“Transwomen are women”

Has this news story been shared yet?

www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/female-labour-councillors-blast-fundraiser-1074821

The upshot - women who were elected because of a shortlist argue that transwomen should be allowed to be on the shortlist because its not about sex but about the best person for the job whether they are a man or a woman.

Someone is confused! ...

It is confused.

I hope that the fundraiser to challenge Labour's position on AWS is successful because all of this needs clarification.

The current confused state isn't fair to anyone.

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman)

Read with 'sex' instead of gender that actually makes sense. As it stands, I don't see the point in differentiating between sex and gender as it does - what purpose does this actually serve? It just sounds confused.

Well I'm not doing any of it Maryz, the govt has already decided that someone with a GRC is a woman / man, and I'm looking at how I would present it in court if I were instructed to defend the position that woman is already defined by sense of self rather than biology.

Something being complicated - or even dangerous - doesn't mean it's not possible. Take another famous legal fiction, now defunct: that on marriage, a woman literally became part of her husband's person. Obviously it didn't create an actual physical conjoinment but it did a legal and social one.

The GRA is terribly badly drafted with a worrying conflation of sex and gender: s.9(1)

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).

and / or social (passes through life as a member of that sex; the Clapham omnibus test).

There is a massive problem with this though. Identifying as female socially, even if you pass, does NOT change your sex. It is something that at any time you can opt out of - as soon as the disadvantage that natal women receive rears its ugly head.

Amply demonstrated by this little switcheroo.

But Laura, adopted children don't get a birth certificate with their adoptive parents on it. Their original birth certificate is held and sealed, their new adoption certificate shows their legal adoptive parents - but there is no pretence that they are actually their birth parents.

There is no hiding of the truth.

By insisting that transwomen are indeed real, natal, female women that is denying the truth. Added to which reissuing birth certificates is also rewriting legal documents.

Your reasoning is a bit complicated don't you think? Why redefine "woman" to mean "biological person with XX chromosomes OR someone with a GRC OR someone who socially passes through life as a member of the class of people with the sex of people who have XX chromosomes OR biological women who are now transmen (with GRC or social or etc etc) OR those who are perceived as a woman OR

I didn't say it was a good idea to redefine "woman," I said it wouldn't be impossible.

Other legal fictions: that companies have legal personhood. Yet throw a brick through the window of a supermarket and you'll get charged with criminal damage, not assault against the person.

The most similar is probably legal adoption: adoptive parents are parents. "Parents" has a real biological meaning. However in law, and in society, adoptive parents are indeed parents. The courts (Lady Justice Hale in this instance) have interpreted "parents" to include gestational, biological and psychological parents - so a parent doesn't have to have gestated a child or be related; being a very involved step-parent makes you a parent, as does being the gestational mother's lesbian partner and the second mother to the child for example.

I wonder whether in the future we will see a similar tripartite interpretation so that "woman" (and "man") are interpreted as biological (XX or XY), legal (has a GRC) and / or social (passes through life as a member of that sex; the Clapham omnibus test).

That would include trans men (biological but not social). It would include those with a GRC (legal but not biological). It would include someone who lives as a woman and is perceived as a woman (because as liberals point out, the employer who rejects someone because they think the interviewee is a woman capable of getting pregnant doesn't do so because he conducts a chromosome test but because that person looks like a woman and has a date of birth between 40 and 20 years ago). It would not include Danielle Muscato, who the person on the Clapham omnibus would not perceive as a woman.

This is all theoretical btw, I'm not proposing it as a legal test. Quite apart from anything else I've had most of a bottle of wine after an epically shit day

How can we support Jess @BertrandRussell?

I saw that. I think I did try down one rabbit hole.

SC is my MP.
I don't think I can vote for her again.
She was clearly courting the LGBT vote and is now utterly unable to back down even when hundreds of women are politely asking her to consider the issues.
It makes it very hard to trust her.
She has used women's issues to bolster her career and now she is selling them down the river.

The Labour party certainly seems afraid of offending transwomen....

I read the story about the screening.
I don't think its a case of willfully supporting delusional thinking.
More that people will be able to register with health care as their chosen gender. They will then be treated as that gender ie. invited for screening.
I am no fan of many, many aspects of all this stuff but even the Daily Mail struggled to make it look like the NHS was scared of offending transwomen.

I'm deeply involved in the party (though a Corbyn-sceptic) and I'd lose so many friends over this. They're mostly younger and fully on the bandwagon. It makes me really sad because it would seem they don't understand the basis of women's oppression at all. I already knew that most of the gay men I know in the party don't even believe women are still oppressed at all.

I'd love to support Jess Phillips but I'm too scared

Men don't actually have to enact violence for women to be afraid. We know they can. They remind us, all the time

This this this. Why are women being fictionally raped and murdered every time you turn on the tv? Why are there stories about murdered women and children constantly plastered across front pages even though no-one seems to think these crimes are important enough to prosecute adequately?

Men reminding us they can

BUT Transwomen are going to be offered them routinely - fair enough for breast cancer but transwomen don't have a cervix so why???

I'll open the book right now on whether some poor female HCP will end up having to go through the pantomime of a pretend cervical smear test purely to gratify someone's ego.

They aren't women. Biologically they aren't. Plenty of science to prove that. Just my two sense.

It’s not just transmen potentially risking their health:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3758950/
Apologies for not creating a hyperlink - it’s been a while since I’ve posted.
I wonder, however, whether these potentially serious health risks might help turn the tide so that trans people can access health care appropriate to their biological health needs and knock this “I’m a real boy/girl” nonsense on the head.

From the link above 'presenting as a man'

Part of what it is to be a man, in our culture, is to not affirm or imply that manhood is achieved solely by or in presentation.

The person who wrote this is obviously a great big stinking transphobe.

9toenails

Exactly. I've read a fairly good analysis, location of which I can't remember.

But it basically said that inferring something about someone does not, in material reality, determine what they are.

Absurdity is not a good basis for law -- or for political organisation.

Should be our rallying cry in fighting this shit. Seriously, politicians and everyone else who wants to rearrange society around this absurdity needs to be forced to examine the logic of what they endorsing.

It is at best true that transwomen are women only in the minimal sense in which, for example, seahorses are horses. (Or along the same lines, it is true, if at all, only in the sense in which clothes horses or hobby-horses are horses ... or in which red herrings are herrings or Chicago 12-bar blues exhibit a colour of the rainbow. And so on.)

If this seems to trivialise the matter, that seems to me wholly appropriate. Those who claim 'transwomen are women' and then go on to attempt to annex rights for transgender people based on this claim deserve not debate so much as ridicule. This is all just silly, or would be were the consequences of such foolishness not so serious.

Some of you might be interested in this: Les Green on "'Presenting as' a man" (Les Green is Professor of Philosophy of Law at Oxford.)

• As Green says, it is tempting to make fun of someone claiming to 'present as ...' something-or-other (a woman, say, or a man in the case he addresses.) It may be worth noting, though, in addition, Green's pointing out the obvious (and, implicitly, risible) falsity of claims to the effect that 'presenting makes things so' ... particularly wrt proposed changes to GRA and Labour Party nonsense about 'self-defining women' and so on. (Green himself doesn't make the connections, but I suspect him not to be an habitué of MN.) Absurdity is not a good basis for law -- or for political organisation.

Yes, Datun. At the level of nation-on-nation conflict, having better missile delivery systems and more sophisticated drones for bombing the shit out of "insurgents" and the civilian caught in the cross fire without putting your troops at matter matters more. But at the level of individuals in domestic or everyday situations, physical strength - in the sense of muscular strength and leverage, not the ability to cope with the pain of childbirth (which is awesome, but won't help you in a fight) - is what means that men can beat the crap out of women if they choose to. And as you also point out, the threat is just as effective - which is why punching a hole in the door is domestic violence too because it's saying to the woman, clearly and unequivocally, "behave yourself or your face is next." And why the whole TRA thing of combined doxxing (we know where you live), rape threats, die in a fire threats is not mere hyperbole, but given the context of society wide male on female violence, counts as threats of real-world physical violence.

The madness continues (apologies if someone has already posted about this). Transmen are NOT going to be offered routine cervical smears and breast screening on the NHS (even though they could get these cancers) BUT Transwomen are going to be offered them routinely - fair enough for breast cancer but transwomen don't have a cervix so why???

Seems to be a lose out situation for Transmen.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/14/women-identify-men-not-offered-routine-nhs-breast-cancer-screening/

Very little oppression is based on physical strength now, it doesn't need to be.

I disagree. Domestic violence, 85,000 women a year raped, street harrassment. All based on actual violence or threats of actual violence.

As for the rest, it is all underpinned by superior strength.

Men don't actually have to enact violence for women to be afraid. We know they can. They remind us, all the time.