To those who visit the board and believe in gender identity, what is your solution?

There were a lot of issues with trans people being fired from or discriminated against jobs and services simply because they were trans, and unable to update documentation to adequately reflect the way their lives are lived. This aspect hasn't changed with the update to marriage laws.

The Equality Act protects trans people from discrimination, not the GRA. I don't see why people need documentation to 'reflect the way their lives are lived' - what do you mean by this?

And don't use the word 'cis'. It's banned here and you'll find your posts reported and deleted if you keep using it.

I’ve tried to read the whole thread but it is long so sorry if anyone thinks I’m just repeating what’s already been written. I am quite happy to say TWAW in most circumstances, what Kathleen Stock and others have called a legal fiction, although I think it could be better phrased.

I also think that gender identity is influenced by culture - so we don’t know if women who lived as men - like the women pirates of the 17th c - did it because they felt they had ‘inner essence of man’ or because they would have more freedom and fun. There was no incentive for someone born as a man to live as a woman in those times as they would lose so many rights (eg property) so I assume this is why we don’t have any examples (or I think we don’t) of the reverse.

In terms of your question doyoumind, we have to recognise that legal protections are needed to protect disadvantaged groups. However disadvantaged groups are not equally disadvantaged. Rights can also come into conflict - Hampstead Ladies Pond is an example of this where the rights of trans women and Orthodox Jewish women come into conflict. Here, there are other places trans women can go but Orthodox Jewish or Muslim women have more limited choices so their interests should take precedence here.

Prisons or domestic abuse shelters are another example where many women have experienced male violence. That is why the rights of an individual trans woman prisoner to be in a women’s prison need to be balanced against the interests of the majority.

Women are under represented in politics. That was why they brought in all women shortlists. There are plenty of routes to political office but some women who are biologically female are disadvantaged in political parties if they have children or other caring responsibilities (eg going door to door canvassing or attending meetings in the evening) so, in the interests of the majority of women, women’s officer posts should be retained for ‘natal’ women.

There was a great commentary on the JY case from someone who said that having a Brazilian waxing was not a human right. Health care is, so I would expect the NHS to make sure trans patients were not put off going for screening etc but it is ok for beauticians to say they will not provide an intimate service to a transgender person. However, it would be wrong if a salon refused to give him or her a manicure.

No time to add more but we need to recognise the concept of competing rights. I also think that just as we talk about residual advantages of experiencing male puberty for trans athletes, we need to think about whether some transgender women have residual socio economic advantages. A single successful city banker without children who transitions to being a woman aged 55 may experience a certain amount of negativity but that will not constitute the same level of disadvantage as a disabled woman who experienced FGM and who was made to leave school. That is why the ‘most oppressed group ever’ argument is so frustrating in the UK at least.

StevieW I am so sorry for your horrible experience. I appreciated you sharing that and your other experiences.

You did ask doyoumind!! Hope this doesn’t kill the thread.

Stevie - re "if we were discussing crisis shelters etc., it is my belief that people should be accommodated and assessed based on individual risk and not a generalisation."

You are talking about a fantasy where there is 100% transparency about each person's history, no deceit, and infinite resources to make assessments on a personal level across the country. In the real world, female shelters exclude males and that is a generalization that works for everyone except abusive males and the frankly minuscule group of transwomen who wish to impose their desire to feel validated as women on the entire world.

"constant talk about prison statistics but we are talking about current justice figures of around a hundred people."

Just 1 convicted rapist set loose in a women's prison is too much so not sure what your point is there re numbers. In any case, transwomen are getting their own prison ward so this part of the debate seems to be resolved now.

"excluding people from places we are not discussing implementing systems to exclude offenders, just all trans people no matter their actual risk... trans people aren't by their nature nefarious and if we are creating systems to exclude them based on a risk of people who aren't trans exploiting it, then in my opinion that sets a bad law."

Men are not nefarious by nature, either. That is not why all males are excluded from female spaces, prisons, sport, etc.

There are marked physical differences between males and females (as no doubt you are aware) which have led to the society agreeing to females having our own spaces and sport.

Transwomen are male so it's entirely reasonable for them to be excluded from places and activities where society accords females privacy and protection due to our sex-based differences. This has nothing to do with whether you are comfortable in your own body, like wearing dresses or trousers, or whether Joe now wants to be called Jessica.

"With regards to sports There are strict criteria on things like testosterone production of trans women before they can compete"

It's incredible that you are pretending not to know this, but male advantage over females in sports doesn't stop at testosterone. It is also pelvis shape, hand & feet size, muscle development, reaction time, bone density, not to mention a lifetime of training at the men's level.

"and the most successful trans athletes are actually currently trans men who are competing against cis men."

Hilarious. Where are all the female transmen beating the men at running competitions? Where are the transmen with weightlifting medals? Where exactly can we find a transmen who got the gold medal in boxing after beating the former (male) champion into a bloody mess?

And what surgical waiting list, anywhere, has 'spaces in the future'? A waiting list is linear.

There is no requirement that you undergo genital reconstruction surgery, but unless for reasons of health, again it is not a good idea to simply say you do not want it. Better to state that you intend to have it in the future when the surgical waiting list has spaces.

Why is it not a good idea to say you want to keep your penis? Why do you have to lie?

Learning about the primogeniture clause in the GRA was one of the things that initially got my eyebrows raising about the act as a whole.

Because obviously, transwomen are women but transmen aren't real men.

When I read it I had all the questions that we've been trying to get answered here - what does it really mean to live as the opposite sex? And, if as stated here, it's so complicated with potentially millions of answers, how is this something stated in law?

Also WRT surgery, Press For Change, who describe themselves as 'The Uk's Leading Experts in Transgender Law' have this to say about surgery and GRCs.

Surgery

There is no requirement that you undergo genital reconstruction surgery, but unless for reasons of health, again it is not a good idea to simply say you do not want it. Better to state that you intend to have it in the future when the surgical waiting list has spaces.

Is that 'legal experts' encouraging people to be untruthful when trying to get a GRC?

Neurotrash - the Hansard record would show your transsexual friend is correct.

One of the unintended consequences raised at the time (and subsequently ignored) was the very issue of male transsexuals using women's toilets. And "what happens when a person refuses to call a male transsexual a woman?"

From Hansard in 2004: At the moment there is an example in the news of a BBC programme in which a transsexual man was referred to as a man. Press for Change, the transsexual rights group is campaigning for the BBC always to refer to transsexuals in their chosen gender. That is indicative of the Orwellian nightmare that the Bill encourages. Will people who refuse to call a transsexual man a woman routinely face that kind of hostility?

And look - that's just what has happened. One cannot move on social media for people chanting "TWAW."

A transexual I know has told me the GRA was a total shit show with woolly language. They have had full medical transition and use male facilities.

1. A massive issue is that everyone thinks that gender dysphoria needs to be treated by transitioning.

1. Why on earth are women responsible for everyone?

Why aren't men saying, ok look these people who are biologically male but don't feel they fit in, and are also abused by some of us, need us to create all sorts of provision to deal with this?

Women and feminists and law are doing this for the group of biological women who feel male. Transmen don't suddenly loose all the rights they have as natal women because they transition.

Why aren't the men arguing for pages on dadsnet about this?

Why is it that women are always responsible?

Datun, the Aimee Challenor thread has made me very aware of how even the existing gatekeeping of the GRA 2004 is not fit for purpose.

Quite.

Everything that women, who have been campaigning against self ID, said would happen, is happening.

We have male rapists assaulting and intimidating women in women's prisons.

We have males who identify as women winning medals and prizes in women's sport.

Winning political positions, sports scholarships, business awards that have been set aside for women, to redress the imbalance caused by descrimination against women.

We have women-only spaces designated as "gender neutral" or unisex - and upsurge of voyeurism an assault against women, perpetrated by males.

We have violent males, with a history of assaulting women, in women's shelters.

All this is happening, as women said it would, because organisations, businesses, political parties and the government are allowing males to be treated as women, because they say they feel like women, or identify as women, or are women.

If someone is able to see themselves as the gender identity they are and are treated as their gender identity in all interactions the impact on a trans persons mental health is lessened..

And you think that's the ONLY way to achieve that?

Ok, leaving aside trying to define what men and women are...

On this thread we have people who believe in gender identity and transwomen all saying things that are deemed massively transphobic - not just by a minority of extremists on twitter, but by Stonewall and Pink News, who would consider themselves the authority on these matters.

Acceptance without exception is literally Stonewall's tagline. Which includes people who transition in prison, or who take 16 women to a human rights tribunal for saying no to them (mustn't misgender), or suddenly become world-class at a sport after transitioning, or peadophiles. Their motives? Irrelevant. Acceptance without exception.

These are not our rules - we did not decide who comes under the trans umbrella.

Datun, the Aimee Challenor thread has made me very aware of how even the existing gatekeeping of the GRA 2004 is not fit for purpose.

The last thing we should be doing is making it easier.

The road ahead is being laid down in front of our eyes in Canada at this very moment. J Yaniv thinks they have the right to force women to wax their male genitals - because JY self-IDs as a woman. Yaniv could win this case. In the eyes of the Canadian Human Rights Panel, Yaniv is a woman.

It was spam

Just out of curiosity, has anyone ever managed to read any post made by "Alislia17"?

Every time I have seen that name the post is always missing; sometimes at the poster's own request!

Stevie, if you have a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, then you are among the small group of people that the GRA 2004 was passed for.

Yes, there is gatekeeping. As there should be for such a massive documentation and identity change. You are essentially giving a person born male, a document that states they were born female. This is a legal fiction, and I'm afraid, IMO, a lie.

I cannot agree with the people pressurising for less gatekeeping to gain a GRC. Somebody born male simply cannot become female, and so should not have a birth certificate that states they were.

With regards to sports
There are strict criteria on things like testosterone production of trans women before they can compete, and the most successful trans athletes are actually currently trans men who are competing against cis men. Yes there needs to be an evidential basis for competition level sport, but it needs to be on the objective evidence, which is currently being done and why the current limits are in existence and constantly being studied.

Can you name one? A trans man beating “cis” men? I can only think of Mack Beggs and that boxer who beat a nobody.

There shouldn’t be testosterone limits. Male puberty, reach, bone mass, myonucleii, VO2max, heart size, lung size. All matter.

Regarding evidence, the onus should be on proving that males don’t have an advantage over females. I think it will be long wait for acceptable evidence in this regard.

for anyone who keeps saying only a small number of trans people have GRS and and a GRC then maybe if you campaign for both of these to be far easier to get the numbers will go up.

Aimee Challoner, who employed a paedophile as their election agent, is about to marry a paedophile, and whose nappy fetish is plastered across the Internet, has just acquired one. They are boasting about their new birth certificate that says they're born female, on twitter.

I'm going to try and discuss a few disparate things here. Also I lost half my thread in a page refresh and so apologise if my thoughts are a little jumbled.

I feel quite uncomfortable when I'm aware that I'm being treated 'as a woman', because it usually means that people are doing something like being patronising, or they're ignoring me, or they're giving me special, 'fairer sex' treatment (implying I'm weak, or in need of special treatment), and I can't understand why anyone would seek out that sort of experience.

So when someone says that theywantto be 'treated as a woman', I just ask myself why would anyone want that? I just want to be treated like a human being, which is probably more like being treated as a man.

I can understand why if seeing being treated as a woman is only seen at through negative aspects of interactions it can be taken that way.
I understand that they do happen that woman are spoken over, our abilities and capabilities, and commitments to things such as work challenged, but that isn't the entirety of being.
I haven't tried to seek out the awful parts, I don't think anyone would, but am aware those parts are something that occurs, and also need to be challenged when they do.
There are thousands of subtle changes to interactions that occur between men and women depending on whether they perceive you as a man or a woman. And I don't think I have the language to able to articulate how all these interact.
I don't subscribe to being a woman being needing to fulfill a stereotypical presentation of one, with prescribed hobbies, interested, style etc., I don't think that is what a woman is but I also know that I am never going to be able to give a definitive explanation that most if any are happy with.
As I say I'm not sure I possess the language.

...
If someone is able to see themselves as the gender identity they are and are treated as their gender identity in all interactions the impact on a trans persons mental health is lessened as they aren't experiencing that mismatch to a large degree. However if they don't believe that they, or certian body parts, appear in line with their gender identity, are constantly getting misgendered etc., then they are more likely to experience more severe gender dysphoria.

Most trans people will always have parts of their body that they dislike as not everything is able to be changed, as well as they are always going to have memories of incidences in their past that were either negative or of the period before transition which they can't just get rid of, therefore there can always be triggers to the dysphoria, but treatments can help lower it.

I also happen to be anorexic and i know similarities are brought up all the time but there is a clear difference between the two, changing how I am perceived and my body alleviates the dysphoria, and improves my mental wellbeing, giving in to anorexia will kill me.

Even in an non-gendered world I would feel uncomfortable with wearing the body of a man, I have done since before puberty and it caused me severe dysphoria, I needed to change it to be able to be comfortable in living.

With regards to the GRA I think the current process is arbitrarily complicated and doesn't address any of the issues most people seem to be concerned with as updating forms of useful ID such as passports and Driving licences follow much less intrusive procedures.

One of the main ways I think the system is broken is because the way it was originally designed to work alongside the NHS pathway which is unfortunately now unable to cope with the waiting lists and is out of step.

The current system relies on two medical reports and as waiting lists for the GICs can run to over 5 years, it means that that accessing recognition takes far longer than ever intended. For adults in the UK it can take more than 5 years to get access to any medical treatment, and up to a decade before people can 'fully transition' if they wish to. Therefore I do feel trans people need protection from discrimination before this point in their transition as otherwise they would be living large chunks of their lives without any protection.

Obviously if you have enough money you can pay privately and speed things up but there are a lot of less well off people that don't have this option and I don't like the idea that they shouldn't be able to live their lives and be treated respectfully because they don't have money.

I can understand there are concerns with people potentially using systems for nefarious reasons, however if we were discussing crisis shelters etc., it is my belief that people should be accommodated and assessed based on individual risk and not a generalisation. If a trans woman has a history of abusive behaviour, this should obviously be considered in the the same way it should be considered if a cis woman does. I don't personally think trans women are higher risk just because she is trans.
I know theres a constant talk about prison statistics but we are talking about current justice figures of around a hundred people. Which I'm just about to contradict by saying that due to the way the system works it takes over a month to set up and authorise a transfer from one prison to another, and so when we do look at people applying for these type of things it tends to be longer term offenders, and people who are in prison long term do tend to have committed more serious crimes creating a skew.

Further on the issue of prisons, adequate risk assessments need to be carried out on prisoners, and these simply weren't satisfactorily done in previous well known cases and were a horrendous mismanagement. But I do think there does also need to be a considered difference between how people lived before prison, if you transition in prison it should be only natural that a higher level of scrutiny is placed on the person. But if for example you have a clear history of being trans outside and have gone to prison for tv licence evasion that's a very different risk profile.

Often when people talk about excluding people from places we are not discussing implementing systems to exclude offenders, just all trans people no matter their actual risk.
I'm obviously going to say this but trans people aren't by their nature nefarious and if we are creating systems to exclude them based on a risk of people who aren't trans exploiting it, then in my opinion that sets a bad law.

I also constantly see the GRA being talked about as as some Homophobic law that was just in relation to marriage. The GRA has multiple aspects such as Section 22 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 protecting the privacy rights of transsexual people under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights by criminalising the disclosure of information relating to their gender history by a person who acquired that information in an official capacity.
There were a lot of issues with trans people being fired from or discriminated against jobs and services simply because they were trans, and unable to update documentation to adequately reflect the way their lives are lived.
This aspect hasn't changed with the update to marriage laws.

Also to an extent the marriage laws for someone without a GRC are still different than someone with a GRC as gay marriage and heterosexual marriage are legally different things.
So without a GRC a trans woman and her partner would still legally be husband and wife, or husband and husband at present, another reason the GRA is still needed.

With regards to sports
There are strict criteria on things like testosterone production of trans women before they can compete, and the most successful trans athletes are actually currently trans men who are competing against cis men.
Yes there needs to be an evidential basis for competition level sport, but it needs to be on the objective evidence, which is currently being done and why the current limits are in existence and constantly being studied.

The GRC take up is not low. It's as expected, as stated in Parliament when the GRA was passed.

The GRA was for a "small number of people who have severe gender dysphoria - around 5000 in the UK" - since the law passed, there have been around 5000 GRCs granted. As expected.

What TRAs are now doing is changing the goalposts - saying it's not just people suffering sever gender dysphoria, as medically diagnosed.

Now, they want anyone who says they are the opposite sex - or who have some magical feeling of "gender essence" - to be able to self ID, without any medical diagnosis, and to be able to get a GRC.

Yes, it’s considered “cruel” and “transphobic” to want to deny children the opportunity to render themselves sterile and never experience an orgasm. Part of doing the kindest and best thing for children is to tell them no.

Random thought, the ironic thing about "let's just be nice" is that it's my solution too - men should be more nice and accepting of men who don't conform to typical ideas of masculinity.

Telling boys that they are girls for not conforming is not new - run like a girl, throw like a girl, don't be a girl. I've heard it aimed at boys throughout my life.

Why can we not just be nice and say it's ok to be male and prefer things that are stereotypically thought of as women's things and you're not a girl just because you don't conform to some ridiculous standard of masculinity.

That makes much more sense to me than making it easier for people to have parts of their body surgically removed and/or give children irreversible medicine - especially when those options might not ease dysphoria anyway. How is that in any way nice or kind?

for anyone who keeps saying only a small number of trans people have GRS and and a GRC then maybe if you campaign for both of these to be far easier to get the numbers will go up. the reason GRS is so low is its a 5 year wait and lots of hoops to jump through.

So in that case, anyone can identify as any age they want? You may not understand why they want to, but if they don’t break any laws, it’s ok? So could someone go back to school and be the English schools under 15 athletics champion? If a 45 year old priest decided he wanted to go back and be an 11 year old choir boy again, would that be ok? No laws are being broken, we may not understand, but is it necessary to understand?