LGBTQ+ charities warn of ‘genuine crisis' for trans people after UK ruling
Fourteen national LGBTQ+ charities have written to Keir Starmer seeking an urgent meeting to discuss what they describe as 'a genuine crisis for the rights, dignity and inclusion of trans people in the UK' after the supreme court's ruling on biological sex.
The UK supreme court ruled last month that the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act 2010 referred only to 'a biological woman' and to 'biological sex', with subsequent advice from the equality watchdog amounting to a blanket ban on trans people using toilets and other services of the gender they identify as.
Sign up to Headlines UK
Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning
after newsletter promotion
The letter to the prime minister, signed by the leaders of Stonewall, Scottish Trans, the LGBT Consortium, TransActual and others, said the judgment had created 'confusion and a significant lack of clarity about what this means for businesses, services and civil society and most importantly the impact on trans people'.
The text, seen by the Guardian, suggests the judgment turns previous understanding of the Equality Act 'completely on its head', creating 'a legal framework that simply cannot uphold the dignity, protection and respect of trans people'.
It is particularly critical of the interim update issued by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) last Friday, which said transgender people 'should not be permitted' to use facilities of the gender they identify with. The letter suggests this amounts to 'significant overreach' that is inconsistent with the UK's obligations under the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights.
But the chair of the EHRC, Kishwer Falkner, hit back at critics in an opinion piece in the House magazine, saying 'it is unacceptable to question the integrity of the judiciary, or indeed the regulator, as some have done'.
Acknowledging that 'the public discourse on this topic continues to be polarised', Lady Falkner called on 'every legislator to read the judgment in full', saying she regretted 'any uncertainty among duty bearers and the public that has been fuelled by misunderstanding and distortion, particularly across social media'.
Praising the judgment as 'a model of clarity', she underlined that 'the law it sets out is effective immediately. Those with duties under the Equality Act should be following it and taking specialist legal advice where necessary'.
Falkner also dismissed claims that trans people were not being listened to as 'simply incorrect', pointing to the commission's plans to open a two-week public consultation in May to understand how the practical implications of the judgment can be reflected in an updated code of practice.
The nonprofit legal organisation Good Law Project (GLP), which has raised more than £284,000 to challenge the supreme court's judgment, said it was working on about 20 related legal initiatives, including one case already before the courts. In an update to donors, GLP added it had instructed an expert team to produce legal advice on what the court's decision meant and would produce guidance for the trans community on what to do if they are challenged for using the spaces that align with their gender.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Can we still be Britain without the British? We'd rather you didn't ask
I couldn't care less about the burka debate. Not a tinker's. Why? Because it's a concession of defeat, a belated response by panicked politicians to a change that's already happened and that they largely encouraged. Last week, a meteor hit Britain with the publication of a demographic study by the queerly named Centre of Heterodox Social Science. By 2063, say the sociable hets, white Britons will be a minority; come the new century, almost one in five citizens will be Muslim. This forces us to consider a very politically incorrect question: will Britain still be Britain if it's no longer majority white British? The official answer is 'absolutely, yes'. Elite liberals believe nations are defined by values, and thus anyone, from anywhere in the world, can become British if they conform to them. It helps that these values are universal. Fairness, tolerance, kindness... this is a portable identity that is uncontroversial, because it demands nothing except to pay one's taxes and avoid murder. Keir Starmer warns that we are becoming an 'island of strangers', while promoting a vision of citizenship that is entirely passive. It's also based on a misreading of human nature. Liberals assume that values shape culture, such that we could pass a law – ban the burka, ban Islamophobia – and we'd become good neighbours overnight. But it's the other way around. Culture shapes values, and culture is the product of non-abstract, substantial qualities, such as climate, geography, religion, language and ethnicity. We can shorthand it as 'history'. Thus: we are democratic in Britain not because a committee decided it over one wild weekend, but following nearly a thousand years of revolution and reaction, baked into memory and expressed as temperament. Such a society is light-touch and self-governing, at least in theory, because we've been marinating in its ethics and customs since birth. The English, Welsh, Scots etc do exist as cultures – not superior to others, nor unaffected by migration, but really real – and if they undergo a profound change in composition, this is bound to change the nature of Britishness, too. Isn't that obvious? It's regarded as axiomatic elsewhere. We rush to recognise and cultivate the historical identity of First Nations people, just as we step back nervously from a Holy Land conflict shaped by competing ethnic claims over biblical territory. And even if you regard ethnic conflict as sinful, as I do, or based upon a category error, as academics insist, we have to accept that identity matters to a lot of people. In which case, I struggle to think of a society in history that has faced the scale of change happening to us without descending into violence or authoritarianism. Today, the liberal understanding of nationhood is already in retreat. Remigration is being trialled in the United States. Donald Trump is reducing inflows by banning travel from named countries, cutting asylum and militarising his border. He's also increasing outflows by expelling as many people as he can on any pretext he can find. For instance, when an Egyptian asylum-seeker assaulted protesters in Colorado, the administration not only arrested the attacker but detained and is seeking to deport his entire family – a 'sins of the father' policy that judges are resisting. Elsewhere, the BBC's Simon Reeve has caused a stir by highlighting the integrationist policies of Denmark, a country that offers people cash to go home and dismantles ghettos. That this is done by social democrats comes as no surprise. Scandinavia is historically conformist; a welfare state requires high levels of solidarity to function. Evidence of my 'history-shapes-identity' theory is offered by how countries respond to the immigration challenge in light of their own traditions. Here, when a Reform UK MP asked the PM for his views on the burka, the PM had no answer and his MPs sounded as shocked as a maiden aunt offered cocaine. Why doesn't Labour want to have this debate? A cynic will say: it offends their core constituency. A Tory will claim: they don't really care about immigration. And yet Labour's immigration White Paper looks tough, and it has already increased deportations compared with the last government. Historically, it was Labour that restricted Commonwealth immigration in the 1960s, and Boris Johnson, of Brexit fame, who threw the borders open. Boris, who liked to play both sides of the immigration game, infamously compared the burka to a letter box – yet did not wish to ban it. Do we not say 'an Englishman's home is his castle'? By extension, they are free to wear whatever they want in the street. The problem, reply nationalists, is that by clinging to a liberal vision, we open the door to illiberal attitudes that might, by strength of conviction, overwhelm us. If the culture goes, our old values will follow. We are not, however, as tolerant as many assume. It has been reported that Prevent now regards 'cultural nationalism' – the fear that society 'is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration' – as a 'sub-category of extreme Right-wing terrorist ideologies', and thus worthy of referral to the authorities. GB News is up in arms – admittedly a permanent condition – but I've yet to hear a guest point out that white Christians are merely experiencing what the security services have done to Muslim Britons since 9/11: slander and harassment. Between 2016 and 2019, over 2,000 children under the age of nine were referred to Prevent, including a four-year-old Muslim boy who talked about a violent computer game at an after-school club. Right and Left are chasing a mirage of British liberalism that, in an age when you can get 31 months for a social-media post, no longer reflects reality. Immigration is ultimately a numbers game. A democratic society can get along fine with any minority, so long as it remains small in number. But when a government fails to police its borders, and thus loses control over numbers, it will feel obliged to police society to maintain harmony: monitoring, deporting, rewriting history, and indoctrinating us in a strange new variant on national character, a parody of kindness best described as 'sinister twee'. If you want a vision of the future, it is a Dawn French-shaped woman, with a midlife-crisis fringe, talking to you about diversity and inclusion as if you were a baby. Then, when you raise an objection, ending the discussion with a disturbingly final 'NO'.
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Time to face the harsh realities of spending orthodoxy
Labour came to power fatuously parroting the word 'change' and yet has shown itself to be the same old tax and spending party it has always been. What it meant was a change of party in office not a change of direction. Not only have taxes gone up but so-called protected spending is set to rise despite record debt levels. Yet if ever a public policy has been tested to destruction surely it is the notion that the NHS will improve if only more money is thrown at it. Even Sir Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, are on record as saying that higher health spending is not the answer to the endemic flaws in the health service and yet another £30 billion is to be announced for the next three years on top of the £22 billion handed over after last year's general election, much of which went on pay and showed nothing in the way of productivity improvement. No mainstream politician is prepared to acknowledge that the problem with the NHS is the fact it is a nationalised industry with all the inherent inefficiencies associated with such. Most other advanced economies in Europe and elsewhere have social insurance systems which work better. But the insistence in Britain of cleaving to the 1948 'founding principle' that treatment should be free at the point of delivery has become a quasi-religious doctrine that few dare challenge. Only Nigel Farage has questioned the wisdom of continuing with a system that patently fails to achieve what others manage to do but has been noticeably quiet on the subject recently because Labour will exploit it mercilessly to see off the Reform threat. Telling people that they will have to pay for something they have always had for free is even more difficult when political parties are prepared to see the health system get worse rather than reform it. The same is true of welfare. Taking benefits from people, even when they are payments introduced just a few years ago like the winter fuel allowance, is hard if the reasons are not explained and the issue is 'weaponised' by opponents. Yet unless the welfare budget is brought under control it will bankrupt the country. If change is to mean anything then we need politicians finally to understand the extent of the country's difficulties and make decisions accordingly. Will we see that from the Chancellor on Wednesday?
Daily Mail
5 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Revealed: Labour-run councils are housing 3 times as many asylum seekers as Reform-controlled areas - so how many are in YOUR authority?
Labour-ran councils are bearing the brunt of Britain's asylum crisis, according to an analysis which piles even more pressure on Keir Starmer. Authorities controlled by Sir Keir's party house more than 26 asylum seekers for every 10,000 residents – almost triple the rate of councils now under Reform's watch, MailOnline can reveal today. Pollsters warn Labour may become victims of Reform's 'humongous strides' unless the 'hot topic' in traditional Red Wall strongholds is addressed. Wary of the threat posed by Nigel Farage 's outfit, which has seized on the public's immigration fears, Sir Keir earlier this month promised to deliver Brits what they had 'asked for time and time again'. The Prime Minister, who warned mass immigration risked turning us into an 'island of strangers', unveiled a package to 'take back control of our borders'. The skills threshold will be hiked and rules on fluency in English toughened under the Government's plan to bring down annual inflows by around 100,000. Basking in Reform's extraordinary dominance in May's local elections, Mr Farage vowed to reject migrants across his party's 10 newly-gained councils. Zia Yusuf, the party chair and a major donor, later promised to use 'every instrument of power' to do so, including the threat of court action. MailOnline analysis, based on Home Office figures, show there are nine asylum seekers for 10,000 residents across those Reform-held councils, including Lincolnshire and County Durham. For comparison, the UK-wide average is 16. The figure for councils under Tory rule is 11.5. Twenty-one of the 218 upper-tier local authorities in MailOnline's audit supported no asylum seekers. The Labour-run councils housing the most asylum seekers, in relation to their population, are Hounslow (72 per 10,000) Halton (70) and Coventry (59). The council housing the most, Hillingdon (94), is run by Tories. Chris Hopkins, political research director at polling firm Savanta, believes immigration is a major hurdle for Sir Keir's Government. He said: 'Immigration and asylum is increasing in salience among the British public, probably is reaching the highs now of sort of 2015/2016 to be honest, having taken a bit of a drop off during the pandemic. 'I'm not going to say the next election is going to be about immigration but it definitely does feel like the hot topic of the moment. 'It presents a problem – not just for the Labour Party – but for any government of any colour because there is a sense in the country that numbers are too high.' Mr Hopkins added: 'There is a sense that Labour's opposition now is Reform UK, not the Conservatives. 'Obviously Reform UK are known, to some extent, as a single issue, anti-immigration party. So Labour have to navigate that ultimately, and need to be seen acting on that. 'I think that there's a danger of them trying to "out Reform" Reform, which isn't going to work for them as it didn't work for Rishi Sunak. 'And I think that Labour potentially risk alienating some of their more Left-wing liberal voters to the Liberal Democrats or Greens if they go down that route. 'A lot could change at the next General Election (to be held no later than August 2029) but the direction of travel at the minute is Reform UK making humongous strides.' Polls suggest that Labour's failure to address sky high immigration could spell further disaster for the party at the ballot box. A recent survey by IPSOS found 68 per cent of the public deem the numbers coming to the UK to seek refugee status or asylum too high. And 33 per cent think they are doing a worse job on immigration than the Tories. Just 17 per cent feel Labour is handling it better. Labour's highest-profile defeat in May's locals was in the Runcorn by-election, where Reform narrowly beat them by six votes. In the run-up to polling day, both parties promised to close a 425-bed hotel in the constituency that was being used by the Home Office to house asylum seekers. Locals in the Cheshire town claimed crime had increased in the area since it started housing asylum seekers in 2020. On a national level, Downing Street's sweeping new plan will increase efforts to stop housing asylum seekers in hotels. It comes as a series of investigations by MailOnline have revealed the 'absurd' reality of asylum claims in Britain, with critics saying that it was proof we've become a 'soft touch'. Fuelled by the small boats crisis plaguing the Channel, a record 108,000 applications were lodged in 2024. Claims from dozens of countries, including Afghanistan and Iran, have doubled over the last 20 years. Last month we revealed that citizens in the US, Australia and even Scandinavia are trying to claim asylum here – despite already residing in wealthy Western countries that are free of major human rights abuses. And a fortnight ago we exposed how Northumberland council in Britain is housing 600 times more asylum seekers now than a decade ago. Home Office policy is to disperse asylum seekers around the country. Officials insist they are not given a choice as to location and the accommodation. Local authorities also do not get a say in how many are housed in their areas, insiders insist. They are given £1,200 for each asylum seeker being housed in their boundaries. A spokesman for the Local Government Association said: 'We are keen to continue to work with government on a more equitable approach across asylum and resettlement. 'One that takes into account wider housing, homelessness and cohesion challenges, with sufficient lead in time for engagement with councils on any new sites.' The Home Office says value for money, community cohesion and the wellbeing of those working and living in asylum accommodation will continue to be at the 'forefront of decision-making'. Although authorities can object, they have little formal power to actually stop asylum seekers being housed in their areas. Newly-elected Reform politicians have vowed to stand up for their communities and fight against their dispersal. Mr Farage said he was opposed to the government 'plonking scores of young men' in counties where his party now has control. He has vowed to 'resist' asylum seekers being housed in the counties where Reform was in control, claiming they were being 'dumped into the north of England, getting everything for free'. 'People hate them,' he told The Telegraph. 'They see a sense of total unfairness that they are working themselves to bits to pay tax for young men who can illegally come into the country and be given everything for free.' Newly-elected County Durham councillor and ex-GB News presenter Darren Grimes said Reform would not 'allow our communities to be a dumping ground for illegal migrants'. And in her victory speech, Reform's new mayor for Greater Lincolnshire Dame Andrea Jenkyns proposed housing them in tents instead, saying 'tents are good enough for France; they should be good enough for you in Britain.' Her comments prompted some rival candidates to walk off the stage in outrage. As well as getting free accomodation, asylum seekers are also entitled to UK taxpayer-funded NHS healthcare, prescriptions, dental care and children under 18 are required to go to school (where they may be able to get free meals). If their accommodation provides meals each person gets £8.86 per week, this rises to £49.18 per week if no meals are provided. Extra money is also provided to pregnant mothers and young children. A Home Office spokesperson said: 'We are working to fairly disperse asylum seekers across the country, consulting closely with local authorities to further reduce our reliance on hotels and deliver better value for money for taxpayers, while giving control back to communities through our Plan for Change. 'We've taken immediate action to fix the broken asylum system this government inherited, by increasing asylum decision making by 52 per cent and removing nearly 30,000 people with no right to be here. 'By restoring grip on the system and speeding up decision making, we will end the use of hotels and are forecast to save the taxpayer £4 billion by the end of 2026.'
