Supreme Court sex ruling: Women's group warns Northern Ireland employers not to ignore sex-based legal protections

Members of the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland at Stormont.

A Northern Ireland women’s rights group has warned employers here not to ignore the legal protections afforded to women and girls by the recent Supreme Court ruling banning males from female spaces.

The Women’s Rights Network (WRN NI) has also said that local women “must not be left behind” over issues surrounding the Windsor Framework and its impact on gender equality legislation in Northern Ireland.

The campaign group told the News Letter: “Our laws are written in the same way, with sex as the defining factor.

“If organisations continue to ignore the legal protections afforded to women and girls in their policies, we will see this going through our local courts with the UK Supreme Court ruling as dominant case law.

“We believe this is an opportunity for the NI Executive to lead the UK by ensuring policies in every sector are clear that sex means biological sex when it comes to single sex spaces, services, sports and data”.

The Executive Office, led by the First and deputy First Minister, said it was examining the implications of the ruling.

WRN NI’s comments on Northern Ireland’s laws tally with comments from the feminist campaigner Maya Forstater.

The Sex Matters co-founder lost her job at the Center for Global Development after tweeting and writing about sex and gender. Her case established that ordinary beliefs about the two sexes are covered by the protected characteristic of belief in the Equality Act 2010.

She told the News Letter this week that although the Supreme Court’s judgment concerned only the Equality Act in England, Scotland and Wales, “it said that the effect of the Gender Recognition Act on the many other statutes that refer to men and women must be carefully considered in light of their wording, context and policy”.

Ms Forstater said: “We are confident that this exercise would result in the same conclusion as in the Supreme Court judgment, when carried out in respect of the meaning of ‘sex’ in relation to the Sex Discrimination (NI) Order 1976” – adding that “neither judges in Strasbourg or bureaucrats in Brussels have the power to hold back the tides or to decree that human beings aren’t mammals”.