It was the Gender Recognition Act that messed everything up

[jellyfrizz]

The ongoing hostilities between 'TERFs' and trans is so sad to see. Feminists and trans people should be natural allies as gender is what is harming everyone involved in this.

Feminists fully encourage, support and engage in gender non-conformity and not being defined by your reproductive system.

The obvious solution would be reduce gender's influence by creating laws that protect people however they present.

Instead an Act was created that enshrines gender. We should be pushing for people to be accepted however they present instead of making them conform to our binary society and encourage people to deny and hide their past by changing birth certificates etc.

We should be pushing for a society where people can be trans and proud, where being trans isn't even a thing, just people going about their lives.

I really think the GRA has pushed the situation to this point and should not just be reformed but scrapped altogether in favour of new laws to protect gender non-conforming people from discrimination. A gender recognition certificate does not protect people from stigma or discrimination despite what MPs might like to believe.

Interesting article, Stopmakingsense.

Do the Maria Millers of this world actively want all sex-segregated areas/sports/scholarships etc to be completely abolished then? The eventual outcome would be that men would not even need to claim a 'female identity' to access women's spaces, because:

For a school to allow a male student who identifies as female into a woman’s shower facility while refusing such shower access to a male student who identifies as male (or as androgynous, or pangender, etc.), does discriminate on grounds of gender identity.

I really think the GRA has pushed the situation to this point and should not just be reformed but scrapped altogether in favour of new laws to protect gender non-conforming people from discrimination.

You have highlighted such an important point here, jellyfritz, not only in pointing out that the GRA is where the problem starts, but in emphasising that feminists must challenge the root of gender identity ideology, not just the more extreme manifestations of it.

Trans activists have used the Overton Window brilliantly: they've been so unyielding in pushing the most extreme version of genderist ideology, that feminists are always on the back foot, desperately trying to stop whatever is happening this month - rapists in women's prisons, boys winning girls' sports events, 12-year-olds being given sterilising hormones - and all of the madness springs from the initial false premise that is enshrined in the GRA: the nonsensical and sexist idea that a human male can 'feel' female, and vice versa.

Feminists need to shift the Overton window by staking out a stance that unequivocally rejects genderist ideology in its entirety: human beings cannot change sex, gender is sex roles, rather than legislating to protect a subjective feeling in someone's head ('gender identity'), let's protect everyone's right to transgress sex roles: meaning, for instance, employers should not be allowed to discriminate against a man who prefers to present in a manner more typically associated with women.

And I would add that we should also insist on the importance of the materiality of sex: what those differences mean for how men and women live in the world, and why services, statistics, sports bodies, etc need to take account of them.

This is the firmest ground to stand on: a sound, logical position that offers an alternative understanding of gender to the one that is being promoted by the transgender movement, and protects freedom of expression for all while insisting that sex is both real and politically relevant.