What do you think should happen to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA)?

@MargotBamborough fantastic posts throughout this thread, thank you

Wowser, so if women feel screwed over by the GRA, bad luck if you want it changed because it will cause the troubles in Northern Ireland again. Sorry, but this reeks of 'everything is womens fault' and is up there with 'women will get raped anyway'

But I am wondering, and please dear MN-ers, help me out here, how the court deals with the conflict between article 8, the right of private life, that is used to underpin the GRA, and article 14 discrimination based on sex. If you read the guidance it is all about protecting women against discrimination based on sex and government having frameworks in place to protect women. But the way article 8 and the GRA is used directly undermines any all and all framework for article 14.

So how does the ECHR think this would work? Anyone know?

cor

is there anything that uppity women refusing to act like doormats aren't responsible for?

restarting the Troubles is a new and interesting plot twist so well done Platy Janty on that one.

Why is it not legitimate for the UK to decide it cares more about the human rights of 51% of the population, including that of Northern Ireland?

I do not for one moment believe that peace in Northern Ireland would break down if the UK decided to withdraw from the ECHR because its continued membership was incompatible with protecting women's rights.

But IF the ECtHR made it clear that the UK's sovereign government could not make changes to its own laws to protect its female population without falling foul of the ECtHR's entirely self made rule that men with gender identities are entitled to falsify their legal documents, and it did so knowing that it was forcing the UK's hand on this issue and that there could be a knock on impact on the Good Friday Agreement, the only relevant question here would be why the ECtHR was prioritising the demands of a small number of men with gender identities over peace in Northern Ireland.

Is there anything that must not be sacrificed on the altar of trans?

Like it or not, Janette, women are allowed to say no, and our government is allowed to support women. If the ECtHR has a problem with that because it goes against their bizarre belief that if you squint very hard in the light of the full moon you can clearly see that the participating member states intended for men to have an inalienable right to falsify their legal documents and access women's spaces, the ECtHR simply isn't fit for purpose. That's not women's fault, and we are under no moral or legal obligation to put up with this shit.

I’ve not seen anyone actively welcome the opposite of the things I listed in pp so I’m guessing male TRA

Putting the onus on NI parties to change the jurisprudence of the ECHR in order to maintain the Good Friday Agreement is yet another ridiculous comment from you.

Whats more, it’s not about whether the parties care about the Good Friday Agreement. It is about whether the UK cares about it. There are elements within both the DUP and Sinn Fein that would not be averse to the GFA unravelling. The point is that the UK as a whole should not be as cavalier as you are with the peace process.

Well then the obvious response to that is that if all these other parties care so very much about the Good Friday Agreement, they should take extra special care to make sure that the UK's continued participation in it is not made conditional on our acceptance of the idea that the completely imaginary "rights" of a few very special penis people to lie abut their identities trump the very real human rights of the entire female sex.

These ECtHR judges need to stay in their goddamn lane and stop inventing and trying to enforce treaty obligations that the member states never signed up to.

Please please just educate yourself on Northern Ireland.

The risk is not that there is increased support for Irish unity because of some love for the Gender Recognition Act.

The risk is that the entire peace process unravels if one of the key chapters of the Agreement - is hollowed out by the UK withdrawing from the ECHR, unravelling the very delicate balance contained within the Agreement.

The thing many posters don’t seem to get is that the Good Friday Agreement is not just an agreement between the UK and Ireland. It is a multiparty agreement.

The ECHR provisions were included because there was no confidence among nationalists and Catholics that human rights abuses would be addressed by UK courts applying solely UK legislation. An important part of the balance in the Agreement from a nationalist perspective is also that there is a common floor in rights protection across Ireland and Northern Ireland.

There is simply no way that there is any agreement among the parties to the GFA to just remove those obligations and no incentives for nationalist parties to agree to do so. When the agreement was struck, it was carefully balanced - for nationalists the ‘losses’ were recognition of NI within the UK and the principle of consent and the ‘wins’ were the mechanism for a unity referendum and rights protections.

The idea that you can just dip in and surgically amend the Agreement suggests lack of understanding of Northern Ireland and the peace process. Unpick the rights provisions of the GFA and the other provisions also start to unravel. Why would nationalists feel compelled to adhere still to the principle of consent if another important element is removed? If the support for the principle of consent is eroded what does that mean for unionist support for power sharing and the border poll mechanism?

The earlier claim by a poster that this isn’t brain surgery, and the comment by another of ‘whatever’ at the prospect of all of this unravelling are just stunningly ignorant and cavalier.

Yep. Plus that sounds incredibly regressive to me

Kill it with fire.

I think the definition of “transgender” is even more intriguing.

”persons who have a gender identity (which, lest we forget, includes “other expressions of gender including dress, speech, and mannerisms”) different from predominant social expectations based on their sex assigned at birth”

So a girl liking football (prior to the London olympics anyway) could be “an expression of gender different from predominant social expectations” thus making her transgender. Until she moved to the US - where liking football would make her gender-conforming, and no longer transgender.

Women who don’t cover their hair moving to a country where it’s required of women would go from being gender-conforming to transgender by virtue of changing countries.

Or women who don’t shave their armpits would go from being transgender in the UK to no longer transgender if they moved to Germany.

Tbh if NI want to reunion with Ireland over this I'm fine with that. Can't see many NI people being super pro trans though? More traditional religion generally no? Isn't that why we keep being threatened with no peace?

And tw currently affect articles 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11 (remember lesbian gatherings are discrimination against tw), 13 and 14 by their use of single sex toilets, changing spaces and sports. But guess women are not worthy of universal human rights?

It's a great thread, I died at this:

PS - you forgot your clown shoes. 🤡

You are referring to:

2. The British Government will complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the Convention, including power for the courts to overrule Assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency.

You are obviously correct that withdrawal would remove access to the ECtHR and it is a reasonable inference that this withdrawal would be a breach. So what would this mean in practice? UK won't withdraw from the GFA. Will ROI? Will UK and ROI seek a reasonable work-around? Could there be a new Supreme Court of Human Rights for NI with 2 judges from UK and 2 from ROI who apply the current ECtHR case law?

That would mean that the GRA couldn't be repealed for NI because the new court would strike it out. So maybe other solutions need to be explored. Back to not recording sex markers on official documents to render the GRA redundant?

crikey

I turn my back for 5 minutes and you lot are restarting the Troubles by wanting to deny some chaps their lady certificates

it's all go isn't it?

I enjoyed the ECtHR definition of gender identity provided above and would love to know what dress, speech and mannerisms correspond with the male and female sexes.

What a lively thread! Most informative and @MargotBamborough you are on fire 🔥 today!

Hey folks potential new recruit just posted on main board go draw in and be gentle

Yeah well it appears some of the actual judges need to read the bloody convention.

The convention is not worth the paper it is written on if the judges are going to ignore what is actually written on it.

People should also read the European Convention on Human Rights.

None of the rights that have been discussed in this thread, none of the rights that TRAs claim legitimise the GRA, are absolute. All these rights are subject to limitations for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Pretending that people can change sex endangers the health, the morals, and the rights and freedoms of others.

@EasternStandard are you male?

Don’t even have to see or sniff them, to tell, mansplaining is such a give away 😂

I hope it’s full of lurkers inspired to read up on the ECHR rights which protect women eg the prohibition of degrading treatment, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, prohibition of discrimination in the protection of these rights….

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/human-rights-the-uks-international-human-rights-obligations

The substantive rights and freedoms contained in the Convention are:

• Article 2: the right to life
• Article 3: the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment
• Article 4: the prohibition of slavery and forced labour
• Article 5: the right to liberty and security
• Article 6: the right to a fair trial
• Article 7: the prohibition of retrospective criminal penalties
• Article 8: the right to private and family life
• Article 9: the freedom of thought, conscience and religion
• Article 10: the freedom of expression
• Article 11: the freedom of assembly and association
• Article 12: the right to marry
• Article 13: the right to an effective national remedy for breach of these rights
• Article 14: the prohibition of discrimination in the protection of these rights

I hope this thread is full of lurkers who are as aghast as I am at the depths ideologues like Janette will sink to in order to discourage women from asserting their own human rights.

The purpose is to divert the women on this thread away from talking to each other about how women’s right to dignity and privacy from the opposite sex when in a state of undress can be protected in UK legislation.

If women can be drawn into an off topic debate about something else entirely, then that’s X amount of time which hasn’t been* *spent on researching the UK and International legal framework and coming up with ideas.