absolutely barmy.

I'm not a lawyer, but absolutely stunned by the genius of hearing an outcome like this in law and deciding the it's EHRC's position which is untenable.