"Trans Criminals are not Women" says Priti Patel

Please God we get there soon...

The end of the line, as women have been predicting here for years, is that eventually it will be admitted that any policy that has been involved with Stonewall, uses any of their advice, or has been written by anyone trained by them or by another lobby group, is compromised. And it will all have to be torn up and begun again from scratch by people actually doing their job properly, from a position of impartiality and actual law.

Although as pps explain so well; the law is now a total confused mess, through lack of people doing their jobs properly, applying their own policies and using basic common sense. That is going to be a lot harder to undo. But Patel's words today show that they are realising; there must be limits in reality on how far individual choice of gender identity can go before harms to others must be faced up to.

And previous lobby groups.

Really this has the sniff of stonewall.

Interesting about the GRC first being in 2004, I was a Labour Party member then but then moved abroad for several years. I have no recollection of it as an issue whatsoever though.

Occupational Safety and Health Act 1970.

She is now saying the Home Office is working with forces to improve the figures

Yes, but if you read the government's (mad) response to the petition that they posted just last week, they say they don't understand the question because biological sex doesn't exist, and they then go on to say if by biological sex you mean anatomy and chromosomes, then that's unethical to check, so no.

And if you mean sex assigned at birth, then GRC blah blah...and they trail off avoiding answering how they actually record sex for the majority of people who obviously don't have GRCs.

But they link to their transgender policy, which, hidden in footnote 5, reveals that actually they just let everyone self-identify their gender when they arrive at the prison (although presumably they knew whether to deliver them to the male or female prison based on something).

And then if anyone says they're trans, the policy tells them they should look at their hair and their clothes and their mannerisms, any prosthetics, and so on, to decide whether they are in fact a woman or a man on this inside or whether they're just taking the piss. This is all in the Prison Service's trans policy, which would have been mandated by Stonewall.

So I don't see how they are going to even know how to implement Priti's order to record biological sex at this point because they've tied themselves in knots already.

Undoing the current mess isn't as simple as just "stop messing around and record biological sex" - they're in a real pickle at this point.

The government announced last week that they can't record biological sex as it doesn't exist and they don't even know how to:

Whoever is responsible for that ludicrous response needs to be told to grow up and not be so bloody silly.

Don't celebrate just yet - as PPs have pointed out, there is a glaring discrepancy between what Priti says will happen and what can actually happen while Stonewall's still advising the Home Office and most police forces.

The government announced last week that they can't record biological sex as it doesn't exist and they don't even know how to:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4383260-Prison-Service-says-they-dont-know-HOW-to-record-biological-sex

The Tories were in coalition with the Lib-Dems from 2010 until 2015. I wonder to what extent the latter were responsible for laying the foundations of this huge mess (I think some evidence of this was given in an earlier thread but can't remember what it was).

FPFW:

Something big happened around 2015. There was a surge of transgender policies. Few noticed and other stakeholders were not consulted. This sloppy practice led to the mess we are in today /1

It was around this time that trans-activists captured the gay rights organisation Stonewall. /2

In 2016 we also saw prison policy change to allow male prisoners to self identify as trans and move to women’s prisons. /3

In that same year sport was captured. The IOC opened up women’s sport to males without the needs to undergo genital reassignment. The UK’s Sports Councils quickly produced similar guidance /4

It was 2016 when @IpsoNews published its guidance for newspapers on trans reporting. Preferred pronouns and reporting gender identity as if it’s birth sex. /5

The failure to consider the impact on other protected groups means most policies are no longer fit for purpose. The prison service and sports councils have undertaken extensive work to improve their guidance. /6

Others like the Police and Census authorities are now being ordered to change their ways /7

Some are now falling behind with old and out of date guidance such as @ipsonews and the judicial college and now under pressure to step up /8

FPFW

Have / are just writing a good thread about the timing of all this, around 2015/16.

twitter.com/fairplaywomen/status/1452309821441593351?s=21

I would presume that your workplace only has standalone toilets and that may be the reason , they do not have to have single sex toilet areas.

Best hope is Labour stay in the wilderness then. 🤔

it’s never been an issue despite a range of religious and cultural backgrounds.

All this means in practice is that no female has yet disclosed a difficulty - which can be very difficult to do, particularly if it means disclosing very personal information or discomfort that will draw attention and cause inconvenience - or that no female has yet joined the workforce that will have a difficulty. There are plenty of them out there.

The duties of the Equality Act are supposed to be proactive. Anticipatory. It should not be the case that females are required to disclose sensitive information in order to be permitted space apart from males. It should not be the case that provisions are not inclusive of all females.

I am currently reading 12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson - it's about AI but the chapter Gnostic Know How covers this idea, and how it was pushed out of religion in favour of a male only view.

Thanks TooMinty, one to line up.

JudyGemstone
But our workplace has never had separate toilets for example, and it’s never been an issue despite a range of religious and cultural backgrounds.

Interesting. Memory tells me there was a law passed back in the seventies (possibly 1972?) which said that any place of employment with more than I forget how many it was employees of both sexes must provide separate lavatory facilities for each of the two sexes.

I remember this because the place where I was working counted heads, established that we were too few for that to apply to us, and were glad not to have to try to fit another lavatory into our top-floor workshop somehow. (We also debated whether we were employees within the meaning of the act, since we were all self-employed.)

Does anyone else remember that law coming in? I might start to think I had imagined it if I started to credit all the "women have never had single-sex lavatories available at work" stuff that I now see being put forward.

Err, that was meant to be responding to:

Male people are larger, stronger, and infinitely more prone to violence, especially sexual violence. How they personally identify has no effect on that at all.

Transwomen sexually offend at the same rate as any other male. Which is roughly 2,000 times the rate females offend. And given that we have separate spaces not because we think all men are icky, but because they pose a significant and proven statistical risk, it's quite breathtaking to say that all those safeguards and rights should be stripped away the second a male person says, "I want".

It's men's rights activism, plain and simple.

Beautifully and succinctly put

lots of posts on here about how people feel about agreeing with Patel. which is the last place my mind goes to (but then I don't identify with any party). At LGBA politicians from Labour, SNP and conservative talked about how they support each other in Westminster. They were friendly, cracking jokes and they were all good people.

The argument that not all trans identified men are a threat is disingenuous. No one is saying they all are, it’s the ‘not all men’ argument. Data suggests trans id men offend at the same rates as all other men so they’re at least as dangerous as your average man. And women’s single sex spaces are not just for safety, importantly they’re for our privacy and dignity too. We lose this when there is a man present.

I don’t want to change in a mixed sex changing room. Since puberty I’ve been subjected to the male gaze and street harassment when out minding my own business. Never been harassed in a single sex space where everyone is female, I feel much safer and calmer in single sex spaces.

And yes I can tell when men are present, they don’t pass, especially in women’s single sex spaces. Some men may look quite ‘feminine’ when surrounded by other men, but stand out even more when surrounded by women.

I will continue to vote Conservative, after voting Labour all my life till the last couple of years, as long as they are speaking sense on this issue and, crucially, listening to women, and as long as Labour and all the other alternatives are silencing and demonising us, and planning to restrict our rights so drastically
Hear, hear.

I don't see any issue with agreeing with Patel on this.

To me it's like when people were harrassing and making rape and death threats against one of the Alba candidates in the Scottish Parliamentary elections and Alex Salmond immediately made a statement saying stop threatening our political candidates, we wont stand for it and we'll take action. I'm not shocked that I agree with Salmond, I'm absolutely shocked and horrified that Sturgeon and Starmer don't. Same concept with Boris Johnson saying academics shouldn't be getting streams of death threats and it's OK for a charity to hold a conference. What fool DOESN'T agree with these things?

I probably also agree with Patel and Salmond and Johnson on a host of other things such as that cannibalism shouldn't be compulsory and that the UK shouldn't bomb New York City and that Glasgow is west of Edinburgh. I'm not recanting those beliefs either and the idea that I should is not just incredibly childish but also literally unbelievable. (And yes, I know that 2+2 is 5 if you round, so don't bother ).