A little bit of history about the Equality Act 2010, especially for those too young to remember or who were totally unconcerned at the time. These two weighty publications, published in June 2007 were an important step in public consultation about the proposals — 300 pages worth

The Discrimination Law Review (189pp) set out the facts about over 100 existing pieces of legacy statutes and the proposals to level up cover for different protected characteristics and harmonise with EU law. It also set out some of the exceptions that it was proposed to make.

The Regulatory Impact Assessment (110pp), as the name implies, was a complex evidential and theoretical analysis of the impacts on different groups — and between them — to make the best effort to avoid unintended consequences for one group from levelling up for another.

This widespread consultation didn’t land on the public from out of the blue. It was the culmination of a consultation process that had begun more than eight years previously, meeting stakeholders both together and separately to hear what they were seeking and might be afraid of.

One notable part of the review publication for trans people was an examination of the proposed exceptions. Our starting point on this was the law as it had stood since the P vs S and Cornwall County Council case and how that was put into law with the Sex Discrim’n Regs 1999.

This first example of exception making stemmed directly from those 1999 regulations, which had already been working well. So it’s worth noting that a key principle that made its way into the EA2010 has now been in operation for 21 years and the praxis around it is well establishd

Next up, sport. The expression “safety and fair competition” first saw the light of day in 2003/4 with extensive consultation with sports bodies during the drafting of the Gender Reassignment Act. It was talked about, agreed, and policies were made in the basis of those talks.

Insurance was another area of consultation that had already happened in the drafting of the Gender Recognition Bill in 2003. Private insurers were not fussed because they recognised the effect to be insignificant as far as their business was concerned and trans M cancel trans W

And let’s hear it once again for “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” — well established praxis by the time of these proposals and nowadays in use for 21 years — since BEFORE the Gender Recognition Act was even conceived.

What I want to emphasise from this is that there was nothing revolutionary about this aspect of EA2010. By the time it was passed in the last days of the Labour administration the principles it embodied had been consulted upon for at least 11 years (the first public /

.. consultation on a Single Equality Act took place in 1999) and the provisions for trans equality were based on law that already existed from either 1999 or 2004. So, by the time of enactment, the principles had already been in effect and in use for between 6-11 years.

The new aspects of the EA2010 were mostly about the ideas of discrimination by association or perception and protection from discrimination in the supply of goods and services (1999 was only about employment and vocational education). But on this latter new ground the praxis was/

..essentially the same. Government had legislated for the question of trans employment in single sex spaces in the 1999 addendum to the Sex Discrimination Act, so the extension to also cover trans use of those services wasn’t a great leap — the same principles applied.

Personally I was very closely involved in the consultation and passage of the 1999 regulations — a battle thoroughly documented in volume 2 of my eBook series Pressing Matters. As a result I and colleagues were also in on the ground floor of discussions about what became EA2010

Also, of course, my colleagues and I were also intimately involved in the various consultations that shaped the Gender Recognition Bill, which in turn informed other participation and service aspects of EA2010. I retired from direct involvement in late 2007, which is why I’m less

familiar with the end stage consultations that took place in 2008 and 2009 over the final wording, but essentially the EA2010 went into debate in 2009 in essentially the same form as proposed in these massive reports because the principles in play were not new to anyone by then.