Reconciling competing rights

Wow that was an excellent post BarrackerBarmer!

Thank you Barrack, I have saved and will quote you!

Brilliant post Barrack

barrackerbarmer

Excellent post @barrackerbarmer trans rights do not lie within women's rights. Their rights lie in the 'trans' not the 'woman'. To think otherwise is to deny trans rights and women's rights.

I legally own my home (ignore the mortgage for a second)
Someone, let's call him Jonathon, really likes my home and wants to live there.
We don't have competing rights to live in my home.
I have a right to live here, and he does not.
He DOES however have a right to A home.
Just not mine.
Society can make sure he isn't homeless, that no-one should be homeless.
We can fight for Jonathon's right to have a home 'like I do'
Just not my home. That isn't his right.
Perhaps Jonathon claims I don't have to move out, and he wants to share with me.
That seems reasonable to him.
It isn't reasonable.
He may have lived in a succession of homes that he fancied, because their occupants were willing to share with him. Some more than others.
Jonathon feels this has set a precedent.
It hasn't.
He even got a few home-owners to put him on their deeds..
I do not have to.
My home, is, under the law, specific to me.
I am a person distinct from Jonathon under the law.
That is how the law distinguishes between us and establishes who owns my home.
Even if Jonathon changes his name to mine, the law will still distinguish between us so that it can establish that my home, is mine and not his.

We both have the right to a home, but not to each other's home.
And it is critical that the law can differentiate between us to ensure that we don't accidentally end up with one person claiming two homes and the other with nowhere to live.

Competing rights?
No.
We have the same human rights.

The mistake is thinking we have the right to 'define ourselves AND OTHERS into a joint category' to which both parties cannot actually belong.
Or thinking that we can define ourselves AS OTHERS by redefining those others to our agenda.
We don't have the right to claim entry into a category in which we don't meet the criteria.

Start here: There are 3.7 billion females alive today.
They exist, and they are distinct from the males.
They have rights, and they need more.
They are an objective, recognisable, biological group.
The single largest most oppressed group throughout history.
Collectively oppressed precisely because from birth - they are immediately recognisable as female.
We have to name and draw a boundary around this group, and give them rights specific to this group and that will exclude males.

If the only way to recognise the 3.7 billion oppressed females is by scrubbing their obvious, truthful, biological reality OUT of existence in our laws so that we can fictitiously rewrite them back IN as an 'invisible internal identity that matches some males'?

Then we have gone very, very wrong.

Gasping.
Some people have a gender identity, some people don't. There are infinite gender identities that people can have, and why shouldn't they? For some people, their gender identity is linked to their sexed bodies, this might be in harmony or conflict with what is widely considered to be gender conforming or gender non conforming. For some, their gender identity conflicts with their sexed body to the extent that they experience gender dysphoria and struggle to cope with their sexed bodies. For others, their gender identity has no relationship with their sexed bodies.
Some transwomen undergo physical treatment (hormones and/or surgery), others live in peace with, and are are content with, their male-sexed bodies; others are transwomen on days they feel like transwomen, and men on other days. We could go on and on and I see no problem at all with people having and expressing whatever gender identities they have. People are just people and everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.
Trans people, quite rightly have protections under the Equality Act to help guard against discrimination and to help afford them dignity, privacy and safety - these rights can be compromised as a result of being trans. For example, expecting a transwomen to have to use facilities designated for people with male-sexed bodies is likely to deny them dignity, privacy and possible safety. Having said that, if they want to use provision designated for people with male-sexed bodies (such as their own), they should be afforded protections through the protected characteristic of sex, to enable them to do do safely.
Similarly, women -people with female sexed bodies - should be afforded dignity and respect through the provision of some same-sexed provision whereby access is determined by sexed-bodies. People with female-sexed bodies should feel able to get undressed, rest assured that someone with a male-sexed body is not about to enter. The gender identity of someone standing naked in front of an undressed woman is likely to have little or no consequence.
The problem arises when transwomen (male bodied people) want to access facilities for people with female sexed bodies, despite the entire premise for the provision being about denying access to male bodied people. Whilst allowing transwomen access may afford them dignity through being treated as the gender they identify as, it denies women dignity afforded through being able to undress away from male-bodied people.
Similarly, many females want to make sure that outcomes for females are effectively monitored in order to try and achieve equality of opportunity. To achieve this, a distinct category for natal females/female bodied people is needed. The same could be said for transwomen. How many females are involved in STEM, how many transwomen? How many women are the victim of crime? How many transwomen are?
There are positive reasons and motives for distinguishing between transwomen and women. There are clear differences between the groups and some conflicts of interest. I say this without any malice or ill intent towards transwomen. I am committed to supporting transwomen and do not have anything against them, or their rights to hold and express the gender identity they hold.

For me, equal rights must include the right to define your own experience

For me, equal rights must include the right to identify someone else as male or female without being forced to deny it, and the right to define my own experience as female without someone else telling me I am wrong about my definition of female.

I think we've got ourselves into a pickle by confusing the right to hold a belief with the right to enforce your belief on others.

Go ahead and choose to believe you actually are the opposite sex / that the earth is flat / that too much wanking makes you go blind / that you will go to hell if you don't pray to god in the right way.

It is not ok to turn that into making it a criminal offence to not pray to god in a certain way / to require opticians to prescribing stopping wanking instead of glasses / to require NASA to make satellite orbit calculations based on flat earth theories / to let a person with XY chromosomes into women's sports, women's prisons, women's refuges because he believes he's a woman.

Single sex provision is not just to preserve safety, but also to preserve privacy and dignity.

I have never been subject to sexual assault, but I still don't want a male HCP putting a speculum inside me. It happened once, I hated it and promised myself it would never happen again. And I don't have to give any more reason that than. Don't want it, female HCP please.

And that's the way it should be.

Why is it so easy for society to give trans people what they demand?

Male privilege. Trans rights are men's rights.

Why is it so easy for society to give trans people what they demand? And at the same time women are apparently still second class citizens.
We need single sex spaces and services. You cant identify your way out of prostate or cervical cancer. Or violence.

The third neutral space option is fair to everyone except narcissists who demand validation and acquiescence.

Do you think it's right that women and girls have female only facilities? Do you think that woman and girls have the right to request and set up spaces that are for woman only, based purely on their needs and wants?

Do you believe that a man can change sex and be female? Do you think that a transexual man/tranwoman/TIM has the same biology, the same socialisation, the same experiences and is treated the same as women?

When you say does one side just have to grin and bear it, which side do you think will be?

I do have PTSD, it's written all over my medical notes in huge letters and it's the reason why the NHS offer me woman health care providers especially for gynecological and obstetric procedures (and even try in emergencies).

The blurring of whether those women healthcare providers are women or trans women is an issue for me. Not because I don't believe people should be able to live their lives however they want, I've supported trans women service users before (in cases when my colleagues were refusing to) but because I still get a knee jerk panic reaction to a certain aspect of anatomy (obviously not penises), flashbacks, racing heart, a desire to run or to fight for my life.

I've had various treatments, I still see a clinical psychologist and psychiatrist on the NHS but so far nothing has worked. I've done fairly serious damage to dh in the past when he tried to wake me up from a nightmare and I didn't realise where I was/who he was.

Day to day I survive by avoiding looking at the specific area of the body of anyone who looks male and being in a constant state of hyper awareness. That's why single sex areas to retreat to when I get triggered and knowing that the NHS and I are talking about the same thing when they promise a woman healthcare provider is hugely important to me because the alternatives are pretty bleak.

I also know I'm not alone. I've worked with young girls who have been sexually abused and they couldn't cope with being in the same room as fully dressed male policemen, social workers and doctors... having to share changing facilities at school/toilets/tents with anyone with a male body would be traumatic and problematic to them.

They like me aren't afraid of men because of urban myths, because of stories our Mothers told us but because of what was done to us. My bruises, cuts and tears healed a long time ago but the wound inside is as raw as it was when it was inflicted.

Also not yours to confer: that women will acquiesce in the belief that some men are women.

People can't change sex. There is no good reason I can see for opening up sex segregated spaces to the other sex whatever 'gender' ID they have. Gender is not sex. Third spaces remove any issue. Not 'trans' spaces just seperate unisex spaces alongside. 'Validation' of a legal fiction of changing sex by removing women's rights to privacy from the opposite sex is not OK. It's not an equivalence of 'rights'