‘Rights can be knocked out in a second’: older transwomen shocked by SC ruling

"You did this to yourselves you fucking muppets. You sawed off the branch you were sitting on, and you were too stupid and arrogant to see you were doing it".

Nails it! 👏

Yeah, it's interesting how it works with race and ethnicity. That's why I'm interested in things like the Buffy Sainte-Marie story and all the fake Native Americans who get exposed.

I'm a little invested in this because I have Romani ancestry. I don't call myself Roma because I didn't grow up in the community and have a quite sketchy knowledge of its traditions. But it's quite common to find people (let's be honest, women) who aren't Roma but claim to be, because they think it makes them interestingly exotic.

There's been a thing in Germany in recent years of young left-wing Germans who want to retrospectively fight the Nazis, who claim Jewish heritage on slim (or more often no) evidence, blag their way into Jewish communities and then tell the Jews that they're Jewing wrong. They're trans-Jews.

Race, ethnicity, religion are not objective and binary the way sex is. But the idea that you can self-ID into a group and nobody can challenge how you describe yourself is generally a bad idea.

Transperbolic! Best word ever!

Exactly.

Stonewall wanted No Compromise and that's what they've delivered.

One analogy I thought of is this. Imagine you’ve got a perfectly decent house but you want to extend it. Stonewall and all your progressive friends tell you it’s fine if you want to build an extension. So you build a nice extension and happily live there for a while until the council comes along and says hold on a minute, you haven’t got planning permission - now you need to take the extension down. Naturally anyone would be upset - but they had no right to build that extension in the first place. The Equality Act has been misunderstood and misinterpreted for years. I wish some legal eagle had come along and clarified it much, much earlier, before the self-ID trend got out of hand and before Stonewall infiltrated every portion of society with its flawed DEI campaigning.

TRAs: wanging on about genocide since 1977

Out if interest, where did that article come from? And who is the speaker - Whittle?

But then self-ID became the shiny new object,

Point of order.

Self-ID was alive and well in the early 80s (if not before). I ran into it at Uni (freshers week), and had a spirited "discussion" with a SU grandee where I said it was a total crock and would inevitably lead to deliberate mischief. In this case it was all around race and ethnicity. But the principle is the same. In those days there was no "preferred not to say". I told the guy he could tick whatever box he wanted if it was that important. However the whole point of the exercise was to avoid people deciding other peoples race. I guess something must have happened in the past to make that seem a bad idea. (In the end nothing got ticked.)

The thing is you can get away with self ID for race and ethnicity, as they are all made up constructs anyway. Like gender. And religion.

It defies belief. But I guess they will want to hide their complicity.

They were convinced that they had rights relating to using opposite sex provision, and had been acting in line with this thinking, for a long time.

Even when getting the GRA enacted.

That started from the premise "people are already surreptitiously using opposite-sex provisions, and interaction with officialdom should uphold that pretence, rather than call them out."

They never stopped to actually arrange anything in law to give them the right - they just enacted a law to facilitate a claim to a right they didn't have.

These men obtained privileges by deception. They never had a right to what belongs to females.

I'm Sorry, Rethinking Life, but I'd disagree with your statement that you "have a lifetimes experience of sexual assault and rape". Unless you have actually been a victim of either, you cannot claim to have any experience.

I think it’s natural and understandable for trans people and their allies to be shocked and upset by the ruling. They were convinced that they had rights relating to using opposite sex provision, and had been acting in line with this thinking, for a long time. From their perspective, there were no issues arising, or no issues of importance, from their behaviour. Being told, overnight, that their actions are and were always illegal, is a significant blow for them.

At the same time, it is natural for women to feel enraged that their legal protections have been trampled on for years and now that has been confirmed by the highest court in the land, many of the perpetrators are not only failing to apologise, but are insisting that they will go to great lengths to prevent these legal protections from being enacted.

The court ruling overrides appeals to emotion and PR. It gives GC women a firm platform to make discrimination claims as/when single sex provision isn’t upheld. Greater efforts than ever will now go into trying to make excluding males seem ridiculous, spiteful, misguided etc. This has no power when it comes to the law, nor does disagreement with law.

I think what will help is to take a leaf from the TRA’s book and simply state that women have a right in law to single sex spaces, no debate. ‘TWAW, no debate’ hit a buffer because it wasn’t true. The SC ruling is, so the same won’t happen.

This can be supplemented with - and trans people have a right to privacy and dignity too and employers and organisations need to afford them this. When asked, ‘but how?’, a good response it to point out that it’s important that trans people’s voices are at the centre of determining. It’s important to highlight how it is disrespectful to trans people to be centring the voices of women in an issue that is nothing to do with women. Trans women have, for years, pointed out that they have no platform and people listen to women and not them. The issue about privacy and dignity for trans people no longer impacts on women, the SC ruling has made that clear, and trans voices must be heard to find solutions that work for them.

One thing I keep coming back to is - the GRA has been with us for 20 years. I firmly believe it's bad law, but for 10 years or so it was workable. Because the numbers were tiny, it was understood there was fairly strict gatekeeping and thus the impact was small. As Helen Joyce says, it was a bit like witness protection.

If Burns & Whittle et al had been less hubristic, they could have had that settlement indefinitely.

But then self-ID became the shiny new object, and the signal went out that any man with any agenda could enter any female space, and the old dears of the trans movement were firmly behind this.

I've been hearing TRA friends saying "oh, when the GRA came in nobody really minded, I'm not sure what changed", and spinning fantasies about left wing lesbians becoming neo-nazis, or how we're all being bankrolled by JKR/Musk/Putin.

NO.

You did this to yourselves you fucking muppets. You sawed off the branch you were sitting on, and you were too stupid and arrogant to see you were doing it.

No chance. They haven't in the last 10 years, it's not likely to change.

So they interviewed the people responsible for the flawed interpretation of the act and present them as victims?

The concept of basing laws on facts and principles, not on how nice people or un-nice people are, seems to be completely lost.

If you wanted evidence based policies, you wouldn't live in a democracy.

This Guardian article is a good illustration of what is wrong with the reaction to the UKSC ruling, and indeed with a lot of the trans debate in general: the tyranny of the anecdotal.

The concept of basing laws on facts and principles, not on how nice people or un-nice people are, seems to be completely lost.

Trans people must be allowed to use women's single-sex spaces because my [their] friend is a transwoman and he is 'lovely'.

The Supreme Court judgment is invalid because it has upset transpeople, and transpeople are 'lovely.

Transpeople will just continue to use whatever toilet they want because they've been getting away with it for years anyway. And they are 'lovely'.

My butch lesbian friend keeps getting hounded out of the women's toilets and has to be accompanied for her safety [Dawn Butler MP]. (I can't remember the exact quote, but I'm guessing her butch lesbian friend is 'lovely')

0.5% of the population are unhappy, so the law, education, the media, medicine, and language should be turned on their head because they are 'lovely'.

The examples of TRAs being anything but 'lovely' to GC women abound, but I'm not even going there - at a legal level, it doesn't matter whether trans people are lovely or horrible, just as it doesn't matter whether GC women are lovely or horrible - the law should be based on concepts like fairness, proportionality, justice, and so on, not on a personality competition.

And the debate should also be about facts and principles, not about feelings.

There are many things in society that make me feel unhappy, but if I decide to campaign against them, I'm going to come up with more cogent arguments than saying
[a] this law makes me feel unhappy
[b] I am lovely
therefore
[c] society should do everything I say to keep me happy.

On reflection though - because I'm a woman, I could come up with the most fact-based, principled, fair and justified arguments ever assembled, and I'd still be told to stop making men unhappy by not going along with whatever they want.
A woman's place is in the wrong😠

Blimey, that’s a corker isn’t it?!

One to keep in the library for sure. Thanks Haulage

Boo fucking hoo

@Haulage that's shocking! I wonder why you don't see that narrative expressed so clearly now...

Edit - oh yes, forgot about Reddit! Keep it up, lads...

My word. That's like something from the Trans UK subreddit, only much more literate, which makes me wonder what's been happening to educational standards since 1977.