Humanists UK’s policy on the Equality Act since its drafting has been to support both its protections from discrimination on grounds of sex and its protections from discrimination on grounds of gender reassignment. These protections, read together, mean single-sex services can be and often sensibly are restricted to people of one sex who have not changed their legal sex (i.e. are not transgender), when such a restriction is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.
Recently it has been proposed to amend the definition of sex in the Equality Act and we have considered what that would mean for our policy of supporting existing protections. The proposal would mean in particular that those few thousand people who have legally changed their sex would lose their right to protection on grounds of their legal sex, even when this cannot be said to be proportionate or legitimate. These include vital protections in areas such as employment and services.
Public debates around gender recognition are fraught and many related legal and public policy questions are complex. But to introduce a blanket exclusion of this nature would be to take an approach that fails to even consider the circumstances involved and would expose a minority currently protected in equality law to new forms of discrimination.
We have always supported and campaigned for women’s rights and we still do. We regret that in recent public discourse, which has been so polarised and where so many nuanced areas of law and policy are being discussed at cross purposes, people and groups who face discrimination end up pitted against each other.
In accordance with our own values as an organisation, all our own personnel are committed to ‘engage in dialogue and debate rationally, intelligently, and with attention to evidence’ and to do so in a way that ‘recognises the dignity of individuals and treats them with fairness and respect’. Although these are our own principles, we would commend them to everyone.