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

It's amazing how transvestism has been thoroughly memory wiped from the culture - except for drag shows, which seem to have been grandfathered in.

Even ten years ago it was common knowledge that a significant number of men cross dressed for erotic purposes. Nowadays that's counted as Hitler level bigotry.

Old Norm seems to have got there before most of us did.
That's because in the 1970s it was common knowledge that some men liked to dress as women for pleasure. Some men stole underwear from washing lines. Some men were flashers. It's only today that these men are seen as poor and vulnerable, in need of help.

Wow, that Tebbit speech. An intelligent man. And I used to regard him as one of the bad actors.
But this thread has me thinking about the nomenclature of men's attitudes to women. We refer to misogyny a lot, but it covers several things which are not the same.

At base level there are men who have swallowed the idea of equality, quite properly, and lumped males and females together for legislation and so on, assuming that the two should be treated the same. Like a woman not needing a guarantor when buying a house. Which sounds fine, until something like trans comes up, and it take time for them to realise that in some cases the two need different responses for equity to be achieved. They don't dislike women, don't need to "keep them in their place", but may get a bit peeved when the women step out of what they expect. They don't need a word as strong as misogyny, but they do need something.

Then there are the ones who do deserve the word, the ones who don't appoint well qualified women when there is a less qualified man, who ask what the victim of assault was wearing, or why she was crossing Hungerford bridge at night, or expect their wives to have dinner ready at 6 as in the fifties, who are basically back in the 50s and simply can't accept that women have their own lives. There are a lot of them about and we all know it when we meet it. They want women in their place and blame feminism for all the wrongs in society, but mostly do not think about what they are expecting from us.

Then there are the ones for whom misogyny is too weak, who see nothing wrong in shouting out their hatred in public, like the TRAs. I propose we call them gynophobic, by comparison with the other phobic words we now have, which refer to hatred, not fear, though any woman is quite right to fear the TRAs. Those who call for death for women, of course, do have a hatred driven by fear, though why they fear women I can't imagine. They fear our laughter while we fear their violence. A bit extreme of course. But a much worse thing than misogyny.

In retrospect, "physiological or other attributes of sex" turns out to be the enormous loophole that enabled the big push for self-ID - because "other attributes of sex" might just mean putting on a wig and a miniskirt - but then ended up undermining the whole thing.

Yes - even in the Equality Act, there isn't a requirement to undergo full SRS (and that was part of the original 2004 debates on the GRA), but the wording of the PC of gender reassignment - "the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex" - clearly implies that MPs thought they were protecting people who were on a pathway to SRS.

It was only backwoodsmen in the Lords like Norman Tebbit who raised objections along the lines of "what if some big hairy arsed bloke wants to join a lesbian group", and that was all handwaved away by Labour ministers who said those things would never happen.

Old Norm seems to have got there before most of us did.

I think it would be possible if you were thinking this was only going to be about people who were really engaged in undergoing the whole SRS process. The fact that we can now see all the red flags with the “doesn’t need to have started the process” business could go past you easily enough if you were literally only thinking about genuine patients. Especially if it had already been established that it was against human rights to put a requirement for surgery in place. The system made it relatively easy for TRAs to say they were only saying that as that was the only legal option, whereas it’s now obvious the opposite was true.

I imagine the big selling point was: it's low cost, it will have a negligible impact on society, it will have a big positive impact on the 5000 stealth transsexuals out there who will thank you forever, and you'll make a statement that you're on the right side of history.

The sort of bill a centrist dad type of Labour MP loves, and by the time the negative impacts become clear, most of them have left politics.

I worry that there are similar dynamics in play with the assisted dying bill. I don't think the psychological profile of MPs has changed that much.

I very much doubt we’d have the number or type of ‘trans’ people, and by that I mean the lesbians with beards and heterosexual cross dressers, that we have today without the GRA, it has emboldened boundary pushers and loophole seekers and people who otherwise would find other ways to make women uncomfortable.

It has always been a shocking piece of law and that anyone ever thought that legislating lying was acceptable is truely bizarre.

Back in the days when Norman Tebbit was the worst person in the world! I'm still no fan, but he was spot-on and perceptive about this. But back in 2004 there was no Isla Graham in the TV news.

What did I think about the GRA in 2004? Honestly, I doubt I was even aware of it. I don't recall a massive fuss in the press. Nobody (or hardly anybody) thought it was a big deal at the time. And of course that was very much the gloss that was put on it.

"the Court considers that society women may reasonably be expected to tolerate a certain inconvenience to enable individuals men to live in dignity and worth in accordance with the sexual identity chosen by them at great no personal cost."

Fixed it for them.

Thank you for that @SionnachRuadh - I agree, that was a pleasure to read (and I also can’t imagine my younger self predicting me saying that). What an opening! And it just storms on from there!

“My Lords, I do not support the Bill in principle, in any way, up hill or down dale. This is a bad Bill. It is a most offensive Bill.”

My former self would never have predicted me saying this either, but Norman Tebbit's interventions in the GRA debates 20 years ago are not only prescient but often a pleasure to read:

"My Lords, I do not support the Bill in principle, in any way, up hill or down dale. This is a bad Bill. It is a most offensive Bill. It is certainly offensive to the followers of more than one religion, but I do not intend to make those criticisms today. In the speech of the right reverend Prelate, we heard of some of his telling concerns.

Sex cannot be changed. It is no good the Minister shaking his head. Sex is decided by the chromosomes of a human being. If we have XX chromosomes, we are women; if we have XY chromosomes, we are men. I might perhaps accept the Bill if an additional requirement for registering changes of gender were that it had been discovered that those concerned had inappropriate chromosomes for the sex in which they had been registered. That is the only way in which the Bill could avoid telling a lie. So far as I know, there is no law nor any known medical procedure that can change the sex of a human being. The Bill purports to do so. It is therefore an objectionable farce.

Moral and constitutional issues are also involved. The Bill requires members of a gender recognition panel, on the production of certain evidence, in broad terms to certify that a person who was born a woman, lived as a woman, married as a woman and has borne children is, despite all that, entitled to be issued with a birth certificate falsely professing that she was born as a male child. That cannot be anything other than a lie. It is a lie that the state would require its servants, such as the Registrar General, to certify as a truth.

Under this Government, we have become accustomed to a certain lack of precision and distinction between what is true and what is untrue, but this is going a long way beyond that. It is of a different order. Not only does it provide that an untruth can be made a truth, that a legitimately and properly attested document may be altered to purport something different, but it provides for the punishment of anyone who dares to speak the truth about the matter.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, properly referred to some of the problems in sport. When a six foot eight inch, 22 stone lady turns up to join the hockey club and denies that she has changed gender, who can attest to the contrary? Her birth certificate will have been altered and it will be a criminal offence for anyone to reveal that fact. Just how do we proceed in that matter? It is no good saying that we can leave it to people in the sporting associations. We cannot. That is impossible.

Even worse, it is not quite an offence for anyone to reveal the truth about the matter because, properly, under Clause 21, the Secretary of State or Scottish Minister is to have by order power to make provisions prescribing circumstances in which disclosure of the truth would not be an offence. We have read in the papers during the past day or two some of the background to the Soham murders and about the real difficulty caused by the clash between data confidentiality and the need of the police to be able to identify people who have not been convicted of any crime.

Let us consider the Bill in relation to that. Suppose the suspected person had changed gender. That would be difficult to track back, because he would be a different person with a different birth certificate. If this wretched legislation is passed, I hope that the Attorney-General has thought his way through that one before we have another problem on the scale of the Soham affair.

Mind you, all that is somewhat small beer compared to the power given to the Secretary of State in Clause 22 to modify,
"the operation of any enactment or subordinate legislation in relation to… persons whose gender has become the acquired gender under this Act, or… any description of such persons".
So there is the potential to deal with what we may call the Soham problem but, as I said, I hope that the Attorney-General will tell us exactly how that will operate. He must have thought it through. The Bill has not suddenly emerged; it has been thought about for a long time.

As I read it, the Bill would also purport that a marriage lawfully undertaken and consummated would be annulled where one of those false certificates had been issued in respect of one of those who had been lawfully joined together in an indissoluble union in the presence of God. We have heard the right reverend Prelate's reservations about that. I wonder what His Holiness the Pope thinks about it.

Clause 16 provides that if an Earl re-registers himself as a woman, he fortunately does not have to become a Countess. That is a most liberal part of the Bill; for such small mercies we should be grateful. I therefore presume that if a King should undertake gender reassignment, he could rule as a woman, but he would still be a King. I must say that that would raise some curious thoughts."

I totally get the anger from some posters, especially anyone who has been following this for a more than a few years. But I'm trying to console myself that at least this piece, and Wintermute's articles/interviews are out there in the wild now. They all add to the mountains of evidence that we have used time and time again to prove our case in tribunals, court cases, interviews, articles, podcasts, letters, FOIs, social media etc.

Of course, this is the TRAs' big thing about self-ID, isn't it? It's just a "bit of admin", a "piece of paper", "administrative tidying up" etc. Though of course it's also life-saving and they'll all kill themselves if they don't have it

Yes, and the entirely administrative business of changing driving licence names, birth certificate, utility bills is mysteriously somehow 'onerous' and 'hugely oppressive'. Funny how that’s not 'just a bit of admin'.

It's good that Tom Harris has written this, I think, but as with Robert Wintemute, pretty bloody devastating to have it shown yet again how totally blinkered these men were about the basic human rights of women. Never in a million years would I have imagined myself applauding Norman Tebbit 😳

And then history almost repeated itself with the Scottish Government's self ID Bill. Again, objections were just brushed aside. How on earth did so many people get convinced that the needs of a small group of (mainly) men needed to be so prioritised? Why did no one just say no?!

I'm quoting myself here because actually the only question you need is 'what if women don't want it?'

We've seen, time after time, conversations on here with transactivists where we're telling them why we don't want it, and they are countering our point with points of their own (albeit bollocks points).

But the quickest way to the heart of the matter is to just say no. No, we don't want it.

Because you, straightaway, get to the crux of the issue, which is, who fucking cares.

Not that many people put their hands up and admit when they get it wrong.

good for him. Let’s not knock that.

also he has been publicly arguing the case to roll it back for some years now.

Plus ca change. How much shit has been foisted on the British public so that a ministerial career isn't derailed? How many times have we had strongly worded pieces to camera on the news just before a big vote and then it all disappears like smoke when they troop through the lobby and vote like good little sheep, or worse, abstain, because that's really principled.

As with most things the Government does, there are rarely two opposing views put forward to be thrashed out. There is generally only one and then it becomes a fait accompli. MPs get behind something without ever really understanding it because an opposing report (in as much detail as the one with the agenda) that laid out the pitfalls and consequences was never commissioned.

(Bit like immigration when they had a report that said we'd be looking at 30k max coming over per annum from Eastern Europe.) Our politicians, for the most part, are thick and desperate to be seen as progressive. The things they view as progressive are nearly always issues affecting minorities winning out over the rights of the majority. And they wonder why Farage is popular.

Yes, I can understand him thinking it's insane, but the ease with which it's all been accomplished should make him grasp that the desire to screw women over is ever present. You don't need a bloody time machine. You need constant vigilance.

I know, exactly @Datun! “Be kind to who, exactly?”

It's interesting to wonder how, in the past, people could fall for this. I've yet to see a transactivist that doesn't come across as entitled and unable to think of anyone but themselves.

I can just about see how you might fall for it, if it was all in theory, and on paper. But in real life?

And was it a given that men with a GRC would use women's facilities?

Because, it only takes a couple of questions.

So some men will use women's facilities? But there's no criteria to look like a woman?

What if women don't want it...?

Thanks for the article. It’s dismaying and illuminating to see how an MP might have misgivings but will vote a bill through rather than risk damaging their career.

But given that I barely registered the GRA at the time and that, even when I did, my reaction was a shrug and a ‘Where’s the harm?’ I think it would be a bit hypocritical of me to be too hard on Tom Harris. I appreciate his holding up his hands now and I believe it’s never too late to do the right thing.

I think it’s interesting that the bill was whipped. Wouldn’t it be more normal to allow a free vote on an issue such as this or am I reading too much into it?

Very good point.

If I were going to be charitable about Tom - and I've encountered Tom in the past, and he's a smart guy - he's really just saying that he bought the government's rational for the GRA. Which was written for the government by Press For Change.

The whole premise of the GRA was, there are a few thousand transsexuals out there living under the radar, they just want a private life, and this will get them out of having to out themselves every time they need to produce ID.

Which, as Helen Joyce says, was a bit like witness protection - even if it's bad in principle to lie on official documents, you can get away with that if the numbers are tiny and the process strictly gatekept and everyone understands that.

It's really interesting to revisit Hansard from the GRA debates. Not so much the Commons debates, because the responsible minister obviously didn't understand the bill he was piloting (hello David Lammy) and most of the debate was a bunch of Labour MPs virtue signalling. It gets more interesting in the Lords, when Lord Tebbit was doggedly opposing the bill and various peers got into arguments over the detail.

So on that basis, since Tom didn't make it a high priority issue, it makes sense that he accepted the government's rationale. It's not that nobody foresaw the consequences, some did but most took time. What people should have picked up on was not only that the GRA was the thin end of the wedge but that its sponsors designed it that way.

"Mea culpa"
Mea fucking culpa?! Is that all he's got?!
There are children in this country who have been given puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, teenagers with their breasts removed. An entire generation lied to. Schools teaching this shit. Women attacked and viciously bullied.
All just a "trivial matter"?!
I'm so fucking angry.