To be cross that DD didn’t tell me her boyfriend was trans?

[WearyandBleary]

DD who is 16 has just had a horrible breakup with her boyfriend of 2 years. In the course of this crying etc she told me he was trans I e born a girl.

Now I don’t mind whatever but I’m so embarrassed that I had loads of heart to hearts with her about sex and contraception and she never said a thing!!! I feel like an idiot. She can’t understand why it matters. (?!?)

AIBU to be cross? I thought we had a good relationship and she was always honest with me. I feel like a chump!

@Binterested "we can infer" "it's pretty clear"
Nope. Sorry, you're inferring incorrectly. Your legal sex is not necessarily the same as your legal sex. If you legally change your sex then you cannot be discriminated against based upon the sex that you change it to. It does not refer to biological sex. For example, if a person is born and registered as female and then changes their legal sex to male. They apply to become a teacher. The school says "you can't work here, we only hire females", that person has a legal case for discrimination because, as a legal male, that person was discriminated against. Their biological sex is completely irrelevant.
If the law thought biological sex was the same as your legal sex then you wouldn't be able to change your legal sex at all - just like you cannot change your biological sex.

[quote TeachAdopt]@Fanthorpe I wonder whether you consider all women who use their married name as "legal fiction" and remind them that it's not the same they were born with and so not their real name. It's literally the same thing from a legal standpoint.[/quote]
It isn’t the same at all. The law on names doesn’t contain a carve out for certain purposes for which the maiden name is still relevant.

In the EA, "gender reassignment" means you can't say "we don't hire people who have had gender reassignment", "sex" means you can't say "we don't hire women". They are different characteristics.

[quote TeachAdopt]@Binterested "we can infer" "it's pretty clear"
Nope. Sorry, you're inferring incorrectly. Your legal sex is not necessarily the same as your legal sex. If you legally change your sex then you cannot be discriminated against based upon the sex that you change it to. It does not refer to biological sex. For example, if a person is born and registered as female and then changes their legal sex to male. They apply to become a teacher. The school says "you can't work here, we only hire females", that person has a legal case for discrimination because, as a legal male, that person was discriminated against. Their biological sex is completely irrelevant.
If the law thought biological sex was the same as your legal sex then you wouldn't be able to change your legal sex at all - just like you cannot change your biological sex.[/quote]
You can change your legal sex for some purposes, but there are carve outs for which biological sex remains relevant. As pp said, that is why some are campaigning to have even these limited exemptions removed.

@fascinated What on earth are you talking about?

TeachAdopt that it possibly the worst analogy ever. A married name is not the name you were born with and you are frequently asked formally what your previous names were because it may be necessary to know in order to correctly determine identity.

This ought to be the case with "sex change" cases but it is not. We are all made to pretend that a past never happened. It's egregious in the case of transgenderism because one can actually change a name but no one can actually change sex. So claiming that you have literally become another sex - or in fact, as with changing birth certificates, that you always were that new sex and that your mother and all the doctors who were in the room at the time of your birth were just wrong or mistaken - is so very far from changing your name on marriage that I don't actually know where to start.

@TeachAdopt

In the EA, "gender reassignment" means you can't say "we don't hire people who have had gender reassignment", "sex" means you can't say "we don't hire women". They are different characteristics.

Males with a GRC can be included in the female (legal) sex class for some purposes, but not all.

[quote TeachAdopt]@fascinated What on earth are you talking about?[/quote]
I could ask you the same thing! I’m talking about the law. What are you talking about?

@Binterested We are all made to pretend that a past never happened
In my line of work there is a standard form application. I'm currently in the midst of job applications. It asks for my "sex as it appears on my passport", it asks "is your gender the same as you were registered with at birth" and it asks for "preferred pronouns".
This is not uncommon.

I have a feeling there isn’t much point in trying to discuss this here. There is a reason we need courts. Sigh.

And your employment as a teacher example is incorrect also. It would most likely not pass the "single sex exemption" test to specify that you will only hire women teachers. Because it would be unlikely to be useful for any other greater goal such as safety or security. So a teacher who identified as a man but was born a woman would not be able to be discriminated against for this role.

But it is absolutely legal to specify that a particular service or role (single sex changing rooms or female police officer required to do intimate body searches) be a particular biological sex. And as long as that is deemed proportionate to the end goal (eg safety), it would be legitimate to say that only biological women will be considered.

This is the existing law of the land. Stonewall have done a great job of misrepresenting it - including apparently to you.

@Binterested I'm an employment lawyer.

That’s unfortunate.

Then I’m amazed you don’t know the term ‘legal fiction’. The name example you give is redundant in this argument, we give people names, much like we decide genders, it’s a construct.

Parents who adopt children are the parents in the eyes of the law, but they are not the biological parents. It is a ‘legal fiction’.

Fanthorpe, it’s curious, isn’t it?

[quote TeachAdopt]**@Binterested* We are all made to pretend that a past never happened*
In my line of work there is a standard form application. I'm currently in the midst of job applications. It asks for my "sex as it appears on my passport", it asks "is your gender the same as you were registered with at birth" and it asks for "preferred pronouns".
This is not uncommon.[/quote]
Standard form applications for employment lawyers? Which area is that, I’d love to avoid long complex application letters.

Indeed fascinated I feel like Alice in Wonderland nowadays, being asked to believe five impossible things before breakfast...

I think I’m done exploring - and drawing a map for - this rabbit hole for tonight.

@fascinated In London. And just because it's standard form doesn't mean it's shorter. It means it's standard form through a third party agency who manage the recruitment for most firms in the City.
At the end of the form, it asks for information relating to your age, your sex, your gender, your race, whether you went to a fee-paying school etc etc. The external company uses that data to give you a score so the firm can view your qualifications and work experience in context with your background (because it's easier to get AAA at A Level if your parents paid for it and are both highly educated and you didn't work alongside education). It avoids the firm knowing all of this information directly so reduces discrimination.

It’s not a process I’m familiar with, TeachAdopt. We must be in very different areas.

One sometimes wonders - I’d be a little concerned about my professional indemnity policy if I realised anyone in my firm was regurgitating Stonewall type law.

I think an employment lawyer might know what a legal fiction is and isn't.
I'm an adoptive parent. For most purposes my children are mine but both from my own health and their health POV (including things like mental health, disability etc) it's their biological makeup and hence their birth parents that is important. They can never be my children "for all purposes" but they are "for most purposes".

This is the same as legally changing sex. You can have F on your passport now. You can't have a cervix.

The Equality Act has sex as a protected characteristic and since it separately references gender reassignment we can infer that sex means biological sex and this is protected in its own right

Regardless of whether the EA means biological sex, legal sex or whatever, that reasoning makes no sense.

Protected characteristics aren't mutually exclusive of each other - you can be both black and gay, or elderly, disabled and trans. You could even be trans and be discriminated against on the basis of your sex.

Even if a law was drafted to define homosexual relationships and included transgender people in that it wouldn't take anything away from laws protecting gay people, just open them up to include gay transgender relationships in that as well. In this instance adding another minority group to a law wouldn't take anything away from the people it originally helped, it would simply help more people.

You may say 'the more the merrier', but a fox in the henhouse isn't going to help the chickens, is it?

Homosexuality is about same sex attraction. While individuals can do whatever they like as far as I'm concerned, any law purporting to protect homosexuals that ignores the sex part of same sex attraction may as well be written in plasticine.

What difference would it make exactly? It would still protect the people that you agree it should help.