The risks of repealing rights... debate

The issue is the conflation between two entirely separate characteristics. Which is deliberate, and borne out of a purposeful intent to use terms that are sex based as if they belonged to the class 'gender'.

None of the other protected characteristics overwrite each other this way.
If someone created a religion entitled 'disabled' or 'gay' or 'pregnant' and claimed the right for their belief to be protected AND FOR IT TO OVERWRITE THE ACTUAL TANGIBLE DEFINITION OF THISE CLASSES this would be denied.

But gender is allowed to identify itself and overwrite the tangible class sex.

This is what must be unpicked. Gender, if it is to be protected, must be entirely separate from sex. It cannot 'become' sex. It cannot use the terms of sex -and have them recognised in law as indistinguishable from the actual sex based reality terms.

Gender will only survive this if it is represented as it's true form: a belief, not universally shared, subjective, intangible, and entirely distinguishable from actual sex.

The risk of repealing or limiting any established right is that it endangers ALL rights

The idea of human rights has since WWII been that they are non-negogiable or reversable. They were set in stone as monoliths which were enduring and supposed to last forever. Where there have been clashes the established wisdom has always been about balancing rights.

What we are now seeing is the potential to set the precedent to repeal rights. This removes the notion that rights are there forever. It replaces them with the (sadly correct) wisdom that rights are merely something which are held up by the politics of the time believing in their value. If their value is undermined and rights can be reversed, it sets in motion the realisation that lobbying can change who has rights and the nature of rights - which plays to those who have money and status (remembering that rights are supposed to protect precisely those who lack money and status).

This is particularly true if where rights clash the wisdom to balance those rights and to identify the most vulnerable individual in each specific case is replaced by the idea of a hierachy of rights based on groups rather than individuals. This exposes the most vulnerable individuals to harm. It effectively removes their rights in practice even if their rights are said to exist in law on paper.

This is all combined with growing economic inequality, and a weakening in the institutions which hold up and protect rights. The capacity to defend rights is being degenerated.

The long and short of it is that removing ANY established right is deeply problematic. It has repecussions. As it stands we have areas where there are unresolved conflicts in rights - which need to be resolved and understood why there is a conflict which needs to be considered - rather than removing the rights of anyone.

That very few people really understand the purpose of rights and why and how they were and are established and how they are maintained, protected and enforced, is all part of the same problem which goes directly back to the 'never forget' mantra of WWII.

We forgot some time ago.

The GRA is a pointless and meaningless piece of legislation at this point, GRC holders get nothing extra other than the right to enter womens’ spaces and colonise womanhood. The act itself is no more than a Trojan horse to infiltrate and negate womens’ rights as it currently stands, and surprise surprise, not only is it going to be broadened, but it’s going to be broadened out to the point of rendering sex class meaningless.

The whole things to go imo. Men going in womens’ changing rooms and prisons is not a human right. They have changing rooms and prisons already.They gain all and we lose everything, and as PP said, these laws are harder to unpick and almost always get relaxed further, the GRA being a casing point.

I think the name Gender recognition Act was chosen to be deliberately ambiguous, just right to have a bus driven through it, as is happening.

Either the GRA’s only purpose is to grant access to womens’ single sex spaces, which it is atm, or it’s to excuse violent men who find GNC males intolerable in their spaces. You pick which, but neither explanation benefits women and both are legally unjustifiable.

What knickknack said

What we have here are two separate things.

1. There is an increasing population of trans people who do not wish to use the facilities of their sex for varying reasons, are asking for their separate identity to be respected in society, for the different and specific needs associated with that identity to be recognised and met, and for assurance of legal protections and freedom from discrimination regarding their gender expression choices. This group currently includes an increasing population of children whose needs should be properly met.

Those needs absolutely should and can be met, and most law already provides for it. This can be done by providing trans specific accommodation, spaces, gender neutral toilet facilities, shelters, refuges, the idea of making some facilities and services single gender while ring fencing others as single sex. This meets all needs. IF women's needs as a group are equally strongly protected and the EA strengthened up with that ring fencing of single sex provisions alongside new and more varied provisions.

2. The forcing of the agenda that a man is a woman, his male body is female if he says it is, and that all biological women must be forced to accept that the definition of women and any recognition of biological women as a sex class with any separate needs or rights or provisions (or voice as a group) is over. So is homosexuality, and religious freedom is increasingly getting the side eye too.

There is no part of this that is not as dodgy as fuck from start to finish, and fuck that.

These two need clearly separating out in all situations. In the mess of what much of the woman MPs in the HoC said this week, they have 1 & 2 completely muddled up together and 2 is sliding in by stealth with 1 as a human shield.

The GRA was designed to give rights to a minuscule, well-defined group of transsexuals. Introducing self-id would extend those rights to a large and heterogenous group including cross dressers, opportunists and predators. It is clear that going through with it would repeal the rights of both women and transsexuals. But in what sense would not doing it take away anyone's existing rights?

did allowing people to change their legal status and documentation already repeal the rights of having "sex" as a protected characteristic?

I think that it did, because it mandates belief, which is totally contrary to the right to freedom of belief.

Gender reassignment, like theatre, only works if the viewers agree to suspend their disbelief.

Legalising gender reassignment is basically saying "You must believe this because I believe it". (And legalising self-ID would basically be saying "You must believe this because I say so.")

I may believe that the world was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, but I cannot oblige you to believe it. And, while I can expect the freedom to practice my religion, I cannot expect you to suffer in order to accommodate me, so it would not be Arklephobic of you to insist that I put my used tissues in the dustbin, rather than press them moistly and reverently into your hands.

What 'rights' would be repealed?

Protection from discrimination, harassment, violence, equal access to marriage, protections in law, work related protections, etc etc should be absolute for everyone regardless of race, sex, age, gender expression, sexuality, disability, etc etc.

The mistake of the GRC was to create a legal 'fiction' for a specific group, largely to avoid legalising gay marriage. That equality for marriage has now been established in law in other ways, and is no longer an issue. The EA now also specifically provides protections for trans people.

As far as I understand it, the desire is to repurpose the GRA to confer the legal status of being a woman on any male born person who signs a self declaration (which in practice will mean any male who enters any female space since no one will check this at the door, the person will be assumed to be self declaring by the very act of entering). So legally changing the definition of women to include male born people, removing the protection of single sex spaces for women, removing the right of women to have facilities, spaces or recognised identities apart from men.

The rights being 'repealed' are all womens, not transwomen's. In fact, by stealth, this will create a hierarchy of protected characteristics under which women, religious beliefs, disability and safeguarding all lose if a transwoman is involved.

I have mentioned to my MP that it is also much easier to create law than it is to undo it, once these 'rights' that someone must have full entitlement to the category and resources of a protected social group purely on their subjective feelz instead of the objective, provable reality of belonging to that group, then it will be very easy for those entitlements to be exploited in all directions (hello transdisabled people demanding benefits, carers, hoists, hello transage people demanding access to nursery places and vouches, we already have transrace people taking places set aside for BAME people) and very, very difficult to repeal the mess of law that enabled it all.

This is a very good reason to stop, think, increase 'rights' and the law framework gradually while monitoring impact, and not to rush straight into legal hell with a glow of good intentions.