The following is a copy of a letter I sent to my local MP to raise awareness of Trans Actual’s damming new report Trans Segregation in Practice, detailing result of the UK Supreme Court’s ruling on the Equality Act 2012, the EHRC’s interim guidance, and other pieced of legislation introduced in recent months, and to respond to the reply to this email. I may include the reply at a later date but have omitted it here.
I have provided this to provide potential inspiration and a general structure should you wish to use it to contact your MP which I strongly encourage everyone to do. Please don’t copy and paste the wording but write it in your own tone of voice, as a copy-paste will read as disingenuous.
Dear NAME,
Thank you very much for your reply and especially thank you for your strong statement of support to the Trans community and wider. It is sincerely relieving and refreshing to hear a direct and unequivocal message of the value of the LGBTQ+ community, and so I’d like to genuinely thank you for that.
I was also appreciative that you acknowledged the ambiguity introduced by the ruling; that there is no definition in law for terms such as “legal sex” or “biological sex” despite both being used continually.
Unfortunately in the intervening months since the Supreme Court ruling and our last correspondence the situation for trans people has gotten exponentially worse as a result of general hatred being whipped up by the media in the wake of the ruling, but also as a direct result of Labour communications and policy announced since then.
I wanted to write to you again now to draw attention to a new report published by the CIC Trans Actual which details in disturbing detail case studies of the type of discrimination and abuse we as a community are facing now, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision and subsequent legislation. It details the horrific yet unsurprising result of the current political climate and the ambiguity left by the SC ruling and interim EHRC guidance. From the summary section:
“Frequently, people trying to follow the guidance given to them are prevented from doing so or experience harassment and threats of violence as a result of being ‘in the wrong bathroom’.”
“The changes are reported as empowering bullies who are already engaged in campaigns of harassment against trans people.”
I would especially highlight the impact on other civil rights such as the Article 8 right to privacy where trans people are being forcibly outed or otherwise asked for documentation illegally or asked invasive questions just trying to go about daily life.
“In both workplaces and otherwise, people were asked invasive questions about genitals, asked to produce Gender Recognition Certificates, and exclusion was frequently justified based on people’s perceptions of whether the trans person passed or based on what genital configuration they had; “you can’t use this until you are post-op”.
“Trans people report being suddenly excluded from social spaces and clubs which have been safe previously, and now avoiding going out or only going to places confirmed as trans inclusive.”
I appreciate the sentiment behind the idea that trans people will still be protected under the Equality Act 2012, but as has been clearly demonstrated, directly to each of us, trans people have effectively lost all protections under the act. The ambiguity left by the supreme court decision is being exploited by individuals and organisations implementing their own ‘interpretation’ of ‘what the law now says’ and performing acts of vigilante policing in an attempt to enforce anti-trans policies. In other cases, aside from those with an anti-trans agenda, well meaning individuals believing that the law now mandates trans exclusion fumble ‘implementations’ of policy to the same effect. Those wishing to actively include trans people are in many cases confused as to what they are allowed or mandated to do.
I wholeheartedly agree that it is not the government’s place to override the ruling, which is why I did not propose or allude to it before. Like you, I have a strong belief that the government is subject to the law, just like the rest of society.
However what the government can and must do is legislate to protect vulnerable populations. In the case of the SC ruling it must act to resolve the ambiguity left and resolve -what we now know to be) inadequacies in the Equality Act 2012, or to replace it with a more robust piece of legislation.
Labour must do more to protect trans people. To turn the tide on this wave of rampant transphobia I’d like to ask you to support movements to enshrine access to gender affirming care in law and to support the creation of a new legal recognition of our status as the sex which we actually are.
Thank you for pointing me to the EHRC consultation, I did fill it out and found the proposed guidance contradictory and laced with unworkable transphobic fantasies about how the world does / should work. It is a joke document that makes a mockery of the function of government and proposes what amounts to the total segregation of trans people from society, which I detailed in my answers.
Since then the EHRC announced that they would disregard a significant portion of the responses and indicated that they would use some kind of Large Language Model system to parse some / all of the responses. This is tantamount to a complete disregard of the 50,000+ responses they received. (source https://goodlawproject.org/the-ehrc-is-ignoring-trans-voices/)
I would also like to communicate my dismay and anger at the Department for Education for its updated statutory guidance on RSHE in schools which exceeds the Supreme Court ruling to introduce a “Section 28” style restriction on accepting trans identities and proposes that the existence of trans people is subject to “debate”.
I must condemn in the harshest terms this abuse of the EA 2012 and stress the harm that this will cause for years down the line. I was in school for the tail end of Section 28 and so heard no mention of trans people until late in high school. I developed a caricatured derogatory image of what a trans person was and could be, believing them
The idea of creating an environment where children are taught that trans people exist as a political entity or some kind of ideological quirk is heart-wrenchingly wrong. I urge the Labour party to amend or retract the update and take a strong stance of inclusivity in schools.
Lastly, I urge your party to revert its decision to revert the decision to appoint Mary-Ann Stephenson as the new Chair of the EHRC despite both the Women and Equalities Committee and the Joint Committee on Human Rights expressing opposition to her appointment as the government’s preferred candidate. To begin to undo the damage caused by the EHRC it must be reformed and a candidate with links to transphobic hate groups such as Sex Matters stands to maintain the same unacceptable status-quo.
Thank you very much again for your time, I hope you have a pleasant rest of the day.
Yours Sincerely,
Robyn F H Veitch