UK government insists it is ‘taking time to get this right’ on single-sex spaces
The UK government has insisted it will take as much time as necessary to “get right” new rules on access to single-sex spaces after a leak of guidance submitted by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) raised concerns that its publication was being deliberately delayed,The equalities watchdog submitted its formal guidance on how public bodies, businesses and other service providers should respond to April’s landmark supreme court ruling on biological sex to the UK government in September,Since then, its outgoing chair, Kishwer Falkner, has urged the equalities minister, Bridget Phillipson, to approve it “as soon as possible”,Ministers are still considering the final guidance, which must be approved by Phillipson before being laid before parliament,Phillipson said on Thursday she was going through it “thoroughly and carefully”.
She told reporters: “I have responsibilities to make sure that’s done properly and we’re taking the time to get this right,“This is an important area and we want to make sure that women have access to a single-sex provision – that’s incredibly important for domestic violence services, rape crisis centres, so that women are able to heal from the trauma they’ve experienced,“But of course, trans people should be treated with dignity and respect,”The children’s minister, Josh MacAlister, said that rushing out the new guidance could risk further legal action,“We’re doing this as fast as we can and there’s no deadline that we’re putting on it.
We want to get it right, and if we don’t get it right, it does risk putting this back into the courts and providing even greater uncertainty for people,” he said,On Thursday, The Times reported on a copy of the document, which it said had been leaked by Whitehall figures concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential backlash,Dozens of Labour MPs wrote to the business secretary, Peter Kyle, last month warning that the new regulations could cause chaos for many businesses, which have separately raised concerns they may be “unworkable” and could “undermine inclusion”,MacAlister denied that the government was refusing to publish the guidance because it hoped the problem would go away, adding: “Three months is very little time in the grand scheme of things,”According to the Times, under the new guidance, service providers such as hospital wards, gyms and leisure centres will be able to question transgender women over whether they should be using single-sex facilities such as toilets and changing rooms based on how they look, their behaviour or concerns raised by others.
The Times also reports that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such as a trans man, who is biologically female but is “perceived” as a man, attempting to use a women’s changing room.MacAlister told Times Radio that the government wanted to “avoid being in a position where toilets are being policed by people”.“I just ask people to imagine small corridors where you’ve got a setup around toilets that’s pretty restricted and you’ve got – whether it’s a restaurant or a school or a gym – not that much space to play with.The guidance, as it’s written, has implications for both how physical buildings are set up, but also how staff in those settings would need to determine and judge even whether somebody might look like a woman.”Later on Thursday, the prime minister’s spokesperson underlined the complexity of the issues involved and, while refusing to comment on the leaked version, added: “I do think you’d be hard-pressed to find people across the country who don’t think that a fellow human being should be treated with dignity and respect under the eyes of the law or in everyday life.
”The leak comes as concerned parties await the outcome of a judicial review of the EHRC’s interim advice on the supreme court judgment, brought by the Good Law Project, which some expect to conclude before the end of the year.It could have a significant impact on the legality of the guidance currently with ministers.The new guidance is expected to closely reflect interim advice released by the watchdog in April, which in effect banned transgender people from using facilities according to their lived gender.Responding to the leak reports, Jude Guaitamacchi, the founder of Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, said: “These leaks reveal that not only does the EHRC’s proposed code of practice seek to require trans exclusion, it instructs service providers to police this based on appearance and gender stereotypes.This is a misogynist’s charter, plain and simple, and the government must reject it.
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Why don’t Conservatives get credit for culture funding? | Letter
Helen Marriage, a hugely respected cultural leader, writes that “there is no political party that will commit to the kind of investment needed to keep a living art and culture ecology alive” (Durham’s Lumiere festival was a beacon of hope and togetherness – we cannot let the lights go out on the rest of the arts, 11 November). But she also places the responsibility on all of us. She wants the culture sector to make a better case. But can it?As commissioner for culture in the last government, I remain surprised that large funding decisions directed at culture have been forgotten, devalued and ignored, perhaps because the sources were then from a Conservative government.During Covid, culture was the only economic sector to receive its own rapid, specially designed, comprehensive rescue package
Jon Stewart on Trump’s Epstein files flip-flop: ‘This dude is flailing’
Late-night hosts tore into the next chapter of Donald Trump’s never-ending Jeffrey Epstein scandal.Jon Stewart ripped into Trump on Monday evening after the president abruptly changed tack and called on House Republicans to authorize the justice department’s release of files related to Epstein, a convicted sex offender – files which Trump himself could order to be released.“If he had nothing to hide, he could have declassified and released these files himself at any time,” the Daily Show host explained. “How do I know this? A legal expert named Donald Jurisprudence Trump said so.”Stewart then played footage of Trump from 2022 in which he insisted that the president can declassify anything, at any time, just by saying so or “even by thinking about it”
North by Northwest: Hitchcock’s funniest, most ambitious film
Imagine: you’re a handsome and relatively successful ad man in idyllic 50s New York. You’re having a delicious mid-afternoon snack in the lobby of the Plaza hotel, which presumably cost all of $2.50, when suddenly you are abducted in broad daylight at gunpoint by two polite and well-dressed men. You don’t put up a fight. You merely walk with them to their car, trying to object in the only way you know how: asking nicely for them to stop
David Nicholls to adapt The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ for BBC
A writing team led by the One Day author, David Nicholls, and that includes Caitlin Moran is bringing Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ to the small screen in a 10-part BBC One adaptation of the classic tale of teenage life in British suburbia.Nicholls, who described the book as “a classic piece of comic writing and an incredible piece of ventriloquism on Sue Townsend’s part”, will adapt the book that produced one of the best-known literary creations of the 1980s.Known for Mole’s comically dramatic assessments of his life in a Midlands cul-de-sac – “I feel like a character in a Russian novel half the time” – the book sold 20m copies worldwide and was translated into 30 languages.The BBC said: “With only a multi-coloured ballpoint pen as his guide, Adrian worries about his spots, his parents’ divorce, the torment of first love and the fact he’s never seen a female nipple.”None of the cast has been revealed, and producers say “a nationwide … search is currently underway to find Adrian”
‘People still blame me for their perforated eardrums’: how we made the Tango ads
‘Gil Scott-Heron did the closing voiceover. He was giggling away, saying, “You English guys are crazy!”’My creative partner Al Young and I had been on the dole for 18 months when we landed our dream jobs at Howell Henry ad agency. We had to prove ourselves fast. Tango’s brief was basically to get talked about. They told us: “We want Coca-Cola to be afraid of this little British brand
Memoirs, myths and Midnight’s Children: Salman Rushdie’s 10 best books – ranked!
As the author publishes a new story collection, we rate the work that made his name – from his dazzling Booker winner to an account of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him “It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie now says of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but also indicative of the sort of writer Rushdie would become: garrulous, playful, energetic. The tale of an immortal Indian who travels to a mysterious island, it’s messy but charming, and the sense of writing as performance is already here. (Rushdie’s first choice of career was acting, and he honed his skill in snappy lines when working in an advertising agency.) Not a great book, but one that shows a great writer finding his voice, and a fascinating beginning to a stellar career
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What is Cloudflare – and why did its outage take down so many websites?
Cloudflare says ‘incident now resolved’ after outage causes error messages across the internet – as it happened