Tom Harris, former MP, apologises for voting for Gender Recognition Act 2004

I don't think I've seen any other MP or peer who voted for the GRA come out and say they were wrong, or even that, while they still support the principle, they now see there were undesirable consequences that should be fixed.

Not even Lord Winston, though I'd be fascinated if anyone asked him. He's become a lot more GC over the years, for which I'm grateful, but his Lords speech on the GRA was very much "as a biologist, let me tell you that sex is incredibly complicated and nobody really knows what it is or how to define it". He definitely doesn't say that now.

Yeah, me too. Especially contrasted with the silence from everyone else.

I agree with that @fromorbit

@PilotFish wrong thread?

You are missing the point.

Those protected by a legal status are a tiny minority. ie less than 10,000.

Everyone else who are asserting they have rights dont have legal rights.

But society has given in to their demands.

If you are worried about that you need to work out how women could ever have the same influence on society that this Stonewall lead campaign has.

And it wasn't because they misrepresented it as a legal right.

They have won the arguement that it is a human right irrespective that it is at the cost of women's human rights.

That's what we as women have been made to face.

The women just dont not matter to the vast majority of the population.

The speech from Tebbit quoted above is amazing, and very on point. Strange how you can end up agreeing with someone, when you thought you disagreed with everything they stood for.

As for the Tom Harris article, well yes, he voted for the GRA (under pressure), but at least he now admits he was wrong. There's a lot of good stuff in the article - Parliament was about to legislate, for the first time in its history, to allow people to lie.

Plenty of people are STILL saying it's a tiny minority....they are organising and campaigning even while they know the impact on women, the impact on young people. No one can say "they don't understand" now.

Thanks for the link. Interesting reading but also realise that given he now rights for the Telegraph and has opted out of Labour all sorts of people who should take note will just not read it.

And to be fair, back then nobody thought that there would be the huge growth in "identities", gender bending etc., which were all the result of crafty Stonewall expanding its campaign base.

And thinking asking women back then that the GRA was a danger to women, many would have as said in the article well it will only ever be a tiny group.

The real damage was Labour sneaking it into the Equality Act.

If they hadn't done that it would just be an act that to date less than 10,000 people have used.

The damage is not the GRA itself althought to quote Tebbit (shock, horror) it is a law that legalises a lie, in itself it would have no power.

It is, and this was a deliberate act of social engineering, making having a GRC a protected characteristic. (which doesn't cover self id, or gender bending or asexual etc.)

So as has been said over and over again, this was a deliberate act of sabotage on sex based rights.

That was at the political level.

And this was then deliberately mis represented by Stonewall etc., to say that self iding etc., was a legal right.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g, thank you for that - really clear as to the history of all this. And good advice not to take any statements (even ones that seem to support one’s cause) out of context.

Agreed. I think that's spot-on.

Thank goodness someone has said this. There are plenty of people on this thread using a time machine to go back to 2004 and berate MPs for not all being as prescient as Norman Tebbit. I was in my early 40s then and I don't even remember hearing that the GRA had passed. If I had known, I'd have been a bit sceptical, but I wouldn't have expected it to lead to what has since happened.

I now know (I didn't then, and I think hardly anybody did) that the NHS had not long before this established an adult gender clinic at Charing Cross Hospital which treated mostly males. I don't know if there were others. Then they set up a clinic for under-18s at the Tavistock (GIDS) and saw under 100 children a year, of whom around 70 were boys. Watchful waiting was the standard treatment for minors. For adults, it was understood in adult gender services that they fell into two groups, gay men who were struggling to accept their sexuality and saw adopting a female identity as a way out, and cross-dressers, whose motivation was sexual and who were not usually gay. The second group were not referred for surgery. Not sure if they were put on hormones. The former group might be, but only after years of psychotherapy.

When the UK Parliament was asked to pass the GRA, they were assured by experts that only about 5000 people in the UK would be eligible to apply, so it looked like a niche issue. They were also told that they had to pass it because of a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. A UK citizen (a trans-identified male, I think) had taken a case all the way there to demand the right to marry his male partner. His case was that his right to a family life was being denied. The UK could have addressed this by introducing same-sex marriage, but in spite of having a huge majority in the House of Commons at the time the Blair government didn't think this would pass (I suppose it would have been a conscience vote so not whipped), so went for the GRA instead. The litigant would have got a GRA, applied for a female birth certificate and then been able to marry.

(It does seem very odd to me that the government was so sure that same-sex marriage wasn't the solution, but they were very keen on focus groups and must have thought they had their finger on the pulse there. In spite of this, as we know, we got civil partnerships and then gay marriage within a few years, so I think that was a missed opportunity. Stonewall was then a gay rights campaign group and once they had decided to lobby for gay marriage their campaigning probably made a big difference.)

It's a bit rich to criticise one of the very few MPs from that time who has now admitted it was a mistake to pass the GRA. What about criticising all the people who voted for it and have never accepted that? Harriet Harman comes to mind, but there are plenty more.

And let's not forget that one of the key movers and shakers trying to get more legal recognition for trans people was Stephen Whittle, through the organisation Press for Change, which I think Whittle ran with Christine Burns. It wasn't all trans-identified males pushing this. There were very few trans-identified females at the time but Whittle was very vocal and persistent, had become a law academic in pursuit of legal change and may have been more convincing then than now.

Also, in 2004 the internet was still pretty new to most of us and social media was in its infancy. Nobody knew then how that was going to dominate the lives of many young people, especially socially isolated people already struggling with their mental health. Nobody could have foreseen that within a few short years from the passing of the GRA gender ideology would have become so popular and prominent on social media, and most people had no idea that the GRA and similar measures in other parts of the world were the foot in the door to push for more legal rights for trans-identified people.

I remember when this was first being discussed on MN people were still talking about this as if only males were identifying as trans. It took time for the statistics coming out of GIDS to sink in and for it to be understood that not only were the numbers of patients at GIDS rocketing but there had been a very sudden switch from 2:1 boys/girls to the other way round. Even now transactivists are resistant to the obvious answer to this, namely that it's a social contagion.

Nobody saw this coming. The people to criticise are the people who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make it happen.

I was just re-reading Voldemorts twitter thread on the 2004 HOL Hansard debate. In questions, Tebbit focused hard on the fact that the bill was enabling same sex marriage. The responses were often incoherent tbh in terms of refusing to discuss sex and gender as separate issues, even in answers to questions where they had been separately identified. It seemed to me that Tebbit didn't really hold back from being put in a 'homophobe' box, and that allowed the government response to become tactical in a 'stop Tebbit getting traction in this debate' way, rather than allowing any of his arguments to be refined out as less or more valid, by others if not by the government.

Listening to women would be ideal, but short of that, not taking David Lammy's assurances on trust would also be good.

Well to be fair, he did listen to a woman. He listened to Hilary (Baroness) Armstrong, the government chief whip. According to that article, she’s the one who advised him it was ‘a trivial subject’.

I can see no point in getting angry with Tom Harris given that at the time it was my belief that women’s rights had largely been won in the UK and that we certainly had nothing to learn from Norman on-your-bike Tebbit. And as far as I can remember, and with a few honourable exceptions, that was a widely held view among women.

Tom Harris wasn’t the only one caught napping here. Most women were.

If only he'd known? If only he'd listened! Virtually every negative thing that has happened as a result of the GRA was predicted, was argued about. And all those MPs who supported legislating dishonesty and punishing integrity, all the proponents of this appalling law, responded "It will never happen."

Well, no shit, Tom, it has happened. Now that women and children have been harmed, do you think perhaps you should actually listen to women?

It makes me wonder about those women MPs sitting on the Women & Equalities Committee, who seem to have reached adulthood without ever encountering a fetishist or a voyeur or a flasher.

What sheltered lives must they have had? We don't exactly have to seek in strange places to find them.

That reminded me of this, from a police officer in the US, on how attitudes to crossdressing men have changed in the last 20-odd years.
Thread by @sappholives83 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

I’m not being funny but I used to go drinking with my friends in the local gay bars when we were 14/15 because it was easier to get served and that’s where I first came across men dressed in women’s clothing, I didn’t need to have seen a lot of the world to know it was a fetish!

It's nice to have the truth acknowledged but he not only threw women under the buses but he threw the truth and parliaments integrity too, and he did so knowingly, trying to excuse himself now by claiming he didn't have a time machine, is at best pathetic. Lord Tebbit didn't have a time machine either, he didn't need one to know the bill was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Trying to understand the mindset of MPs passing the original GRA.

Was MP's perception of transition set by documentaries like the BBC's 'A change of sex'?

A Change of Sex - 1. George - The Big Decision - BBC iPlayer

Were there other documentaries that covered the subject around the same time frame?

My dad was an engineer in the merchant navy in the 50s. The stewards on board the ships were transvestites. They would dress up when the ship docked in whatever foreign port and go into town. They didn't dress as women on the ship in front of the crew, only when going ashore, but everyone knew about it and were generally accepting.

It was well known that this was accepted in the merchant navy and so transvestites flocked there.

Interestingly, gay men often joined airlines as stewards, though this didn't really take off til the 70s.

Both groups were looking for a safe route to act out lifestyles that weren't always tolerated in their communities.

Unlike many MPs these days, Norm had a life before parliament, he was an airline pilot. So presumably had seen a lot of the world.

Yes exactly.

This was a good read. He comes across as decent.

But.

As a woman but also as a socialist I want the misogyny naming explicitly. Especially of the individuals and organisations who continue to reject the supreme court ruling.