Statement from ALBA Women
ALBA Women congratulate For Women Scotland, who have won their Inner House appeal against the Scottish Government, regarding the Gender Representation on Public Boards Act.
ALBA Women welcome this judgement and applaud For Women Scotland’s tenacity and courage in pursuing this legal action on behalf of females in Scotland.
This judgement reasserts females’ rights under the Equality Act 2010 and clarifies a woman is a female of any age.
Public authorities have been reacting to the increasing number of people who declare a gender identity different from their sex by introducing policies that simply overwrite sex with gender.
This judgement affirms that protected characteristics must be balanced and one cannot supersede another. And the judgement underscores the need for politicians and senior managers to take seriously their duty to recognise sex as a protected characteristic.
We all owe For Women Scotland a huge debt of gratitude for their courage and the personal risk they took in challenging the Scottish Government.
However, we should not have to crowdfund to ensure the Scottish Government stays within the law. It would be refreshing to see the tax-payer funded ‘feminist organisations’ following For Women Scotland’s lead and standing up for women.
Nor should we have to use a reserved power to protect the existing rights of Scottish women. The Scottish Government legislated ‘beyond their competence’. Hopefully, this judgement will give the Scottish Government pause for thought and will rein in the gender extremists within
It’s fantastic but it’s a travesty that they have had to do this supported by people like you, me, ordinary men & women, who are sick of the SNP & their pet projects to the exclusion of everything else
Men are not women – fact
Thank you For Women Scotland
Thanks for nothing Nicola Sturgeon
This is good news, the Gender Yahoo’s and thought police have their nose in a sling tonight.
Well done for the Sisters in Alba.
Its confirmed what I always knew , Men are Men, and Women are Women.
2 +2=4, and not 5 as Nicola told us. Comon sense has prevailed. Soar Alba.
The next step must be repeal of the 2004 GRA because it has been superseded by other legislation. The trans lobby has been pretending that this Act requires updating when that is patently false, and they are using it a the springboard to ‘legal’ policies which are actually illegal, such as convincing stores to open their female changing rooms to men in frocks.
However you approach the issue of women on boards – either the Scottish Government did not know the law or it ignored the law – it shows just how embedded the SG is in this ideology. That it was willing to fight the issue in the courts and prove to everyone just how incompetent its own leadership, its MSPs and its civil servants are in relation to what is an Act of the British Parliament, and, therefore, a reserved matter, is astounding. Never has this administration shown such determination to challenge reserved matters when they relate to Scotland’s independence.
This is a landmark legal decision pertaining to the 2010 Equality Act where its terms are being upheld on ‘protected’ characteristics’ status. Well done For Women Scotland. Another characteristic that is upheld is ‘gender reassignment’ (whatever that might mean in law) and not – emphatically not – ‘gender identity’. The only legal interpretation that could apply is that only transsexuals who have had full surgery come under this definition, otherwise we have self-ID by default – i.e. a re-interpreting of the ‘intention’ of the legal principle.
It seems quite ludicrous that ‘gender reassignment’ could mean the retention of all male external and internal sexual characteristics, yet be deemed in law to be female, and vice versa, but there’s the rub: apart from invading gay male spaces, the trans men (FtM) seem to stop at the door of heterosexual men’s private spaces, prisons, sports, etc., so the two situations are in no way analogous, albeit all males are equally entitled to their private spaces and rights.
The legal position should be that males and females can live as they please and the law should afford them a certain leeway (changing drivers’ licences, etc.) but that they cannot, in either case, breach long-recognized boundaries based on natal, legal sex, rather than gender – i.e. where females have, by dint of their sex, and that sex’s particular requirement for safety, dignity and privacy, and for that sex’s requirement in the interests of fairness and equal opportunities, to be afforded specific access to public institutions, been granted certain privileges (or, perhaps, rights would be more accurate as females are also taxpayers).
That would open up the requirement for legal third spaces, and it has long been a bone of contention that the trans lobby has never attempted to campaign for public third spaces across the board – lavatories, changing rooms, refuges, etc. – but appears to spend its public funding allocations on administration and public campaigning for trans ideology at every level, and specifically aimed at breaching every female space, right, prize, and activity, as well as campaigning for the early ‘transing’ of children, which should, at the very least, be questionable as to its real agenda and motivation since the health, well-being and support of trans people appears to be of secondary importance while, simultaneously, claiming that trans people are a much-put-upon and victimized minority. Women fought long and hard for the concessions they have, using their public funding allocations to set up self-help institutions and organizations – to which Stonewall and its Scottish arms now want full access.
Totally agree with your remarks, Lorna.
I will add that when the 2004 Act was at committee stage it was acknowledged that it could potentially damage women, however it was also believed that the number of people covered by the Act would be tiny and that women should be ‘kind’.
It was never envisaged that the legislation would be both reinterpreted and abused in order to facilitate fetishists, sex offenders accessing female prisons, and female impersonators capturing refuges for domestic abuse or services for rape victims. Or that pharmaceutical companies would seize upon it. Or that postmodernist social policy ‘academics’ would create an industry around biology denying for their career advancement. Or that Stonewall would employ it in a crusade against women.
The 2004 Act is an example of unintended consequences as well as the thin end of a wedge. As another example of flawed legislation, the Equalities Act does not require organisations to employ sex based exemptions to exclude possessors of a GRC from female only spaces; it only permits them to do so. A major oversight. It should be remembered that male possessors of GRCs are no more or less likely to have committed sex based crimes than other males. It was wrongly presumed that all organisations would wish to use such reasonable exemptions. Not that legislators and funders such as the Woke captured Scottish Government would pressurise the organisations into NOT using the exemptions.
In international terms, the social phenomenon of allowing individuals to be legally and institutionally treated as though members of the opposite sex, has resulted in a male swimmer, previously unremarkable in a male team, declare himself to be a woman and win a women’s competition by nearly a full length of the pool. Yet the IOC said that they couldn’t stop this because it would be against his ‘human rights.’. What right does a person have to be something that factually he is not?
Seemingly there are not ‘male only’ Olympic competitions. There are ‘open’ competitions and ones for females only to reflect female reduced muscle and bone power, smaller lungs and lesser reach. Now, however, the
IOC and other Woke captured institutions are destroying women’s sport by stealth. But they wont be transparent and abolish so-called women’s competitions because this would oblige all males to compete against other males – and where would the cheats be then?
Yes, Joan, when people say, just be kind, they don’t take into account that there are many, many, many bad actors out there. Set any group up for a pasting and they will get a pasting.
Yes indeed, Lorna! 100%.
I agree with every single word too Lorna. But leaving aside gender issues for one teeny moment
“Never has this administration shown such determination to challenge reserved matters when they relate to Scotland’s independence.”
THIS!!!
Please sir can I get a section 30 order? From the FM who ignored section 3 of the Scotland Act – the one that says if you have a 2/3 majority in a vote you can dissolve Holyrood at any time of your choosing. Still bad Alba, nasty ISP…
Back to gender, I favour the abolition of the GRA in its entity. The clear aim of the legislators (via Hansard) was to avoid allowing same sex marriage for transsexuals so that it could be refused for homosexuals. Well same sex marriage is now legal so there is no need for the Act at all.
Thanks to all involved and to all the commentators here.
One in the eye for the Transwomen are Women mob. How many of our politicians have parroted this old trope?The Court of Session has just ruled that in law, Transwoman are NOT in fact Women.
Is it not about time our MSP’s did a proper job of scrutinising legislation before they vote it in?
Frankly sick of their incompetence.
I think, Nally, Stonewall and its tentacles, and the Scottish government, which is being lulled into sleep within those tentacles, actually thought that women would just bleat a bit and do nothing. I think we have to accept that there are very bad actors within the SG itself, and even in the wider independence movement, who, on balance, would be happy to betray the women who have campaigned with them for many years in the vain hope that independence will come by doing so.
Now they know we will fight them every step of the way, and their reaction has been very telling. Each time they are bested, there is a deluge of anti female vitriol and accusations from certain quarters of women betraying independence by not accepting trans women into their every space and right. These people are hard-nosed independence supporters who are willing to sacrifice all females in order to achieve their dream for themselves, and to hell with women and girls, and children.
It smacks of Algeria (and many other independence fights) where females fought on the front line until independence when they were pushed out and told to cover their heads and stay out of public places as their reward. It is a shameful position for anyone who believes in human freedom and rights to adopt, when they are happy to support independence even if it means that men self-Iding as women can access all female spaces and rights. Women are not demonising men who believe they are women. Men who believe they are women are demonising women.
Sturgeon won’t be posting rainbow logos on Twitter 🙂