Fair Play for Women recently gave a speech at a forwomen.scot event outlining why women need to resist GRA reform:
GRA reform is bad law... demedicalisation of the GRA must be opposed ... It is right and fair that a robust and medical gatekeeping process is in place.
I disagree. IMO there are numerous contradictions in being against ‘self-identification’ of legal sex while handwaving medical oversight of legal ‘sex change’ as a reasonable and normal state of affairs.
Instead of opposing the proposed amendments to the GRA, feminists should be loudly AGREEING with trans activists and politicians when they argue that the current GRA is not fit for purpose. We should seize the opportunity to argue that for everyone’s sake, the GRA should be repealed, because it is a bad law that is working for nobody.
I think feminists have focused on self ID because it looks obviously bonkers to the general public, so they think this issue has the most chance of gaining traction. But this undermines the clarity and power of the feminist argument in several ways:
Firstly, it makes no sense to argue that some men can become women but others can’t. So already, the ‘anti self-ID’ stance looks (and indeed is) incoherent.
Secondly, the existing GRA is already predicated on self-ID: no surgery or hormones are required to change legal sex – the only caveat is that two doctors need to agree with the applicant’s self-declaration, and a panel needs to sign off on it.
So the trans activists are right when they say that getting rid of these steps is a mere administrative change. The notion that the current system has ‘checks and balances’ but the proposed changes will ‘open the floodgates’ is misleading. The floodgates are already open. The existing GRA is no barrier to the societal change that is underway – on the contrary, it has facilitated it – nor are predatory men prevented from becoming legally ‘women’ under the current system.
Thirdly, advocating that legal sex status should be regulated by the same gender doctors who have shown themselves to be operating outside of all normal ethical and scientific standards is illogical and undermines our efforts to stop what is happening to children and young people under the auspices of ‘gender medicine’.
Lastly, no party in a conflict should start negotiations by asking for the smallest possible bit of territory that they think they can get – which is what ‘no to self-ID’ is. Not only does this sell women and girls short, it is an especially unwise strategy given the scorched earth policy of our opponents. While women are trying to look nice and reasonable by pleading for a ‘balancing of rights’, trans activists never give an inch: not on prisons, not on sports, or in any of the areas where allowing ‘gender identity’ to overwrite sex causes the greatest problems. On the contrary, trans activists prosecute their most outrageous demands the hardest, because they understand that if they were to concede that sex is relevant in ANY area, it would undermine the logic of their entire project.
Thus, the only workable and coherent position for feminists to take is that the GRA should be repealed and the legal fiction of ‘sex change’ ended.
When Jess Phillips says the current GRA isn't working for trans-identified people, she's right - her error is in thinking that making it easier to get a GRC will solve their distress. It won’t; people who identify as trans are still going to come up against the immutable reality of sex, in all sorts of contexts (not just those covered by the Equality Act).
Society can NEVER bend itself far enough to accommodate the lie that was enshrined in the GRA, because sex, and its fundamental relevance to all aspects of life, can never be abolished. Trans activists must keep endlessly litigating and censoring, and while this might be good for Stonewall's bottom line, it's not good for the mental health of the people the GRA was supposed to help, and it's disastrous for the rest of us.
It's time that politicians were forced to acknowledge that the legal fiction of ‘sex change’ has created insoluble difficulties for society in the areas of women’s rights, child protection and free speech, and these problems are only increasing in number and magnitude. Feminists should campaign to repeal the original bad law, and to replace it with new legislation that recognises the social significance of the sexed body while protecting all people from discrimination on the basis of sex-role presentation.
‘No to self ID’ is a losing strategy for feminists in the long term, even if it succeeds in getting GRA reform shelved in the short term. ‘Yes to keeping the red tape around changing one’s legal sex’ isn’t a compelling or coherent position from which to resist gender identity ideology.
'Repeal the GRA’ is the only logically defensible position for feminists to take – and IMO it should be our foundational and first demand, rather than something we have already conceded as an impossibility. It is the only position capable of resolving the problems created by the original legislation, and the only one that has a real chance of shifting the broader cultural narrative in favour of women, children and reality.