The Scottish Feminist Network and For Women in Scotland (FWC) group have just been granted the right to a judicial review of the Scottish Greens sponsored Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) by the UK Supreme Court.
FWC’s request challenges Holyrood’s policy that a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate in their chosen gender has the Protected Characteristic of sex. Their point is that the inclusion of a man’s chosen woman gender identity alongside the female biological sex in the Equality Act is unworkable.
FWC are seeking clarity that sex was always meant to be interpreted as biological sex when the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act were first drafted.
Scottish Ministers – which include trans activist Greens MSPs – have now finally accepted that, as a point of law, there is a need for certainty as to the definition of the term ‘woman’. They have agreed the case could be brought before the UK Supreme Court.
But how and why the UK team of experts and lawyers originally involved in the drafting of the pioneer Gender Recognition Act (GRA) got into such a muddle about the definition of sex in the first place ?
An explanation has come to light recently from Robert Wintermute, professor of human rights law at King’s College London. Wintermute took part in the drafting of the United Nations guide entitled the “Yogyarkarta Principles”. This document was adopted in November 2006 at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia.
Signed off by a group of human rights experts, lawyers, and transsexual activists ( a terminology used at the time for transgender people ), Professor Wintermute has come forward to recognise that the guide failed to consider that transwomen would seek to confuse sex with gender and thus give them access to female-only spaces.
Wintermute has confessed what he did not then consider the implications of Principle 3 of the ‘Yogyarkarta Principles’ in particular being in conflict with women’s sex-based rights and that those rights would ever be eradicated by trans rights.
Although the UN panel was co-chaired by Sonia Correa, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls and Brazillian sexual rights activist, she is reported to have refused to refer to the word ‘woman’ and ‘women’s rights’ because she believed that sex was a 19th century and a Western social construct.
Straight out of her post-modernist academic training, Correa considered that expressing the views that biological differences between the sexes were backward and “fundamentalist”.
As a result of such ideologically muddled identity politics thinking by the rapporteur representing women and girls, members of the UN panel simply did not seek to consult, nor listen to women’s organisations, has now admitted Professor Wintermute.
Unlike Wintermute, Vitit Muntarbhorn, also a member of the UN panel from the University of Bangkok still insists to this day that the concept of gender identity as defined in the Yogyarkarta guide poses no threat to women’s sex based rights.
The outcome of the judicial review by the UK High Court granted to For Women in Scotland is expected to confirm that ‘sex’ under the GRA and the EA was always meant to be understood as biological sex and that there should never be any clash between women’s right and trans rights.
Such a landmark ruling may finally signal the end of Stonewall ideological definition of transphobia and the persecution of those who disagree with their gender ideology.
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