When did the dialogue change?

Since what you refer to is the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex. Which applies to people born with male genitalia as well as female.

fairplayforwomen.com/equality-act-2010_womens-rights/

Also, www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/advice-and-guidance/sex-discrimination which states -
'TheEquality Act 2010says you must not be discriminated against because:
• you are (or are not) a particular sex
• someone thinks you are the opposite sex (this is known as discrimination by perception)
• you are connected to someone of a particular sex(this is known as discrimination by association)

In the Equality Act, sex can mean either male or female, or a group of people like men or boys, or women or girls.

There are also exemptions which address issues faced by a specific sex -

Circumstances when being treated differently due to sex is lawful

The Equality Act has some exceptions that allow employers or organisations to discriminate because of your sex.

A difference in treatment may be lawful if:

• Being a particular sex is essential for a job.
This is called anoccupational requirement. This includes some jobs which require someone of a particular sex for reasons of privacy and decency or where personal services are provided. For example,a gym could employ a changing room attendant that is the same sex as the users of that room.
• An organisation is takingpositive action.
Positive action might be used to encourage or develop people of a sex that is under-represented or disadvantaged in a role or activity. For example,an engineering firm places a job advert for a trainee engineer stating that applications from women are welcome.

Other exceptions

The armed forces can refuse to employ a woman, or limit her access to training or promotion if it means they can ensure the combat effectiveness of the armed forces.

In competitive sports the organisers can hold separate events for men and women because the differences in stamina, strength and physique would otherwise make the competition unfair.

There are several situations in which an organisation can lawfully provide single sex services. In all circumstances they must be able to justify it. For example:

• offering a women-only support service to victims of domestic violence who are women is likely to be justifiable even if there is no parallel service for men due to insufficient demand

A religious organisation can sometimes restrict employment to one sex if the role is for religious purposes. For example:

• an orthodox synagogue can require its rabbi to be a man

What is a sex-based right?

And if they're sex-based, then why don't men have them?

Are there any references to "sex-based rights" in any legal or policy documentation?

Thecatonthemat - the bit I left out was the impact of funding on women's groups. Which should have been positive, ie taking women's refuges out of squats etc., but of course came with strings attached. And later those strings would be the TWAW arguement.

Ken Livingstone, who was the first to use council money to fund women's groups is alleged to have said it was intended as a means of control, to create loyalty and because (I think) they thought women would need to be overseen by professionals like council officers!

This also lead to a lot of groups being created in the image that councils want. For instance the WRC is an artificial creation of the then London Councils and was specifically set up to act as an arm of the funders (rather than purportedly being a voice for women's groups). Women's groups were told their funding depended on becoming members of the WRC. And of course it meant council officers didn't have to do the job of genuine consultations, they just got their arm of government to do it for them. And of course they have never made a statement on single sex provision. What a surprise.

There was a big meeting in London at A Woman's Place (not the latter day group but a women's centre in the middle of london with meeting rooms and books etc.) about whether women's groups should take funding. The majority said less, partly because of the stress of unfunded work, but also socialist feminists were very vocal in those days and they did see that their feminism was about bringing women into the remit of the Labour Party. Long before the current generation of feminists who have succumbed to gender politics, socialist feminists were selling out autonomous women's groups to the Labour Party structure. How times change - not!

Needless to say the only ones opposing taking funding were the Anarchist Feminists who said it will end badly. And they were right.

WarriorN

Women's Studies I think started coming under attack in the 80s. It was very much part of the male back lash at that time in wider society. So again maybe we weren't all as aware as we now are that this was different because of queer politics, rather than plain old fashioned misyogyny. (in my mind girl power and young women claiming they had the right to get pissed like boys were all part of that - equating equality as being able to be as crap as men - rather than women's liberation that challenges not just men as individuals but male power and culture - ie patriarchy)

I think a lot of people (mostly men but not only) really do not like women and really, really do not like feminists. When the chance arose to blame feminism and women in general they grabbed it with both hands.

Fascinating link, WarriorN, thanks. I was going to say John Aravosis had amazing foresight, but of course as a gay man he saw it all happening around him.

At the time he was writing, the USA was debating a long-awaited law to stop employers discriminating on the grounds of homosexuality. But this was being derailed by demands to include transsexuals. A lot of people, gay and straight, didn’t see how transsexualism fitted in with simple same-sex attraction. And many felt uneasy about the Queer Theory agenda.

What he didn’t foresee was that within a decade the trans lobby would be triumphant, laws would enshrine their rights to the detriment of women, and gays would be setting up their own movement again. But who would foresee that?

A good essay, still worth reading now.

Excellent potted history, thanks Stumbledin. As a feminist I’ve always seen us as allies to the LGB movement, though I did notice over the decades we seemed to put in more effort than gay men did.

I was totally blindsided by the trans takeover, though. Glad the LGB Alliance has re-established the original purpose, of supporting same-sex attraction. And I now get my feminist news on Mumsnet, which has been another surprise! But a welcome one.

I'd agree with this hugely. And a lot of the trans twisting of words is ableist.

I randomly found this article and was surprised at the date and also how openly the author described an issue we are now seeing. 2007

www.salon.com/2007/10/08/lgbt/

(Great post too btw)

@stumbledin do you know when this happened?

Women's Studies became Gender Studies, and 2 or even 3 generations of students were educated (brainwashed) into the thought process of gender identity and individual rights over collective rights

I know two people in the area, about 5 years apart. One is noticeably more GC than the other. Who is GC but has had to teach GS at uni and so can give the other side. Eldest is now 49.

I started noticing a lot of TV programmes and news reports about trans children in 2014. For me, as a non-academic who runs in not-especially-woke circles, 2014 is the year when trans issues became mainstream.

However, it is only this year when I've seen pronouns being used in people's signatures as work (as opposed to on Twitter or Instagram).

I think it's about the tagging onto other groups. Taking their arguments and ideas and twisting them.

LBG obviously
Feminism
Anti racism
DSD groups

Over and over the arguments made by these groups are twisted and thrown back at those who came up with them. The language as well. In such blatantly offensive ways.

Assigned at birth. Very relevant to those with DSDS. Repurposed to make sex in general guesswork. Fallibie. As if all the women who give birth without midwives docs present would have no idea of the sex of the baby.

A feminist one is. Women don't need to look like this or that. We can look and dress how we want etc.
Becomes. If someone is 6'4 with male body shape, a beard and wears standard male clothes. To assume they're not a woman is awful! Policing how women look is s tool of the patriarchy...
Etc etc

It's shit.

I would've said the most marginalised group are the disabled but they're so marginalised they're basically invisible.

Really useful history Stumbledin to remind us oldies of what happened way back ,but also for younger sisters who are new to this. But for years in the eighties and nineties women and lesbian groups were disrupted and destroyed over these men’s presence and entryism. In the early 2000s when the T was more or less added to the LGB without our consent was just continued colonisation .

I remember commenting around 2004 that a trans colleague seemed to have a 1950s view of womanhood. However at the time I thought they were an outlier in terms of having that view and trying to impose it on me

This has been explored on other threads and maybe we need a sort of history archive.

It was any issue back in the 70s, but in the euphoria of Women's Liberation when things seemed(!) to be moving towards women's autonomous rights, I dont think anyone thought trans identity would be anything other than a very small group.

But what we didn't take into account was the politicisation of trans issues by queer politics. This in fact is what started the trend (deliberate strategy) to erase the word sex and substitute gender. By erasing women as a biological reality and instead saying it was gender, a choice, men could no longer be accused of being the sex class oppressor of women, because sex no longer mattered.

Women's Studies became Gender Studies, and 2 or even 3 generations of students were educated (brainwashed) into the thought process of gender identity and individual rights over collective rights. These students then moved into the media, politics, education - and campaign groups. (The editor of the Guardian says queer politics informs every decision she takes.)

When Women's Liberation fell apart after the National Conference in Birmingham the grassroots networking and sharing of information and joint campaigning also stopped. But queer activism didn't.

Queer activists actively practiced entryism into areas of influence. The real power isn't the networks that are named and seen. They are the private networks, in much the same way that Men's Clubs probablly had more power than Parliament.

Fast forward a few years / decades and you get the culmination of this lobbying resulting in the GRA. And this is the lynch pin that has undermined women's rights. Because even though everyone knows it isn't actually possible, you could get a certificate to say you had changed your sex.

So while we (women) were all asleep or still nursing our grudges since Birmingham trans activists, actively supported by MRAs were infiltrating everywhere. Reallly important to remember how convenient the trans arguement is for MRAs.

One veryimportant tool for them was language. Newspaper no longer reported someone's sex but their gender. Prostitutes became "sex workers". The later woke rainbow haired militants are effectively the grandchildren of those early queer activists.

Not being rude but mumsnet was quite late to the growing catastrophe. But, not just because of the individual input, it because one of the few, or possibly only place where women could openly discuss the threat to women as a sex class by the GRA. So that when the consultation was announced (with MPs and queer activists convinced they would get self identity enshrined and sex deleted as a protected characteristic) MN FWR was hugely important in creating the groundswell against what was about to happen.

And since then, amazed that anyone had not fallen for their analysis the whole trolling, threatening, silencing, banning, of gender critical politics started an all out war on women. And because they were so well entrenched by now in so many places of influence, there basically was only mumsnet providing a platform for women.

So this isn't just about the influence of Stonewall who as an organisation have grown because of the pervading influence of queer politics ie why would they (apart from the money) change an organisation created to protect people who were same sex attracted suddenly start campaigning for people who said sex wasn't real.

If you have the time listen to Selina Todd talk about how queer politics spread its tenticles and created the ground work for trans activists.

As someone said at the time it was ironic that a socialist feminist historian was confirming 40 years later what radical feminists were saying / warning at the time it started. ie Janice Raymond.

I always think this is worth sharing - www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists

I'd say about 2015 like others, that was the time frame it became a thing here.

I think that it was a long time rumbling away in the background but then it exploded exponentially since about 2015. That was when Stonewall got in on the act, but I don't want to attribute too much to Stonewall because exactly the same thing happened in many other countries at the same time.

The difficult question is - why did it spread everywhere at this particular point in time? Maybe the Internet, but it has spread in non-English speaking countries as well.