The Gender Identity Bill almost certainly won’t make it into law. But the problem is that it’s helped to focus the attention of a lot of people, especially the media, on the rights of transwomen to be regarded as having the same rights as women. That includes transwomen having the right to access the safe places that were previously reserved for women.
Most transwomen just want to live quiet lives, but the trans issue has been taken over by very vociferous people who seem to be intent on pushing the boundaries as far as possible. What this proposed Bill has given them is an extra push for their rights to be more important than women’s rights. And many organisations have already modified their policies so that the focus is on what someone reports as their gender identity rather than their biology.
There are so very many threads here on this issue that I can’t recall which thread I read it on, but a poster reported that their NHS hospital has issued new guidelines, and instead of putting patients in a single-sex ward according to their biology, the procedure is now to place people on wards according to their gender preference. If a female identifies as a man then he’ll be placed in a single-sex male ward, which might cause some discomfort to the men there. But if a male identifies as a woman then she’ll be placed in a single-sex female ward. Given that most transwomen keep their penises (and I can understand why, as that’s very tricky surgery anyway) what can happen is that an intact male is placed in a 6-bedded ward alongside five women.
Most women won’t have to go to a refuge or a rape crisis centre, so won’t have to think about a transwoman insisting on their right to be there because that’s how they identify.
But any woman could end up in an NHS hospital ward for all manner of reasons. The NHS ended up spending huge amounts of money to ensure single-sex wards on the basis of dignity (for men as well as women) but this Bill, even though it won’t become law (yet), undermines all of that.