GRA and Equality Act

It does, the claim of discrimination is a subjective test based on a reasonable belief. If you have a policy where anyone can legally self ID to get a GRC the belief that it's just some dodgy chancer without one is less reasonable.

The law needs unpicking. MTFs without a GRC have no absolute right laid out in primary legislation to access female spaces. They are no different to any other males legally.

OnlyObjectivity thank you for writing so clearly what I've been failing to articulate.

Your post sums up this issue so well.

Zhora

the hordes of 'men' suddenly appearing in female spaces post GRA reform is a straw man argument

Hardly.

There are no police officers "policing" toilets. It is down to members of the public and facility staff to do so. Since there is no law against a man being in a women's toilet, members of the public have to make an on-the-spot decision as to whether that man has a legitimate reason for being there.

Having a GRC would be a legitimate reason. So a member of the public currently has to mentally ask themselves on-the-spot: "Is it likely that an independant panel of professionals granted this person a GRC, and thus they can claim legitimate access to being here?"

Under self-ID, the question becomes: "Could this person have self-declared their way in here?" and there's a good chance they could have.

Predators know that too. They're watching this debate and know that the existence of self-ID causes sufficient doubt that they likely won't be challenged, and as such don't even need to self-ID.

A GRC doesn't change your birth certificate... I think that's right.

Bloody hell Zhora that is the point of it. To hide a person's birth sex with a legal fiction (administrationally at least). There are loads of situations where you have to give ID and a birth cert, like to open a bank account or rent a house, and this would show (as if no one knew already) that a man going by the name of Karen and wearing a dress and listick, is in fact a male. Thus a GRC creates a legal fiction to hide the truth - or rather to let no one speak the truth in that person's presence.

No one minds Zhora that you dont know much about it it is a complex area of shitty messed up law and few of us here are experts, but you are really bloody argumentative for someone so poorly informed. When you admit this, I cannot understand why you would repeatedly insist that you are right. It comes across as stupid and arrogant.

A situation such as toilets at work can be policed more easily as anyone without a GRC will not have their sex hidden, so people such as HR know exactly what is what and can say so and challenge men using the ladies (and they stick out like a sore thumb). To claim the protection given under gender ressignment under the EA, one would have to acknowledge that one is trans. With a GRC HR may know of it because of needing to deal with pension info for eg, but cannot disclose this information to lower managers so they can check for toilet infringements etc. But this is about way more than toilets.

A GRC does make things murky as to how to enforce the exceptions when a birth cert says a legal fiction and you suspect ptherwise. But I wonder (and am happy to be put right) if women's groups eg a rape center could work around it by asking women service users to sign a declaration that states that the service applies single sex exemptions under the EA, and so provides services to natal women only, and that service users must declare that they are natal women and have never had gender reassignment. I think (am not a lawyer) this could mean that a transwoman with a GRC who went ahead and lied and obtained services by deception would be committing fraud (so long as they service was paid for).

It is entirely wrong though that the onus is put on women to have to go throught this defensive rigmarole when the law and society should never be creating the expectation that a man is a woman in the first place. Not to mention that the poor women would have to suffer this clearly abusive male in their presence until (and if) they could persuade the police to do something about it.

Everything about this tramples on women already and giving it further credence in law just makes it worse.

This thread: coming to a "transphobic radicalisation portal" twitter thread near you soon....

No we don't want males in our spaces. We are asking for that to be taken into account. The EA doesn't have to be changed, just the guidelines, policies and code. We want other solutions to be found that don't involve steamrolling over women's boundaries and our privacy and dignity. Public opinion matters and would influence future guidelines. Swim England wrote some terrible guidelines with Stonewall about how intact male bodies should be allowed into female spaces if they said they were trans and women should be "educated" to get over it. That went down like a cup of cold sick and they pulled them. So not so cut and dried.

If you are giving out 'this will allow any man to...' leaflets then that either proves that you are ignorant or a liar.

Have I expressed it in exactly those terms? in the wider scheme of things it does though, by eroding women's sex based protections by allowing
many more males than the tiny current number into the female sex class.

Furthermore, this is part of a wider debate about strengthening women's rights and increasing sex based protections. Many people are just realising now and being made aware what has been done under the radar.

The EA says people should not be discriminated against, not that they can identity into spaces of people with other protected characteristics.

This. It's policy makers and transgender rights advocates who have brought about this situation. It's not in the letter of the law.

A GRC doesn't change your birth certificate... I think that's right.

No, it doesn't change the original one, you can get a new one showing your acquired legal sex and no one is allowed to know about the old one.

Zhora
You didn't even know that a GRC means that you can get a new birth certificate in your acquired 'gender'? Really? You need to do some more reading.

4. In practical terms, legal recognition will have the effect that, for example, a male-to-female transsexual person will be legally recognised as a woman in English law. On the issue of a full gender recognition certificate, the person will be entitled to a new birth certificate reflecting the acquired gender
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/notes

You're not really very informed about any of this OP.

Yes it does. It is the only document that you can't change without one I think. Which I think is outrageous personally. As we know a Man Friday chap changed their driving licence easily from female to male and back again without any issues.

Self-id of legal sex removes the protected characteristic of sex from the Equality Act. If everyone is free to choose their own legal sex, the category of 'sex' becomes meaningless.

In my previous post trans people related to any transgender person as exclusions can apply equally under the Equality Act. If you're a GRC holder you can still be excluded under certain circumstances just as much as someone without one.

But how can you exclude a transwoman with 'female' on their birth certificate who swears that they do not have a GRC and were born female? A transwoman without a GRC will still have 'male' on their birth certificate, and can be excluded.

In my previous post trans people related to any transgender person as exclusions can apply equally under the Equality Act

Except that in practice as I and others have said most legal analysis done on this agrees that a GRC is a higher bar.

But let's go round again.

It's good to have this conversation again for the lurkers, though Zhora. Thanks

Zhora, have you ever tried to see it from a womens point of view? A victim of rape that doesn't want men around her, a school girl that doesn't want to share toilets with boys and fall victim of upskirting or worse, an older woman in a care home that wants to retain her dignity by having a female carer, an athlete that has trained hard for her sport only to be beaten by a male? I am guessing you only see the transgender side of things? So how would you like the world to be for women, women as in biological ones?

Telling the public that this is suddenly going to allow people to do something that they could do anyway goes beyond misrepresentation into downright lying

This isn't just about the GRA. If you read the Fair Play fact sheets you will see that they accurately lay out the legal position.

The deck was stacked against women when the government allowed Gendered Intelligence free reign to write "guidelines" for employers and service providers and didn't consider women's rights or needs or ask any women's organisations to contribute.

The point that trans people can still be exempted has been made at various points throughout this thread.

But in practice, how can it be applied? Take this scenario. An individual applies for a job for which only natal female applicants will be considered, using the exemptions in the EA. This person produces a birth certificate which declares them to be female, but the employer is certain that the applicant is transgender and was born male. How can the employer apply the exemption and exclude this individual?

The point that trans people can still be exempted has been made at various points throughout this thread.

No one is disputing that this is technically possible. Also please be clear what you mean when you say "trans people". In a discussion about the GRA we need to clarify who has a GRC.

But it's legal anyway for someone to use the toilets of the gender the identify with so a GRC is not going to suddenly legalise anything because it is already.

Generally there is a social contract in place meaning that obvious male people don't access women's spaces. You can even see this in countries with self ID held up as beacons of trans rights. Ireland generally retains SEX segregation. And in supposedly liberal Denmark women were clearly uncomfortable when "artist" and obvious male Ibi Pippi changed his legal gender and insisted on accessing women's changing rooms. One place he tried wouldn't allow him to.

What counting males as legal females for most purposes does is erode the idea of a sex class. That is very bad for women whose sex based oppression is grounded in our biology. We're already seeing this happen. It's becoming difficult to discuss women's biology as pressing women's issues, something which is desperately needed as we are the sex and reproductive class. I'm not going to stand by and see it made worse.