Bristol City Council Double Down on Removal of Women’s Rights
Anyone remember this exercise in fake consensus and sidelining women by the great and good of Bristol? I wrote about it three long years ago, back in the pre-Covid, pre-inflation wonderland that was winter 2019. It has, with a dreary inevitability, popped up again like a dead seagull in the harbour.
To recap: led by local orgs SARI and Diversity Trust, a ‘Road Map for Trans Inclusive Single Gender Services’ for Bristol was created. The idea was that the City Council, Avon and Somerset Police, local NHS Trusts, Avon Fire and Rescue Service, University of Bristol, University of the West of England, trade unions, religious leaders and local prisons would all sign up to replace biological sex with ‘gender identity’.
Activists who support men convicted of violence against women, shout ‘scum’ and ‘you’re shit’ at ‘terfs’ and men who claim to be able to breastfeed were invited to be part of this process.
Women who don’t want men in their spaces regardless of any identities men may claim were not.
The project failed; SARI stepped back as they felt trans people were…drumroll… ‘not safe’. SARI CEO and Deputy Lieutenant of Bristol Alex Raikes felt that ‘SARI’s reputation and integrity was being called into question’.
The women of the reality-based community feel your pain, Ms Raikes.
It’s unclear whether many of the targeted institutions signed up. At least one local NHS Trust carried out an Equality Impact Assessment and concluded that the guidance it had bought from SARI and the Diversity Trust (I wrote about it here) was discriminatory. It also realised that the advice on children who claim a trans identity was dangerous.
No doubt they’re relieved to have made the call not to endorse the guidance, given that since then we’ve seen the interim findings of the Cass Review, the closing of the Tavistock GIDS and the continuing revelations about rogue child transition charity Mermaids.
Avon and Somerset Police are most certainly on board with the plan — they commissioned training from SARI and the Diversity Trust in summer 2021.
In her 2019 email outlining the failure of the project, Alex Raikes wrote: ‘I have now met with the Council and Avon & Somerset Constabulary and they have agreed to get permission to lead…’
Bristol City Council aren’t just on board; they’ve leapt into the driver’s seat.
In June 2022, the Standing For Women group held a Speakers’s Corner event in central Bristol, outside City Hall. Avon and Somerset Police let black-clad masked trans activists drown out, intimidate and follow the women who participated.
Bristol’s collective institutional response to appalling intimidation from trans activists against women has long been ‘give the trans activists whatever they want’.
Days after the SFW event, the Labour- and Green-led council voted for a reality-defying motion, resolving that ‘trans men are men, trans women are women’, pressing for menstrual hygiene bins in the men’s toilets, and stating that there is no right to express ‘gender-critical’ beliefs. (I can think of a few judges who disagree, but who needs them when you can instead use top fox antagonist and puberty-blocking enthusiast Jolyon Maugham KC as your preferred legal source, as the motion does).
Despite the motion being put forward at the last minute, plenty of Bristolians objected and pointed out the myriad flaws that are inevitable when you attempt to make coherent policy based on non-defined terms. The Women’s Voices Matter group sent a lengthy evidenced submission.
The former Head of Legal Services at BCC, Stephen Mcnamara, said:
‘I have never seen such a manifestly unlawful motion’.
Gender-identity activists invariably follow the model set out by international law firm Denton’s — avoid press coverage and scrutiny from the pesky public.
But sometimes you have to ask the plebs as well as the non-binary councillors.
At the end of August 2022, BCC opened a bare-minimum length six-week consultation (local government guidance says public consultation can be six to twelve weeks) on its shiny new ‘Trans Inclusion and Gender Identity Policy’.
Except it wasn’t so shiny and new — buried in the Equality Impact Assessment for the policy it states:
‘Some of the content in our proposed policy approach was based on material originally drafted by a working group in 2018 led by local charities SARI and Diversity Trust to develop a “Road Map for Trans Inclusive Feminism and Women’s Services in Bristol” with representatives from various LGBTQ+ groups, women’s rights organisations, and public bodies (including BCC and police). In drafting this guidance we also had feedback from local academics at the University of Bristol Law School, and Sociology Dept. UWE Bristol. We circulated a draft version of the guidance document and invited comments from our Bristol City Council LGBT+ staff led group, Stonewall UK, and local women’s rights stakeholders. This feedback was used to inform the final version of the guidance document, which was approved by Corporate Leadership Board in April 2021.’
Secret guidance in use since 2019 — Denton’s would be proud.
SARI describe themselves as ‘a person centred hate crime charity’. It’s unclear how claimed expertise in this specific area qualifies them to write policy that will affect access to services for everyone in Bristol. The press release presents SARI (who no-one elected and who are, as a charity, not directly accountable to the public) and BCC as partners.
BCC have also taken advice from Stonewall — an enormous red flag. This year, barrister Allison Bailey successfully sued her chambers, Garden Court, for discriminating against her on the basis of her ‘gender-critical’ views. She did not succeed in proving that Stonewall induced them to do so (she is now appealing this) but the point is clear — any organisation paying for advice from Stonewall is likely to be legally liable for discrimination, while Stonewall themselves walk away.
One wonders if the Bristol Law School academics include Dr Peter Dunne, who invited Mermaids to Bristol University and thinks that a woman who’s undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer is no different from a man.
Mothers are on the frontline in the fight for women’s sex-based rights and child safeguarding. Mothers of young children famously have a pretty quiet time at the end of August, with nothing stressful going on throughout September. Well done to the council on picking the optimal window for a speedy consultation which partly concerns what children learn in school about the most basic facts of human existence.
The policy itself is the usual — effectively BCC want to abolish single sex spaces and services:
‘…trans people should be referred to the service that matches their choice of gender expression. This should be part of a culture which recognises their continuing capacity for self-determination of their gender. People who are non-binary, gender-fluid or agender should usually be referred to the service that they feel most comfortable with.’
It cherry-picks older Equality and Human Rights Commission guidance while ignoring their more recent clarifications on single-sex services.
The policy pushes the nonsensical ‘case-by-case’ ‘solution’ for admitting males to female-only services and spaces.
Either a service is female-only or it is mixed sex, and women need and have the right to know.
The framing is predictable:
‘…some people may feel less comfortable because they do not accept trans gender identity or perceive that trans people pose an increased safeguarding risk to others’
These mental gymnastics take a lot more effort than acknowledging the very simple to understand fact that we’re not talking about ‘people’ and ‘people’, we’re talking about women and men.
We’re not talking about ‘people feeling uncomfortable’, we’re talking about women needing female-only services.
Brave women have poured out horrific personal histories for years, trying to get anyone with power to listen.
BCC certainly aren’t listening; they have already explicitly discounted women’s needs — the full quote reads:
‘In developing our current policy approach we also considered an option of not recommending free selection of facilities (because of early engagement feedback which expressed concerns about women and girls potentially feeling less safe). We have discounted this option on the basis that although some people may feel less comfortable because they don’t accept transgender identity or think that trans people pose an increased safeguarding risk to others, this is not itself a legitimate or proportionate reason to exclude trans and gender-diverse people from using preferred facilities.’
Let’s recap again:
- Don’t invite any women’s groups in favour of sex-based rights to policy meetings
- Oh no! Someone spoke up for women’s sex-based rights anyway! What do we do?
- Ignore the disgusting terfs, put out a policy that already rejects sex-based rules, add a brief consultation designed to get the answers we want
- Don’t forget to make sure there’s no way to ensure anyone replying is actually a Bristol resident, and don’t worry about people completing it multiple times — utterly worthless data is what we like!
Even if they were listening — wanting female-only services is enough.
Having to disclose rape or domestic abuse as the reason you are ‘uncomfortable’ should never be the bar for accessing a female-only service.
BCC are busy patting themselves on the back for redefining reality at the behest of those who use council tax money to covertly place a bizarre misogynist ideology at the heart of public policy.
Meanwhile ordinary women, who have no access to these behind-the-scenes machinations, will be left to cope with the removal of their essential services. BCC will be merrily polishing their badges and flying their flags while women’s worlds shrink.
Please respond to the consultation before October 9th 2022.
