To find media discussion about trans issues far overstated compared to the actual seriousness of the issue?

[BarmyBrunhilde]

Full disclosure, I happily accept most trans people I've met as their transitioned gender which I know puts me at odds with most people on MN. But as a feminist and a lefty, even if one views trans women as men which I don't, in terms of political priorities it ranks so list on my list of concerns. I assume that applies to most people too (trans people included!).

What someone has listed on their birth certificate has no impact on my life, and surely minimal impact on most women's lives? Imo we should be focusing on cost of living crisis, housing, properly funding women's services including rape crisis services, funding childcare, sorting out the health service and bloody schools! Gender recognition comes way below those for me (even though I'm broadly supportive with some checks in place).

I know gender criticals won't agree with me, and maybe some trans people who feel very strongly, but I do feel there's a silent majority of us who just aren't that fussed?

Some numbers on “perves” as you put it.

“Thanks to the census data, we can now show that 1 in every 585 trans women and England and Wales are convicted sex offenders. That compares to 1 in every 2500-3000 men
and 1 in every 243000 women.”

In 2017 there were 125 women in prison for sexual crimes. Possibly a few of those were born male, because those with a GRC are not counted as male at all - another impact of this 'admin'. There were 13000 men in prison for sexual crimes. (There are only very rare transmen in a man's prison apparently so that won't be a factor).

'Biological women can be perves too' is the kind of false equivalence that is used to muddy the waters on this issue.

Without a doubt there are women who commit sexual offences who go under the radar because they are women and assumptions are made about them in their favour. But then there is quite a lot of male sexual crime that doesn't get to the point of imprisonment either.

Women make up 5% of the imprisoned population. The numbers matter, and unless you think prisoners deserve to be brutalised in prison, the vulnerability of women in prison does matter as well.

Quite aside from anything else, how could anything good come fabrication and lies on official documents? I don't understand why the implications of this are being minimised.

Redefining the legal definition of women to mean “adult human female and men who feel like women no we won’t define in law what feeling like a woman is” changes absolutely everything relating to women

furthermore it says quite clearly that women’s tonight’s, needs & views are subordinate to men’s in our society which can fuck right off

HTH

Rights ffs!

Do sex-based rights matter less to poor women?

4w.pub/you-meet-more-perverts-when-poor/

I’ve said this before but: Women and girls’ rights are not secondary to men’s. It’s not a sacrifice that all women should ever be asked or told to make.

Some women are personally happy to chuck away their own rights because of whatever luxury beliefs and protection/privilege they hold- they may think they can ‘afford’ personally to do so without themselves (or any female person that they care about) being harmed…and obviously we can see loads of men are happy to throw away women’s rights!

But to women who think this way:
You can’t give away your own rights without also giving away the rights of all the other girls and women who come after you. Many or most of them won’t have the same resources or beliefs as you. Don’t make their lives worse!

You might also might change your own mind when you have vulnerable elderly female relatives or daughters to think about- but by then it will be too late.

The need for sex-based legal protections is immutable, because sex is immutable.

It’s all here and on many other threads www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4587106-learning-disabled-girls-women-must-accept-men-providing-intimate-care

The OP has no interest whatsoever in considering the viewpoints of others but will have a lot of fun getting other posters to explain things, will not engage in any serious debate and at some point will leave with a sigh about how Mumsnet used to be lovely but it’s all transphobia now 🙄

I think you’re right there.

I am so relieved this is now being discussed a little bit more openly - it is an issue relevant to all parents, women, lesbians, gay men and women with religious beliefs.

Scotland wishes to open up the GRC process to literally anyone who has £5 and wishes to erase their past. In removing the requirement for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (which we were always told was the essential part of being trans), they enable everyone without a diagnosis to apply for a GRC and therefore get a new birth certificate.

This includes fraudsters and anyone who wishes to avoid their previous name coming up in a DBS check. This is a known loophole that the government are aware of.

The widening of the cohort who may have a GRC (remember disclosure without permission is a criminal offence), and the fact that it changes your birth certificate - a trusted form of id (passport and driving licence are already unreliable as sex marker/name can be changed easily) has all sorts of real world consequences.

If someone has a female birth certificate and all other documentation says they are female, how can an employer - say a Care provider, officially prove they are male? The organisation then has its hands tied and will be obliged to send that person to care for the vulnerable little old lady.

Stonewall, with its vast influence on thousands of organisations (it claimed influence over something like half the workforce until they realised that wasn’t a great look), has spent years persuading companies to bring in self id policies ‘ahead of the law’.

This means that people like op can claim there is little additional effect of a GRC because male born trans people can already access women’s spaces on the self id policies.

The expanding of the GRC cohort just makes it harder and more risky for any org to exclude an obvious male. Who knows which one has a GRC and is now going to sue them because the Haldane ruling says that they are a woman for all purposes under the Equality Act.

It is without doubt that existing self id policies are already causing women and girls to be harmed (see Primark, prisons and hospitals). It is very odd that instead of taking measures to prevent further harm, the Scottish government are determined to exacerbate these situations.

Whilst I assume OP was not posting in good faith, I do hope lurkers click on the links provided and read them. Including those OP posted, of course.

Thank you, OP, for giving us the opportunity to share Barbie Kardashian and Katie Dolotowski with the aibu board.

Scotland wishes to open up the GRC process to literally anyone who has £5 and wishes to erase their past.

Excellently put.
This massively sexist decision is literally putting the wants of allcon artists and abusers above the safety and dignity of all girls and women.

In what way does wanting to protect women mean that one is aligning themselves with misogynistic men? How is wanting to move on from sexist stereotypes abandoning most females?

The issue is men and their proclivities and their violence.

And allowing them a route to pretend to be women is bad for women and girls.

You have to be pretty [redacted] to be honest to not see it. Or deliberately obtuse. Or another man. Or a woman who thinks her life is so protected that it will never affect her.

Incidentally has anyone mentioned the TRANS hotline on DBS applications, where known paedophiles can change their name, apply for jobs in schools and then just not call the TRANS hotline to admit their old name and then proceed to getting the job with no safeguards in place?

Full disclosure, I happily accept most trans people I've met as their transitioned gender which I know puts me at odds with most people on MN

what a goady opening sentence. YABU to march into a thread with such a load of bollocks

It's the point, isn't it?
It's not just trans people who'll be grabbing these £5 certificates.

It'll be time served child abusers.
It'll be known sex offenders.
It'll be known voyeurs, known gropers, known flashers.
It'll be shoplifters who fancy a nice easy ride in a girls jail next time they're caught. Bit of nookie on the side, that's a nice way to serve time, huh?
It'll be paedophiles who want to work in a primary school. Your child's primary school.

They all have lovely new identities so you've no idea who they used to be and any previous offences vanish poofff into the ether. They never happened. Just like magic, huh?

It'll be Balloo Challenor. Model citizen, polutical activist for the Green Party, Scout leader who, in his spare time, enjoyed tying a 10 year old girl to the rafters in his attic, raping her and electrocuting her whilst wearing a frilly dress. Coventry just a few years ago. Look it up.

It'll be confused teenagers who just don't know wtf is going on with their bodies during puberty.
Homosexual kids dealing with homophobic parents.

Sorry haven’t RTFL, but there’s ann article in the times today about this.
‘It might never happen love is no basis for law’, by Janice turner.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2a58f174-9902-11ed-91ab-4070465550ba?shareToken=3b6ff49f9886676fe7883489244ef54a

Basically eroding women’s rights however small can have far reaching consequences

I think OP has made some very good points.

I don't want to link but there is a current petition calling for UK gov to amend the wording of the EA to distinguish between biological sex and legal sex in terms of single sex spaces. You can find it in the feminism pages or on sex matters website.

but once again:
A trans person is not the issue. There are very few, although with new legislation i'm sure more people with gender dysphoria will feel more comfortable about coming out. That is good, and i hope that it brings people who have been suppressing their nature find it helpful and it brings them peace and happiness.

The issue is bad faith actors, who can now, at the drop of a hat, gain a GRC. There is no requirement to shave off a beard or in any way modify their body (i am fine with not requiring surgery and so on) to indicate that they aren't a burly 6foot beardy bloke called Dave, but a woman called Susan. And that some of these bad faith actors will do it just so they can make women annoyed, irritated or afraid. Some of them will be doing it to get very very easy access with nobody being allowed to gainsay them, to places where women and girls are vulnerable. This group of people are the problem.

If you can't challenge anyone, because they have paid their cash and got a GRC, that they are in the wrong place, how do we know which people are safe? A passing transwoman who wants to use the gym, go for a pee, isn't an issue. Requesting same-sex (not gender) personal care should be a no-brainer.

That is the issue. Not trans people.

You clearly know little of the views of many of us and may even be projecting.

I have no hatred of trans people at all, even though thousands of organisations have been persuaded to adopt policies to directly benefit them while being hugely detrimental to me, my daughters and my other female family members.

We have all already been directly affected in various ways, from sports to mixed sex toilets to retail changing rooms and being gaslit over the sex of a healthcare provider.

Yet still we don’t hate anyone, I wish no ill on trans people but I do need to push back on the extensive and detrimental changes that have already been made throughout society and look to continue.

In what way have the policies that organisations have adopted actually been “hugely” detrimental to you?

Honest question.
Could we allow people to change their birth certificates/ passports etc to say trans woman/transman?
Instead of recording people as the opposite sex at all. Which is a lie because, obviously nobody can change sex.
Could marriage vows not permit the use of transman/transwoman also?
Would that be a fair compromise?

There might possibly be an argument to be made for marriage certificates; but birth certificates are - as the name suggests - a record of your circumstances at birth.

If your BC says you were born in Rhyl and you then move to Los Angeles at the age of 1 and live the rest of your life there, it makes no difference to your BC - because you were BORN in Rhyl. If you are later adopted by different people who bring you up as your parents from a very young age, it makes no difference to your BC - because that records your BIOLOGICAL parents.

My own BC records my place of birth as a hospital that later ceased to be used for births and instead became a facility exclusively for the elderly, and it now doesn't exist any longer at all. Doesn't matter: it did exist when I was born there.

My own BC records my parent's occupations, however they are no longer alive, so they obviously do not have those occupations now. Doesn't matter: they were their occupations when I was born.

But as PP said, it's all about validation, so the 'trans' part is happily used when gaining sympathy and special additional rights/privileges and condemning people for being 'phobic' or committing 'actual violence'; but at other times, they prefer to drop it altogether in claiming to be part of the sex group that they wish to adopt, no different whatsoever from anybody else who is rightly in that sex group.

In what way have the policies that organisations have adopted actually been “hugely” detrimental to you?

Read on further - it's stated clearly in the very next paragraph of that post that you quoted.

I know you aren’t a lesbian, that is all.

I don't like this idea that if I'm not personally affected, I shouldn't care. The chances of me going to prison are vanushingly slim. I don't think that's a good enough reason to not care about imprisoned women. I don't accept that.

But I do think that attitude is part of the reason why the trans issue is such a problem. The activists do not consider the wider implications for other groups (such as women) and have successfully managed to spread the idea that if you don't personally feel the effects, any interest you have is motivated by hatred. It's a very neoliberal movement.