Middle class biological women prepare to be relegated to being second class citizens by the end of the week

[Mycatsmudge]

The Labour Party is expected to win a huge majority in the GE on Thursday. My fears are their stance on trans rights which are being prioritised over those of biological women and this will risk our safety, opportunities and dignity. I also work in the NHS and read what is happening to the nurses in Darlington with horror.

My other concern is they have not been transparent on their plans on how to raise money for their spending pledges other than say they will invest and reap the benefit of green technology. This is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. I can only conclude we will be taxed even more but stealthy.

Then I read this in their manifesto:
‘Expansion of the Equality Act 2010Labour will implement the socioeconomic protected characteristic of the Equality Act, also the socioeconomic duty under Section 1 of the Equality Act and ensure equality impact assessments of government policy are conducted.5 Jun 2024’
To me this means richer areas will get less money from government for public services than poorer areas. I live in an area which is very boringly middle class but our public services are already cut to the bone(bin collections fortnightly, potholes left for months, all adult evening classes gone) but we still pay a hefty amount of council tax.

So under a Labour government I as a biological woman, working in the NHS on the frontline and will be expected to share our women’s changing rooms with any man with a GRC. I will probably be taxed more as a higher rate taxpayer because the tax bands have stayed static for years and I will expect less public services because I live in the suburbs but my council taxes will most likely increase just to sustain what we already have

Yeah. A tiny handful of them were there. Most weren't and have only ever been in opposition.

To a certain extent that's inevitable when you have a two party system and one of them usually remains in power for a decade or more at a time.

But the result is that when the party in power finally does change, you usually have a lot of people with no experience in government running the country.

That doesn't mean they'll necessarily do a bad job. But the fact that some completely different people might have done an alright job 15+ years ago certainly isn't an indication that the current lot will do a good job.

I thought Labour had pulled in a lot of ex Civil Service people to help them; you know, all the ones that Boris drove out…

well maybe not all… but there have been quite a few I think. That will help them tame Whitehall

If they do exactly the opposite to the Tories they’ll be excellent.

I've been here since 2018. 🤖

Prevention is better than prosecution. The majority of rape victims, myself included, never make a police report. It's better to prevent the rape from happening at all. Single-sex spaces are key for this.

The Law Lords, in 1992.

And following the landmark case that reached the House of Lords, the illegality of rape within marriage was specifically laid out under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Labour turned case law into statute. Well done them. 🙄

I was totally with you up until the last sentence.

I'm sorry you feel so worried @Mycatsmudge. Change can induce anxiety, but often it brings benefits and is rarely as bad as you feared.

Why? Having female-only spaces for when women are undressed or sleeping is a very simple way to keep rapists from taking advantage of us when we are at our most vulnerable.

I went to an all-girl secondary to avoid being in the same mixed secondary as the boys who sexually assaulted me at primary school. It was a very effective protection mechanism: I wasn't sexually assaulted even once in seven years at secondary.

I’m worried we will have a PM who ignores basic biology and puts biological women’s safety, opportunities and dignity at risk. I’m worried the Labour Party will be voted in having hidden their actual tax agenda and my finances which are already tight will be squeezed until the pips squeak. So yes I do feel I have real reasons to be worried.

Think of the money decent public services saves you - no three or four figure dental bills, no damage to your car from potholes. In any event there’s a clear undertaking that there will be no increase in income tax, NI or VAT - what other taxes do you pay on a regular basis?

Developing nations still allow for dignity and privacy, so yes Labour are dragging us back into pre historic times of no privacy or civility“

Oh, mate…

Gosh. Stratospheric hyperbole on here

Tax increases which will affect me include Council tax, fuel duty, pension contributions and ISA savings. Also possible inheritance tax. Regarding increased spending in public services. Having worked for the NHS for 30+ years in various roles and departments I don’t believe just more money is going to improve it in the long term. Its poor performance and inefficiencies are also due poor procurement, terrible IT systems, operations, inability to retain and incentivise staff, and how politicise it is which precludes serious long term strategic planning

Well yes, exactly. Men have managed to coerce, abuse and exploit women for the many years in which we’ve had single sex toilets.

Women are most vulnerable when there is the greatest imbalance of power; economic, social, or cultural. Whether Labour have a shot at addressing the inequalities in our society that remains to be seen, but at least it’s a goal of theirs.

AND THERE’S NO NEED TO TYPE IN CAPS.

He is not ignoring basic biology. He is acknowledging the law, and a law that's not easily changed.

The reason we have the Gender Recognition Act is because the UK has required, by the European Court of Human Rights, to implement a law to give effect to trans people's human right to be recognized as their chosen gender (a right that the ECHR found that they have).

What the Equality Act tries to do is balance that right of transgender people (particularly transwomen) with womens' right to have female-only spaces. So the law, as it currently is, does not bar all transwomen from all women's spaces but does allow some some or all transwomen to be barred from specific single-sex spaces.

Labour's position is to continue the status quo.

If you want the law to be changed so as to bar all transwomen from all single-sex spaces then you likely need to vote for a party that will take us out of the European Convention on Human Rights - so that'd be Reform.

Council tax isn’t determined centrally, pension contributions and ISA gains are tax free, fuel duty is negligible and only 7% of estates pay inheritance tax. If you’ve worked in the NHS for 30 years, you’ll remember - as I do - the days under the last Labour government when it worked as it should. Why wouldn’t you want to see the return of that? Labour are clear that they intend to reform it.

SnappyBee

If you want the law to be changed so as to bar all transwomen from all single-sex spaces then you likely need to vote for a party that will take us out of the European Convention on Human Rights - so that'd be Reform.

Which other human rights will that take us out of, please, SnappyBee?

trans people's human right to be recognized as their chosen gender

Which has nothing to do with single-sex spaces because sex isn't gender.

If you want the law to be changed so as to bar all transwomen from all single-sex spaces then you likely need to vote for a party that will take us out of the European Convention on Human Rights - so that'd be Reform.

I'm skim-reading the Goodwin vs UK ruling and, whilst I may have missed something, it seems that all the practical problems the court rightly raised about not being able to retire at 60 and not being able to marry, paying higher insurance premiums, etc have been resolved. We have same-sex marriage, we are soon to have parity of retirement age, it's illegal to charge different insurance premiums based on sex. People have the right to change name.

On the privacy front, it shouldn't be onerous to tweak processes that currently request a birth certificate to instead request a passport or driving licence. Given that you can buy a copy of any birth certificate you want from the General Records Office and it doesn't have a photograph on, it's not effective as ID anyway.

It also wouldn't be onerous to provision some single-occupant loos alongside single-sex mass-occupancy loos for anyone who isn't comfortable using the loo for their sex. I don't see why we still need to maintain this legal fiction that people can change sex.

I know I'm not Snappy but I can furnish an answer: Any of the rights that a future govt might decide that it doesn't want us to have any more. The ECHR is a "backstop" of sorts, it makes it harder for the Govt from deciding to reintroduce blasphemy laws or criminalise being gay. It's a tough call because we cede some of our sovereignty to be in ECHR, taking away our ability to decide how to handle issues ourselves, but on the other hand it impedes a corrupt govt who want to repeal the Abortion Act or remove the vote from women, for example. It was ECHR obligations that forced Westminster to intervene to decriminalise abortion in NI when the Assembly wouldn't even meet.

Which has nothing to do with single-sex spaces because sex isn't gender.
It has everything to do with single sex spaces because it encompasses having the person's chosen sex marker on their government-issued ID documents.

All I can think of is how unthinkable it was that women wouldn't be able to access a termination legally in the US...

I am voting for the party for women.

We don't show papers to go into the loo or sauna or dormitory and we use our eyes, ears, and noses to tell us what sex someone is. Humans identify sex correctly with very high accuracy in face-to-face situations.