Behind the ruling: how ‘Sex Matters’ is shaping UK policy on trans rights

That is a fair question / approach and sure it is a change but there is no ability to transition sex, nor is there an ability to transition gender.

As gender is simply a societal snapshot of typical behaviour / appearance / etc of the sexes, so a man imitating the female gender simply expands the male gender… that’s why high heels used to be a male footwear, now seen as female / pink used to be the colour for boys, now seen as for girls etc - the perception of what is male / female gender changes as people change what they do - rather than those people somehow becoming or transitioning to the other gender…

so - change, yes - transition, no.

of course change can happen with anyone, and change is not always positive - when people claim to transition’ it is the change which upsets because it is effectively a lie - if a man ‘transitions’ to being a ‘woman’ (in their mind!) then they are effectively saying to their family / friends / wife - either, I have been lying to you up to now, the real me is a man in a dress etc, or they are now living a lie - and in reality, probably a bit of both… It is the forcing others to live that lie, or publicly demonstrating that they have been fooled that can be so upsetting - the man the woman married is not the man she thought, but a different shape of man.

It is no different to suddenly telling the wife that he is not British, an accountant who enjoys football, but a Russian spy who assassinates industrial leaders for a job, those conferences are visits to spy on other countries etc - that person hasn’t transitioned, they are just a different shape of man - but there has been a lie in there and that, alongside the wife being made to look foolish for having been conned is the underlying issue

it is no different to a man who is a normal slightly overweight middle aged chap who suddenly joins a gym, loses 3 stone, starts doing triathlons, every spare moment is for training and evening chat is all about protein mixes and reps on weights etc - the historical friendships are all dropped and new friends come over who sniff and disapprove of anything containing sugar etc - that isn’t transition but it is change…

so, no, people can’t transition in the way the trans community would have you think - it is not possible for a man to ever be anything other than a man - however they can change how they portray as a man and in doing so - they show that others have been fooled / are now being forced to accept something new - and in it all are lies. Especially in this discussion where a part of their change is the expectation that others will support them in their play acting as a woman and agree to also lie

the language is a clever tool - transgender is chosen to imply the image they wish to portray - transition is a soft word to allow a range of stages (it currently even includes those thinking about it which even were it real and you could transition would be nonsense) but it allows a claim to be harder to disprove. Gender is deliberately chosen because it is too easy to prove that sex can’t be changed, whereas gender is a nebulous and fluid concept making it easier to pretend that you can transition

ironically where they overplayed their hand was to push harder on it meaning a factual transition or switch at a sex level by insisting that they were now actual women and that made it easier to disprove!

so, in many ways I agree with you - gender does have a meaning because it says in shorthand that I want to present as the societal stereotype, or that actually you are someone pushing the gender concept of being male and therefore please see me slightly differently, it can be saying that men can also be more sensitive and emotionally attuned rather than the gender stereotype / it might be saying that men can also be carers, nurses, stay-at-home parents, arty etc (and equivalents for women clearly) - but none of that makes them a woman / none of that changes their sex or gender - it simply helps to expand the overall societal understanding of being male / female - and that is a good thing - to not stereotype, to allow boys and girls to play with any toys / do any activities / even wear any colours or clothes… but that is a positive affirmation of difference and acceptance - it is not ‘transition’ which is to narrow down and confirm stereotypes- which restricts what people can do - which is built on lies and deceit

"Suckling on the penis of the far right"

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5358888-why-is-this-subforum-so-intent-on-removing-voices-that-dont-agree?reply=145148530

I note the shift from male gaze to male lens which I define as analysing anything said by women through the eyes of men.

We are no longer just looking at women from where the men would have been positioned but we now have to analyse the scene with the male thought process as well.

Yeah, nah, I don't wanna.

It’s not a problem for everyone, some marriages continue on. I think it would be like an overweight husband deciding they were lance Armstrong, renaming themselves Lance, riding a bike around the village all the time in badly fitting Lycra and making everyone at work and at home pretend he will be taking part in the Tour de France, and in fact had always taken part in the Tour de France. And everyone has to go along with it calling him Lance and telling him he looks ready for the olympics on his bike or else lose their job and get accused of being a nazi.

There’s a certain amount of pretending a marriage can tolerate, and an amount it can’t.

I agree there is a link to the far right in that this is a cause those on the far right have picked up on. I suspect it's not so much about women's rights, but more to do with the far rights position on men they don't approve of for not being straight and white.

That doesn't mean to say everyone who is GC is on the far right though . Most who are GC do so because they believe in the hard won rights of women. The end.

I think you are brining up the link with the far right to suppress people's views. You are trying to link GC views to the wider and generally unacceptable views by most standards of the far right. It's another version of screaming no debate and bigot to anyone who so much as raised a concern about men in women's spaces , sports, jails etc.

This shit doesn't work anymore.

We are entitled to our views.

I have no issue with someone being trans. You do you.

But I don't want men in women's spaces. Even if he has got a dress and make up on.

Trans rights don't trump womens rights.

They are separate matters.

Que? 😟

Did it work on Reddit?

Not only ‘what does SPLC have to do with the UK, they also seem to be about as balanced and accurate as Hope not Hate. In other words, I would take anything they say with a pile of salt.

Any person or group that so easily labels other groups ‘hate groups’ really show they choose emotion over accuracy. This hyperbolic mislabelling groups as hate groups ensures that the real hate groups remain in the background and operate undisturbed.

Mate, if you haven’t been able to make GCIM a thing on Twitter it’s not going to work here.

💯

This article is written by the mother of a trans identified teenage boy. I'm sure she finds life painful on behalf of her child, but she's likely to be amongst the most biased of writers.

I miss the laugh reaction.

Dudes. Just use the men's toilets.

All this wailing and angst.

>The accusation is so depraved, hyperbolic, and farcical that it can never be made explicitly, only in veiled and obfuscating language, thus you're often waiting a long time (forever) for an answer of what precisely is meant.

Maybe the OP could take this opportunity to clarify?

But that’s not true is it @akkakk. Transitioning is something. It may not be a ‘sex change’ but it’s something. Or nobody would turn a hair if their partner transitioned.

This is why I sometimes (not always) say I’m a TERF but not GC. I do think gender has some meaning. I don’t even always think it’s negative.

As with much of trans activism, this engages in a semantic bate-and-switch to inject a sense of exaggerated threat and hysteria into the debate.

'Eliminationist' is a concept developed to answer the question: how could the Nazi state have arrived at a sufficiently coherent attitude toward the Jews to make possible their industrial scale extermination in the Holocaust? The answer goes that eliminationist rhetoric dehumanized Jews and likened them to a deadly pathogen that must be excised lest it kills its host (the German people) and inured both the public and bureaucrats to the implementation of the final solution.

It's obviously highly offensive to claim that SexMatters is engaging in a similar rhetorical campaign or that it's part of a larger conspiracy to 'excise' trans people from UK society. And suggest the possibility (by implication not refuted) of removal by physical extermination, which was the original, literal purpose of eliminationist rhetoric.

The leap in logic is made in the following way:

• Joyce doesn't believe in trans identity, thus she denies their 'existence'.
• She thinks that 'gender dysphoria' is real and deserves treatment, therefor she is pathologicising trans people, likening them to vermin or a disease.
• She doesn't believe transition is the appropriate treatment of gender dysphoria, therefor she seeks to eliminate trans people by simply saying that no one should transition.
• By seeking to exclude TIMs from women's spaces, she is attempting to legally proscribe trans people in the same way the Nuremberg laws proscribed the Jews.

The accusation is so depraved, hyperbolic, and farcical that it can never be made explicitly, only in veiled and obfuscating language, thus you're often waiting a long time (forever) for an answer of what precisely is meant.

I just want to know how acknowledging someone’s birth sex “functionally eliminates” anyone “from public life and society.”

Thats a very strong claim that needs some equally strong evidencing.

I know that sex is an immutable biological matter, but obviously I’m not trying to “eliminate” anyone “from public life” by my knowing this. It’s hard to square.

The organisation’s true agenda is, I believe, best described as ‘eliminationist’: seeking through legislative bans, data policies, and the curtailing of gender-affirming care to relegate trans people in life and law to their sex at birth and make transitioning so difficult, dangerous or pointless as to functionally eliminate trans people from public life and society"

You can’t relegate to sex at birth as that implies having moved away from it - sex is immutable and can not be changed.

long before sex matters even existed as an organisation transitioning was still impossible as it is today… sex can not be changed…

you can’t make something difficult, dangerous or pointless if it has never been possible!!!

Just a minor note that the link in the Bylines piece to the page about which ranges of blood values doctors should refer to, is wrong. The link in the article says that using sex-based ranges can be ‘misleading’. The policy that it links to says that sex-based ranges should be used, with a single exception of haematocrit ranges for female people on testosterone.

This is the thing. Sex-based thinking is not ‘eliminationist’. It is protective of human rights and human health, because humans are mammals.

I’m not a ‘we can always tell’ person. I’ve no doubt, and I have experienced, that people who have transitioned may not be seen as the sex they are. That can be dangerous for them. There’s a horrific medical article out there now about a woman who is going to be living with tracheal stenosis and breathing problems for life because she was repeatedly intubated with too large a tube because she presented as male. Women have smaller larynxes and glottic gaps (space to breathe through) than men. At the very least, that case should cause all Trusts to instigate use of the sex field in their records, alongside gender if wanted.

Just looked up the Southern Poverty Law Centre that according to the OPs article classes Genspect as a hate group

I did a search for SPLC and women's rights. First news story I find:

After Allegations Of Toxic Culture, Southern Poverty Law Center Tries To Move Forward

After allegations of a toxic workplace culture that discriminates against women and people of color, the Southern Poverty Law Center is trying to emerge and chart a way forward. Turmoil in the civil rights organization last month resulted in the firing of its famous founder and the resignations of its longtime president and legal director...

...Baynes-Dunning says her work will start inside the organization, by first acknowledging what went wrong.

"I'm acknowledging the fact that we didn't pay attention to the internal culture," she said. "You know ... as a woman of color I realize that, in my own experience, we deal with microaggressions in the greater society every single day."

"When you come and work for an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center, especially for people of color, women, you don't expect this organization to mirror what we see out in the greater society."

So the organisation that decides which groups that believe a man is a man and can't actually be a woman goes on its list of hate already has form for treating women badly.

I'm Shocked 😲

I'm ignoring the "right wing" nonsense.

But I would like to hear about the "elimination" theme.

The contention is that all trans people's state(s) of mind are so all-consuming that without being accepted without reservation in every single way as their preferred sex they are entirely unable to take part in society whatsoever? And for that reason, society is obliged to accept them in every single way as their preferred sex? Without exception?

That's what I discern from the quoted definition of 'elimination' - have I misunderstood/?

Thank you @FlirtsWithRhinos !

You know who else exists Bee?

Female people.

Female people exist.

Whatever your personal definition of a "woman" might be, the group of female people does not include you, and this remains true whatever you may change in language or in law.

So all I want to understand is why is it so important to you that a group of people who you don't even belong to, who have nothing to do your definition of "woman", who by number alone have historically been marginalised, exploited and abused more consistently than any other group of humans, whose problems are different to the problems you may or may not face, be denied legal rights, social acceptance and even our own name and language with which to speak of our own experiences?

Why is it so important to you to take away the tools we need to fight our historic and onoing marginalisation, abuse and oppression, things that are nothing to do with you or womanhood as you experience it but are centred in our female bodies and how society treats us because of them?

Because honestly, I'd really love to know.

The Yorkshire Bylines starts drawing to a close with:

”Sex Matters is a powerful gender-critical organisation with explicit connections to organisations listed by the SPLC as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups, actively courted by our mainstream media, and influentially enmeshed within our parliament, legal system and human rights commission.“

… but doesn’t name a single organisation. (Surely the author can’t think a conference host is an explicit connection??)

Also - so much damage is done by people unthinkingly co-opting US organisations and cultural debates and shoehorning them into a UK context - what does the SPLC have to do with anything in this country??

“Years before the Supreme Court ruling, Sex Matters were meeting with the EHRC behind closed doors to discuss a redefinition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act to mean ‘biological sex’. “

In the context mentioned, a meeting behind closed doors is just…. a meeting.

And what earthly meaning can ‘sex’ have, other than ‘biological sex’? Can’t you see that? Open the definition to anything wider and all that you do is create an inviting space for the confused, the internet-addled, the mentally-ill, those suffering from trauma, and some very bad-faith actors. At the expense of women, and of material fucking reality.

More widely, the energy this is sucking out of the body politic is enervating Western European countries, and undermining any soft power they have with other countries, who either don’t countenance the idea of transgenderism, or use it as a form of gay conversion therapy.

You guys really need to come to terms with the fact that FWS won the Supreme Court case, and that your conspiracy theories are completely irrelevant.