Annaliese Dodds: "sex and gender are different"

This is the problem - people looking to be gaslit. If it was anything even remotely like a genuine climb down I'd be delighted. But it is not and we cannot justshe cross our fingers make a wish and pretend it is something it is not and if it is not a climb down, if it not a change, if it is not a genuine piece of support for women why would we be pleased? Why SHOULD we be pleased because we're thrown the tiniest crumb just be cause it is Labour? Why should we hold Labour to a lower standard than other parties? thinking it is ok for the left to be crap on this because they somehow have the moral high ground is how we got into this mess in the first place. We need to be tougher on Labour and more demanding not pleased with next to nothing. We need to stop being such wimps about Labour and stop letting them off the hook.

As someone on twitter said this morning:

"Wider picture is what Lab has been saying & supporting over the last 7 years. Apart from Antoniazzi & Duffield they're all trans zealots. None of them has ever backed Maya, LGBA, Doc Stock, Allison Bailey. Stonewall & Mermaids are the favoured groups. How do they square that?!

Unfortunately this area is a zero sum game based on a philosophical fallacy predicated on a denial of science including biology and material reality.

And Labour reckon that have a solution to all that? Nobel Prizes at the ready.

Remind me which parties opposed it?

Where in Hansard is the opposition standing up and saying this is a can of worms about to go hideously wrong for women and children, because it's relying on nothing more than good intentions and institutionalised misogyny?

They ALL fell for it. Hook line and sinker. If you're going to blame the Tories for that then you have to blame all of them equally.

We're down to a choice between totally batshit and manipulatively making a few vague sounds long enough to get into power, and with doubts, knowing the issues and having some sane people on board, but probably not the stomach to actually do anything involving saying no to a mob that now beats women in public and gets away with it.

It's a fucking awful choice, it's going to be the least bloody awful for women and children, but mostly whatever gives us five more years of as much breathing space as possible because the mob will just keep racking up these outrages. They can't help it. And they will eventually reach a stinking pile so high that no party will be able to identify as not being able to see or understand it. If women's rights have by then be actively reversed in law, it will be much much harder to repair than it will be if a party has been in power that while it won't fix the situation, is at least not gagging to dive in and make it worse.

One of the useful things about extending the "trans umbrella" as broadly as possible and of encouraging shedloads of ordinary young people to believe that they are "trans" is that all these "trans" young people will identify with the interests of those people who really do benefit from laws about "trans" people. Even when those laws only benefit a very tiny number of "trans" people and even when they work against the best interests of all the rest.

If I think I am "trans" then any law that is good for "trans" people must be good for me. Mustn't it?

What we haven't forgotten is that it was MEN that opened this can of worms.

Thats the 'modernisation' that they are talking about. Women can be unaware that her husband has changed 'legal sex'?

So she has:

twitter.com/anneliesedodds/status/1683434056225112065?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

"To modernise, simplify and reform the gender recognition law, we will:

Replace the panel of anonymous doctors who oversee decisions with a registrar model.

Replace the 'acquired gender' period with a reflection period.

Scrap the outdated spousal consent mechanism."

She doesn't understand marriage law either, then.

We are no further forward than we were yesterday. In trying to appease women's groups ,and the general public, by slighly altering their wording ( and I assume they think that by still having to have a doctor sign self Id off, is a real concession to women who against self ID) they have pissed off the TRA lobby too.

They think people are stupid. Stonewall put out a message just two days ago saying that they were committed to TRA rights and there would be no compromise, after the Beth Rigby debacle. This is nothing but another PR stunt.

"This would allow applicants to go to one of the many and growing private gender clinics in the UK (see, for example, the disgraced GenderGP) and pay a few hundred quid to get a diagnosis, possibly after just a single conversation. This undermines safeguarding" ( James Esses)

https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesesses/p/the-labour-party-is-not-to-be-trusted?r=clsg2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Dodd's promoting the notion the 'diagnosis' by one Dr and one registrar should be enough is dangerous. Tell that to the 1000's of detransitioners who were castrated in their teens, had penis inversions, double mastectomies and other unessential life changing surgeries. Sometimes just at the behest of their parents in an effort to cure the gay child they could see emerging. We need much more mainstream interviews about the detransitioners (#detrans). The entire movement seems crammed with internalised homophobia, homophobic fathers, religious strictly confirming parents & cult zealots at 'Mermaids' lobby pressure group. Stonewall needs dismantled and for the word 'Stonewall' to go back to representing LGB rights and interests and stop hijacking and cherry picking the meaning the name had. Stonewalls' push for Diversity Champions in organisations and ranking accordingly has been very damaging, run by non experts who have a vested interest. All very warped.

It's just all spin and lies. Turns out it doesn't matter who's in charge, serial liar Boris or upright, honest Keir, they all just lie exactly the same.

Dodds criticizes the SNP bill but Labour actually backed it Scotland and whipped their MSPs to support it.

Dodds said that “now, in 2023, we have a much better understanding of the barriers trans people face”

So her answer to knowing more about the barriers is that she's proposing to reinforce those barriers and ensure that the purpose of a GRC is purely to certify what someone thinks about themselves in their own head?

Why would anyone bother getting a certificate to prove what they're thinking if it doesn't open doors to single-sex spaces?

Don't get me wrong - obviously it would be great if single-sex spaces could actually be single-sex, but I'm very suspicious of a proposal that purports to be all about making things easier for trans people while apparently also reinstating single-sex spaces.

It feels like we've come full circle and we're back at the start all over again, where politicians were sure there must be some sort of achievable compromise and we have to sit here and watch them tie themselves in knots telling us there's a simple solution until they realise they can't please everyone. Again.

Annaliese Dodds has tweeted that Labour will remove the spousal consent from the GRA.

Politicians can talk about the differences between sex and gender all they like, but while the law allows sex and gender to be seen as the same, no one has solved anything

Politicians need to demonstrate that they understand that issuing men with female birth certificate and strong id does nothing to maintain sse. Or they need to acknowledge thats whats happening and explain clearly how sse can be maintained without any reliable id.

if that's a legal fiction and they reference single sex spaces for biological women surely that doesn't include people who are biologically male?

Who knows? "Biologically women" and "biologically male" are just more words, and they are just as susceptible to redefinition when it's convenient as any other words. Who's to say that a "biological male" can't mean a woman with an surgically constructed penis and a ton of artificial hormomes? Or mean a woman who wafted within 10 feet of a hormone tablet and now has brainwaves imprinted with blokeness?

The law depends on everyone agreeing what words mean. We have a group of people who want to destabilise language because that destabilises the law and suits their political aims.

It isn't a climb down. Read the thread, all the explanations are right here. Dodds, like many other Labour people, are identifying as this being only a bit of a stray smell of smoke while the house is on fire around them.

This is also the second time in a week we've seen a bit of a strategy from people that are in bed with Stonewall and the extremist T political lobby: to make a tiny bit of a slightly not on message release, followed by Stonewall and the lobby screaming and jumping up and down and shrieking about how it's a total roll back of their rights and they're being genocided.

There's two ways you can look at this.

One is that this lobby are so lost in their own fiction at this point that they are genuine in these claims - and so lost to reality that politicians should be stepping as far away from them as possible and being very clear indeed that Trans people and the T political lunatic fringe/people with appalling criminal records screaming about hitting women through megaphones/rainbow butt monkeys etc etc are not the same thing at all, and the politicians are in no way confusing the two or propping up this lobby. And you have to ask yourselves why they're not only not doing this, but beaming under signs about decapitating women.

The other is that quiet cosy chats over cups of tea in back offices are continuing as Whittle so smugly explained years ago as how this was engineered outside of democracy and scrutiny, and the lobby have been told: we'll throw a few crumbs (which mean nothing, old stuff, 'single sex spaces' etc with no definitions that sound like we might be wavering a bit but nothing anyone can ever pin us down on), you scream your heads off all over the press using your powerful media network, and the general public will go 'oh both sides are pissed off, this must mean it's middle ground and ok'.

I know this lobby's actions over the years. I know the politicians in bed with them from long and bitter experience. I was at the funeral of integrity, any sense of morality, conscience, responsibility of impartiality, public duty, truth, reality and Cumming's eyesight. I know which one I think is more likely.

They abandoned self-ID.

It's Labour we have to thank for the GRA, brought in because they didn't want to legalise same-sex marriage.

No.

They also blocked Self ID, remember.

They are publicly announcing that they are abandoning Self ID - but in practice they are still committed to it. They now call it 'modernising', as a way to disgsuise that self Id is still what it will be.

These supposedly new panels that people will have to pass before in order to get a GRC will effectively be a show panel - designed, simply, to rubber stamp self id. (I can not entirely cynically imagine that the doctor's a panel will consist of 'Gender GP' and 'Adrian Harrop')

This is probably the current plan…

Has everyone forgotten it's the Tories who opened this entire can of worms in the first place with the proposed GRA reforms?

It is a step in the right direction, but only a step.

There is more to do, but hopefully this is a nudge forward.