I’m not sure this is right. You need to belong to a protected class in order to claim the protection accorded to that class. To sue a no-black-people golf club you need to be black, to claim harm. That idea in itself isn’t apartheid.
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To claim harm, yes. But to challenge it, you just say that it discriminates on the basis of race not that you have a race based right to be there because then the white club could say they have a race based right to exclude Black folks.
Ok but discrimination is legal in other cases. It's unlikely that a hospital can be sued for discrimination on the basis of sex for having a female ward. But now a trans woman won't be able to claim harm from being excluded.
Yes, I think the dispute here really is about who can belong to the class, not about whether rights can involve protected classes without becoming discriminatory.
I think this is partly about semantics. We talk about “religious rights” without implying that some religions have different rights than others. “Sex-based rights” seems OK to me on the same grounds. (“Sexual rights” would sound like it’s about having sex, not about what sex you are.)
Mmm, yes this is a semantic discussion that I think misses the OP's actual point that the Supreme Court's ruling highlights the discriminatory nature of sex-based equality legislation that is not based on the principle that the law exists to promote freedom for the weakest members of society
But we don’t talk about religion-based rights, which would be rights based on membership of a specific religion. Everyone has the same religious rights, regardless of which religion (or no religion) they belong to.
Right, that’s because the normal adjectival ending works for “religious” but it doesn’t work for “sexual”. “-based” is I think just an effort to find a grammatical parallel, I think OP is reading way to much into it
I have never heard anyone say “sex-based rights” when the “right” in question is anything other than excluding trans women. In many historical cases of fights for equal rights it would be entirely nonsensical since the whole point was to stop voting or whatever being a right based on sex.
That said, the question of whether there can be “sex-based rights” in the way you describe them is also, I think, a legitimate one, based on principles of equity. “Disabled rights”, for instance, are not simply the right to be treated the same as able people
Alejandra is right. Sex-based rights mean rights you have on the basis of sex. Voting used to be a sex based rights.
Transphobes had been using the myth of it to claim there was a “sex-based right” to demand exclusion of trans women where service providers did not exclude them.
Not true. UK anti-discrimination law is about the perception of the person doing the discriminating, not the just the identity of the person being discriminated against. E.g. a straight man is discriminated against because someone believes he is gay, he’s protected under characteristic of sexuality.
Being a member of a marginalised group isn't what gives you authority to speak out against something that is wrong? You wouldn't ignore someone being beaten up because it wasn't you that was being beaten up. Your example of a 'no-black-people gold club's is just an example of racism.
The part you are missing is that they just decided that a more at risk class of people, trans women, have less rights than a comparatively privileged group, cis women. If you can do that, you can do the same thing for men and women.
I think you’re right that this is an issue that bears on the ruling, but it doesn’t bear on the point above: whether the fact that qualification for the protected characteristic is based on sex means it’s OK to call this a “sex-based right”.
Because they literally in the ruling frame the concept of sex based rights as a distinct and different thing to protection from discrimination on the basis of sex or a positive right to equal treatment.
I think you may be misunderstanding the concept of “protected class,” which is a legal term of art Race is a protected class, and both white and black persons are members of the class and neither group can be discriminated against on the basis of their race.
Yes, I phrased that wrongly. The only questions here are whether, analogously, one might call this a “race-based right” and then whether you’d need to belong to the racial group experiencing discrimination to ask for redress. I think both are true/fine and don’t imply apartheid.
It’s not “race-based” in the sense it arises from the person’s race and therefore they can have a right that others not of their race can’t have. Rather everybody has the right not to be treated in a discriminatory manner if that discrimination arises from consideration of their race.
Right, but it still seems fine to me to describe that as a “race-based right”. Height is not a protected class, neither short nor tall people can claim redress against discrimination on the basis of height because there are no height-based rights.
Protected classes are usually recognized as a result of, among other things, classifications used historically as the basis for discrimination. They are not receiving a unique right because of their race. The are receiving the rights others are afforded, but they were denied because of their race.
I’m not sure that’s true. No one has a right to eat at a restaurant. But you have a right not to be barred from a restaurant on account of race. The right here is the right to non-discrimination on the basis of race. Not sure what’s bad about calling that a race-based right to non-discrimination.
No, you don't necessarily need to belong to a protected class (protected characteristic, in UK law).
The perception of having that characteristic is enough. Or even behaving *as if* someone has that characteristic (e.g. bullying someone for being gay when you know they aren't)
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Transphobes had been using the myth of it to claim there was a “sex-based right” to demand exclusion of trans women where service providers did not exclude them.
The perception of having that characteristic is enough. Or even behaving *as if* someone has that characteristic (e.g. bullying someone for being gay when you know they aren't)