I am Janice Turner's No 1 fan - another excellent article

[Stopmakingsense]

This one picks up in particular the huge rise in women identifying as men, and the increasing inability of anyone being able to question it:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/even-asking-questions-is-now-transphobic-ztk3rlrfk?shareToken=1f64a5116171eb54a9a866590e6432ec

This shouldn't have come to this. Transgender males should have the decency and the respect for woman's boundaries to stay out of sex segregated female spaces. But many of them have no empathy for women. It's about personal "validation". That's really the long and short of it. Boundary violation is a huge red flag. They should be content with a third space when offered and the pressure should be on authorities and organisations to provide those gender neutral spaces. Not force women to share with males in intimate situations against their will.

The men who fail to understand all this, and therefore blithely demand access to women spaces, are the very men who should not be granted it.

Exactly what I was trying to say but much pithier!

The men who fail to understand all this, and therefore blithely demand access to women spaces, are the very men who should not be granted it.

YY! Absolutely.

Some trans women understand this and do not demand access to female spaces. I have great sympathy for them. They are often abused and excluded by transactivists.

Transgender males should have the decency and the respect for woman's boundaries to stay out of sex segregated female spaces.

That's completely it. And women absolutely know.

It's ludicrous, that the very men who are insisting on access, because they are women, act exactly like the men that women use those spaces to avoid.

I have great sympathy for them. They are often abused and excluded by transactivists.

Me too.

The conflation of sex with gender, which this proposed change in the law would reify, is harmful.

AFAIK none of us want any discrimination or segregation on the basis of gender. I would like to see it become a redundant concept, not for it to be reinforced. Sex, on the other hand is real. Its effects are real.

I'm sorry, but I don't seem to have made myself clear.
the point I was trying (but obviously failing) to make is that the changes to the Gender Recognition Act are concerned only with the administrative procedure for obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate, which has much the same everyday significance as a birth certificate. You are not asked to produce your birth certificate in order to get into a public toilet, or a hospital , or a sports centre, or a rape centre !

In particular it would not affect access to public toilets, because there is no existing law that prevents anyone from using either toilet. Nor would it affect the ward someone is put on in hospital -- partly because mixed wards are common anyway, and partly because the hospital would surely go by your medical records rather than expecting to see your birth certificate or GRC?

Possibly more later -- gotta go!

Strange,
There has been a massive campaign which was supported by all political parties that mixed sex wards were humiliating, undesirable and should be eradicated. I have no idea what your experience of childbirth and hospital admittance for gynaecological problems is, but I have had plenty of experience and have no wish to end up on a mixed sex ward for this or in fact for any other medical issue.
And I am not alone!

We know it is not just a small change in an administrative procedure. The people that demand this change already demand more of society, on social media and in the way the current laws are implemented than was ever intended. You don't even have to go to court with anything - individual, organisations and companies are threatened with the laws on hate speech and back down and keep their head covered.

They are not going to stop. If this is passed, they will be emboldened to push boundaries as far as they can and will have the technicalities of the law on their side.

Mixed wards are not common. The govt has committed to phasing them out and hospitals are fined for breaching standards on mixed wards.

Your argument that they are common anyway and so everyone is totally at ease with mixed wards, mixed changing rooms, mixed prisons only tells us what it is you actually want to achieve. Women are not ok with any of the above.

How come the trans community just get what they want, when they want it?

It took women years to get anywhere and we are still not taken fucking seriously.

Strange you are missing the point. Although you do not have to produce a GRC to get into a toilet presently, the use of self-certification would effectively mean that no woman could object to the presence of a man in a rape crisis centre or doing her smear test without a woman chaperone or in a prison. They would have the same right of access as me.

If I saw a man using the changing rooms at work that were for women I would complain to building services. I would expect them to follow up on my complaint. In the new world they wouldn't be able to as they would be forced to view this particular man as a woman if he said he was. And since you can't discriminate between women and men who say they are women, there go my rights.

SuburbanRhonda
Thos GIREs materials are shocking aren't they?
As an experienced trainer I am horrified at the deliberate manipulation of the target audience using a mix of facts, opinion, subjective views dressed up as facts and downright lies. Unfortunately it is all mixed in with perfectly legitimate and positive information and anti bullying approaches. This means that, unless you unpick this line by line, very few in a target audience will be able to challenge it.

It is all presented within a framework of 'the law' and very clear directions that unless you 'follow' the line, adhere to these beliefs, you are not only wrong, but transphobic and likely to be guilty of hate crimes.

It is not educational training - it is indoctrination - and the NHS and the Dfe are supporting and funding this. Most trainers would be ashamed to produce material this biased.

This is why things have changed so quickly because a small group of political activists have been enabled to spread their message so widely authorised by the state. And no one realises this is happening so there's no challenge.

Strange I think that you have misunderstood the significance of a GRC. As I understand it, a GRC allows a male person to be legally identified as female. It has huge implications for the treatment of that person in law.

A GRC gives trans women legal entitlement to women's spaces (e.g. prisons, sports, girls' schools and women's colleges), jobs that currently require female staff (certain care roles, crisis centres) and protections (grants, awards, positive discrimination initiatives, separate sex wards etc etc). It's a far wider issue than toilets.

There should be some gatekeeping here.

Also we do have to declare our sex to the NHS. For most of us this is done by our parents at birth when we receive an NHS number. This is why women receive invitations to breast screenings and not men.

Isn't our actual DNA male or female? Noone can change their DNA can they? The whole thing is mind boggling.

It is all presented within a framework of 'the law' and very clear directions that unless you 'follow' the line, adhere to these beliefs, you are not only wrong, but transphobic and likely to be guilty of hate crimes.

It is not educational training - it is indoctrination - and the NHS and the Dfe are supporting and funding this. Most trainers would be ashamed to produce material this biased.

This is why things have changed so quickly because a small group of political activists have been enabled to spread their message so widely authorised by the state. And no one realises this is happening so there's no challenge.

I think there is a problem that the government has made cuts in the civil service and now use charities and voluntary organisations to do what they did. It all sounded very positive (and cheap). The trouble is these organisations have their own reasons for existing and their own aims and goals and they are not necessarily coming from a place of even handed common sense. They are presented as the 'experts in the field' when in reality they come into existence because someone wants something changed with good cause (eg friend dies of a particular cancer and they wish to make a particular test available) and that is why they are funded. (Then they get too much say and the message becomes 'you have to have that test whether it is good for you or not because x died and all those other people, and you don't want that happening to you, do you?)

@SeaRabbit - a Women's Place are on Facebook here: www.facebook.com/Womans-Place-UK-494295627591295/

and on twitter here: @WomansPlaceUK

They're doing great work about the importance of protecting and strengthening single-sex services and spaces.

Please everyone go give them a 'like' and a RT

StrangeAdventure
Women are not ok with this. We've been campaigning for single sex hospital wards and DV shelters for years.

At the moment, women can challenge men who are in womens spaces, and after self ID is introduced we cant. We could be sued.
GRC give men the legal right to be in womens spaces.

Do the decent thing, and campaign for a third gender neutral space. We can all support that.

If getting a GRC becomes as easy as changing your name (ie. a paperwork exercise) then the whole concept of sex in law becomes pointless.

Stats collected become meaningless - if anyone can be a man or a woman because they filled in a form, then it's as irrelevant as your name.

Of course discrimination will still exist, in person, it'll be obvious for the vast majority of people which ones are male and which are female so bad bosses will know who to hire to avoid those pesky pregnancies, but no-one will be able to articulate that - the words will have been taken away.

BBC is reporting today that the US Marines has commissioned its first female officer
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41394646

I found myself wondering if it was a real woman - or just a MTF as was the case with the fairly recent announcement by the British army about a 'female' first.

What a destruction of trust when you can't be sure whether a female first/winner is a real woman or not.

Almost certainly a MTF as the reason to employ them is to gain access to women's only spaces. They are good at that.

The person involved wishes to remain anonymous.

You don't know if it is a woman or a someone who is now a woman and could have been in the marines as a man anyway.

Utterly meaningless press release, unless they have another purpose in mind.

It is currently possible to change the 'sex' (not 'gender' ) on your passport with a Deed Poll and a letter from your GP. That wouldn't get you admitted to a prison of the opposite sex but it would count for most things in daily life, so why need the changes suggested in the Gender Identity Bill?