• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Fair Play For Women

Fair Play For Women

  • Prison
  • Sport
  • GRA
  • Language
  • Changing rooms
  • Resources ▼
    • Take action! Here’s how
    • Key facts
    • UK law
    • Science
    • Sex vs gender
    • Consultation submissions
    • Materials
  • About Us ▼
    • Review of 2022
    • Our aim
    • Our beliefs
    • Our spokeswoman
    • Our history and achievements
    • Our supporters
    • News
      • Newspapers
      • TV Interviews
      • Radio interviews
    • Contact
    • Donate
You are here: Home / Law / Using the law to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls

Using the law to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls

3rd December 2021 by FPFW

We believe legal action is an important tool in protecting the sex-based rights of women and girls. Supporters tell us they do, too. The right legal outcome can set a precedent, or stop one (as in the ONS case). It can remind others of their legal obligations, and show that they will be held to account. When we raised funds to fight the ONS, we pledged to use any money left over to explore ways in which we can use the law to re-establish our boundaries, reassert the validity and importance of the single-sex exemptions in the Equality Act, or push back against self-ID where it’s been adopted, such as in sport.

After our win we had almost £58,000 in our legal fighting fund, as detailed below. We’ve been using this to obtain legal advice on a range of issues, so we can identify the best ways to use the courts to help our cause. It’s not enough that something seems unfair or illogical; there also has to be a strong legal basis and an appropriate legal route to challenge or redress.

We have worked with legal experts to explore the impact on females of allowing trans-identifying males into areas of life covered by single-sex exemptions, and how these could lead to a legal challenge. In contact sports, for example, there is the risk of serious injury. Elsewhere, the issue may be indirect discrimination, where males are accessing opportunities denied to females. We have consulted several different legal experts covering the different areas of law, to look at the issues around injury risk, the discrimination angles, expertise in sport, and so on.

We also petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene in the Elan-Cane case, to oppose the adoption of non-binary as a legitimate category on passports. We were the only group representing women’s interests to do so. Although no new intervenors were permitted, our petition made the court aware of the threat to women’s rights of permitting anyone to opt out of having a legal sex of either male or female. This required different legal expertise, in this case on human rights law in the UK and Europe.

We continue to work on issues around data collection and recording, in healthcare and in national statistics such as the Scottish Census, due in March 2022. 

Our fighting fund covers exploratory legal advice but going to court again would need new money. We know there is support for the right action. We look forward to taking the fight to the courts again.


You can help to defend female rights by making a donation. Fair Play For Women receives no formal or government funding to support the vital work we do. We rely completely on donations made by our supporters.

DONATE NOW

ONS: the final reckoning

The final court order required the Office for National Statistics to pay our costs. In practice this means a court arbitration process to determine “reasonable” costs which rarely returns more than 60-70% of actual expenditure. In our case the process has just been completed. We have recovered £73,009 from the Government Legal Department, which is almost exactly two-thirds of our final legal bill of £109,237. The net cost to Fair Play For Women of taking and winning this action was £36,228. After Crowdfunder.co.uk fees + VAT, we received £93,985.79 from our ONS crowdfunder in March this year. After paying our share of our own legal fees, we had a fighting fund of £57,757 to pursue strategic litigation. So far we’ve spent about half of the fund.

Losing could mean covering the other side’s costs as well as our own. In the ONS case this could have been close to £200k: our own £109k plus c.£70k of the other side. For that reason, we proceed with caution. 

Where we see cases of strategic importance with a strong likelihood of success, we will take action.

News on the actions resulting from this investment will follow soon.

Filed Under: Judicial Review, Law

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Biological sex
  • Children
  • Gender Identity
  • Male violence
  • Scottish GRA reforms
  • Silencing women
  • Policy guidance

Our materials

  • Our factsheets
  • Our short films and animations
  • Our memes
  • Our research

Our latest articles

  • Testosterone suppression in sport: time to drop the Roberts study
  • World Athletics new transgender policy fails women
  • Statement on the UK government move to block the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill
  • Rowing policies make no sense
  • A progress report on the fight to restore fairness in female sport

Archives

Footer

Prisons, crime and protecting women

  • The facts about transgender prisoners
  • Prisons timeline – how did we get here?
  • Karen White & prison review
  • Sex attacks in female prisons
  • Refuge shelters deeply worried
  • How do women in prison feel about sharing with transgender prisoners?
  • Can you believe what you read about sexual and violent crimes?
  • The judicial review of prisons policy
  • Factsheets

Sport and the human body

  • A progress report on the fight to restore fairness in female sport
  • Biological sex differences
  • Chromosomes, sex and gender
  • The science and statistics behind the transgender debate
  • Guidelines for single-sex sport policy
  • Testosterone suppression in “elite athletes” – what do we know?
  • Safeguarding in sport still matters
  • Male inclusion leads to female exclusion
  • What you can do

Making policy and the law

  • Scottish government is forcing sex self-ID on whole of UK.
  • The Equality Act 2010 and women’s rights
  • GRA reform
  • Advice and guidance for policy makers
  • Changing room policy advice
  • What can I do now?
  • Take Action: Say NO to letting Sex Self-ID in through the back door.
  • Public opinion on the tension between women’s rights and trans demands

© 2023 · Fair Play For Women

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt out if you wish. Read More

Accept Decline Cookie Settings
I consent to the use of following cookies:
Cookie Declaration About Cookies
Necessary (2) Marketing (1) Analytics (4) Preferences (0) Unclassified (4)
Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
wpl_user_preference fairplayforwomen.com WP GDPR Cookie Consent Preferences 1 year HTTP
YSC youtube.com YouTube session cookie. 52 years HTTP
Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and thereby more valuable for publishers and third party advertisers.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE youtube.com YouTube cookie. 6 months HTTP
Analytics cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
_ga fairplayforwomen.com Google Universal Analytics long-time unique user tracking identifier. 2 years HTTP
_gid fairplayforwomen.com Google Universal Analytics short-time unique user tracking identifier. 1 days HTTP
vuid vimeo.com Vimeo tracking cookie 2 years HTTP
IDE doubleclick.net Google advertising cookie used for user tracking and ad targeting purposes. 2 years HTTP
Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Unclassified cookies are cookies that we are in the process of classifying, together with the providers of individual cookies.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
_gat_UA-109881507-1 fairplayforwomen.com --- Session ---
GASessionCookie fairplayforwomen.com --- Session ---
rtc linkedin.com --- Session ---
_wpfuuid fairplayforwomen.com --- 11 years ---
Cookies are small text files that can be used by websites to make a user's experience more efficient. The law states that we can store cookies on your device if they are strictly necessary for the operation of this site. For all other types of cookies we need your permission. This site uses different types of cookies. Some cookies are placed by third party services that appear on our pages.
Cookie Settings