The Times Lead Story - Labour Set To Annihilate Women's Rights

I seem to recall there isn't even the requirement to attend the panel in person. The panel just receive all the evidence including from medical/legal professionals and make a judgment.

Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong about that but I think people imagine something akin to a job interview and I don't believe it's like that.

I’ll be voting Conservative. It’s the best hope in my constituency.

Sorry nrft-just realised that the journalist who wrote the story was on woman's hour today

Woman's hour 24.06.24 www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/5104087-womans-hour-240624

Also, I'm sick of the blatant propaganda that getting a GRC is 'undignified'. Getting an easyjet flight is demonstrably more undignified than getting a GRC.

As a poster, whose name I cannot remember to thank once pointed out, as for indignity, just try being a disabled person who genuinely cannot work, being made year after year to have a medical interview, full of pitfalls to catch you out, in which you have to prove again and again that you cannot work even though you have a condition that cannot improve.

If the former Labour government, mistakenly, and virtually in secret, passed an act that says a person can have the state legally lie on their behalf, and change the fact of their sex on a birth certificate, then why should that be made easy? It only passed as an act in the first place on the basis there would be so few, old fashioned style transsexuals applying.

There is nothing in the least bit dignified imo about basing a fundamental aspect of society on lies.

As for the police, they already outrage the dignity of women as a class by recording them as killers and rapists they never were. The state in some places outrages the dignity of women by putting males in prison with them. A GRC just gives more scope for both practices.

Thanks, had got that all mixed up. Why remove the right to have an annulment?

Helen Joyce explains that GRC panel and application process is easy and isn’t undignified:

Julia asks some of the right questions:

Harriet Harman didn't get where she is today by stopping and thinking.

Yes, let's.

Funny how claims to want to help and protect people don't extend to those who have said clearly that they need the Exit Clause to protect and help them. Ah but, of course, Trans Widows are just women and why the fuck would Labour care about them.

Let's all sign up to trans widows rights being given away, on the basis of Cassie's assumptions.

@CaveMum of all people, you'd think Harriet harman would stop and say "hmmm I seem to remember I torched my reputation in the past. Maybe I should be a little more skeptical in this case".

But no. In with both feet.

You can only get an annulment under certain conditions. If a spouse getting a GRC is no longer one of those then women only have the option of divorce which is not an option for some women. For women who do divorce their marriage will already have legally changed and records will show they were married to and divorced a woman, which will be a lie.

How did I know that would be your callous response. You have clearly read none of the information on this thread and elsewhere as why the Exit Clause is necessary and who it protects.

Of course I know about the reason for it.
I'm saying that with the 2 year "cooling off" period there is plenty of time for annulment/divorce so noone needs to be forced into a same gender marriage.

Plenty of time to get divorced, so that probably is why they are OK getting rid of the exit clause.

Tell us you know nothing and care even less about the reason for the Exit Clause without telling us you know nothing and care even less, well done Cassie

Agree we’ve messed up pursuing this. Well Labour have

The damage to women and children is too great

For me, yes I think it should be totally abolished, I don't think it should ever have been brought in in the first place.

No male should have a female mark in their passport or on any other identity document.

If a Gender Certificate is wanted/needed it should not change the details on the Birth Certificate but be an additional certificate stating the person is trans.

Additional boxes on documents and forms to record whether the person is trans that are n/a to those who are not.

A very good point.

AFAIA changing gender markers on passport/driving licenses is one of yhe ways trans people currently prove they are "living in their acquired gender"

Please can someone explain why the "2 year cooling off period" is more objectionable than the "2 years living in acquired gender" period.

I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea of repealing (actually I'd replace it) the GRA. But neither of the 2 main parties are proposing that.

As always it appears to me that there is just semantics between Labour/Conservative position yet some posters think this is different enough for them to join the Conservative party

GRC has never been needed for changing sex on a passport. It has been done on a gentlemen's agreement basis since forever. IIRC, someone on here tried to get FOI on the numbers, but it appears they do not keep any records as they are so inaccessible as to exceed the costs for FOI. I have seen some very recent numbers out so maybe the last government told them to count them.

What is in the back of my mind, @RoseAndGeranium is a vague memory of the last Conservative leadership vote being down to only one set of people within the party, who seemed to be mostly older men, the ones who wanted Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss. Can anyone think what this might be, or did I misunderstand?

And not just 'when a GRC has been granted', but also 'when a GRC is first applied for'? Like at the start of this proposed 2 year 'cooling-off period'? Has that been made clear?

Yes, I heard her too, and I am out too. 😔

@ResisterRex Yes agreed. Some religions don't recognise divorce and the women affected will face lifelong negative consequences, as will their children, as per links posted above, if Labour proceed. But it affects non religious women too.

'The European Court of Human Rights has found that a person cannot be forced to demonstrate views or behaviour associated with a particular religion'.
www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-rights-act/article-9-freedom-thought-belief-and-religion

Believing the man who got you pregnant is a woman is a belief in conflict with reality (and in conflict with most major religions). The Tory government did a whole consultation on this a few years ago and found the only way to protect everyone's human rights, especially the wives who are most often the ones affected, many of whom have experienced domestic abuse from their husbands, was to keep the Exit Clause.