I hope you will be proud of me..

Well done

The people in the agency that wanted to collect data on 'gender' were all female.

So were about 90 odd percent of the people that changed the field back to 'gender'.

Honestly, you could not make it up. The whole of the training and development industry are so totally captured, just like every other 'government funded in one way or other' industry.

Thanks! It was after JKR became vocal that I realised ‘being kind’ was detrimental to women’s rights.

Back in 2018 I landed a role as managing about 25 ish million of UK gov money and the organisation we had hired to do the evaluation kept changing the title of my data gathering spreadsheet from 'sex' to 'gender'. I kept changing it back. We argued and argued and my point was that in the industry it was the female sex that was an under represented group and that is what we needed to capture. They did not or would not get it. As a woman who worked in said industry for 20 years, against all the fucking shit thrown at me on a daily basis by men of all ages, I completely resented this, they'd not stepped a foot onto a construction site in their lives.

So I scoured the internet for a form that the government agency in question used that recorded 'sex', the old ILR form before the madness began.

And sent it the hired agency, to prove that it was indeed 'sex' that needed to be captured.

We then agreed that we could use that term.

So I sent it out to the contracted suppliers.

And lo and behold, every single one of them changed it.

Next funding round, I changed it back and made them all complete the goddam spreadsheet on fucking TEAMS so that I could change that fucker back every time I fucking saw it.

Still angry about it as you can see.

And yes it is the FUCKING HILL I WILL DIE ON, bearing in mind the FUCKING ENERGY I SPENT WORKING ON CONSTRUCTION SITES EVERY FUCKING DAY DEALING WITH MEN AND THEIR SHIT.

#Not All Men. I quite liked some of them. Some are still my friends.

Same. I’m learning so much from this board, and everyone is so knowledgeable and articulate. Thank you to all of you!

No problem, not women but we should be kind. Very foolish looking back as the person in question should never have been allowed to take a faculty place away from a woman.

I think it’s immensely personal and reasonable to believe women’s sex based rights are important and need protecting.

Don’t you?

Surely anyone would agree with that. Unless they actually thought that men’s desires are more important than women’s rights

I say this again and again

This debate isn't about what's nice and what not nice. Attempts to frame it like this are ignorant and ill conceived.

This debate is actually about what is workable and fair in law to everyone. Being nice doesn't come into it, because for every person who might be nice you will find a minority who really aren't in any group of people.

This particular group of people covers a huge umbrella including a small group who unfortunately are well understood to pose a particularly high risk - cross dressing is a paraphernalia and used to be identified as a marker for sexual criminal behaviour.

It also fails to address how you make legal definitions. Without legal definitions which are clear for all they are unworkable. Every attempt to define gender always reverts to sexist stereotypes and comments about clothing. This is at odds with the experiences and expectations of women in today's society. You can not make legal definitions of gender without discrimination against women and homosexuals - and this is ultimately the point the Supreme Court came to. The definition of trans had to include a reference to biological sex in order to identify who was trans and who had protects as trans. And by extension this also protects women and homosexuals.

This isn't about being nice. Nice is a bias measure. This is about being fair. Fairness is about treating everyone by the same standards. We have to recognise sex to give trans people their own protected status. If we erase sex in law we erase this protection. This may not matter to transwomen because they still have dominance over women due to their sex. Therein lies an issue. Gender neutral is biased towards males - it is not equal between sexes. The converse is also true transmen are still women so the loss of recognition of their sex puts them more at risk.

All this talk of being nice is merely a way to distract away from this inconvenient truth that gender identity is beneficial to males and harms females and homosexuals and is particularly bad for lesbians. It is a tool to smear and to shame women for non compliance.

Unfortunately once you realise all this, and understand that actually seeing sex protects transpeople in certain areas but prevents them from abuses of power - whilst also protecting women and girls and homosexuals you realise what a bunch of arseholes the activists you initially pushed this trope really are and how it's all a mens right movement. And you can't unsee it.

Identifying a male as a male is not unkind. It is recognising him as male. That's it. This is a neutral thing. There is no hate in this. It recognises that he is not female. And can't be. It acknowledges the difference this makes in terms of how our lives might pan out in reproductive terms. Sexual activity and our role in sexual activity being fairly fundamental to us as humans. Since males do not have the capacity nor are expected to have the capacity to reproduce this matters. It doesn't matter if a female has a functioning reproductive system or not - if the system is faulty there will be treatments and consequences to this which are unique to females and not shared by males. And this is what it boils down to.

Neither sex is lesser, but both sexes impact on our daily lives. Whether it be whether you can reach the top shelf in the supermarket or whether you decide to father 200 kids.

It was JKR speaking out which really brought things to my attention - prior to that I didn't have much of a clue, but probably swallowed
the view of all trans people being poor discriminated-against souls who deserve our support. Suddenly, people (mainly DD in her most dogmatic era) were talking about JKR as the world's worst bigot, and this didn't seem to fit with what I already knew about her, so I wanted to know more.

I then read Helen Joyce's book, after reading a positive review of it by - I think - David Aaronovitch, and that really opened my eyes.

Well done OP @namechange62 for challenging this nonsense in real life. It is difficult to marshal your thoughts and arguments on the spot.

I have learnt so much from this board and, while I feel I can string together a reasonably articulate sentence, I am still in daily awe of the eloquence and intellectual rigour that is posted on here.

@namechange62 “Maybe one of you could start a thread with the history of how this topic evolved for all the newcomers to see?”

That would be really interesting, thanks for suggesting it!

It wasn’t until JKR that I started to take note of what was really happening. I remember prominent people speaking out like Germaine Greer (and some very conservative men like Ben Shapiro) before then.

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but when you were protesting against Germaine Greer what were your beliefs about TIMs?

@Bobbymoore123 “a more personal and reasonable angle.”

It is a fact that humans CANNOT change sex.

Every person on Earth is born from a WOMAN!

Thank you for explaining this. I hadn’t realised the extent of it.

Yes but sadly some did get unnecessarily banned just for challenging a decision made with no consultation at all. And certainly not based on a thought out logical reason.

Added to which some then chose to leave, as despite what some were saying, FWR had got a lot of praise during the consultation time re the attempt to bring in self ID. And this was somehow this was turn into a problem not the few women moaning to MN about there being threads about women's sex based rights and the threat from TRAs.

Some others left because for them they couldn't move forward, because there is always an element that old ground has to be gone over again, and they wanted to move on as it were.

It sort of felt like the grown ups had left the room.

My personal and reasonable angle is that no man can be a woman whatever efforts he goes to.

What's yours?

Right back atcha, Bobby!

If this is really the hill you want to die on...

It might be a good idea to log off for a bit and approach this from a more personal and reasonable angle.