“Transwomen are women”

[BertrandRussell]

I’ve tried this before-but please can someone explain the thinking behind this to me. I am naive enough to think that there must be some- is it the “male brain/female brain” thing? And where did it come from? Where did it start?

Please-no abuse from either “side”. Just statements of fact. With links to evidence if possible.

Men don't actually have to enact violence for women to be afraid. We know they can. They remind us, all the time

This this this. Why are women being fictionally raped and murdered every time you turn on the tv? Why are there stories about murdered women and children constantly plastered across front pages even though no-one seems to think these crimes are important enough to prosecute adequately?

Men reminding us they can

Is there anything we can do to support Jess Phillips? She is being harried on Twitter......

I'd love to support Jess Phillips but I'm too scared

I'm deeply involved in the party (though a Corbyn-sceptic) and I'd lose so many friends over this. They're mostly younger and fully on the bandwagon. It makes me really sad because it would seem they don't understand the basis of women's oppression at all. I already knew that most of the gay men I know in the party don't even believe women are still oppressed at all.

I read the story about the screening.
I don't think its a case of willfully supporting delusional thinking.
More that people will be able to register with health care as their chosen gender. They will then be treated as that gender ie. invited for screening.
I am no fan of many, many aspects of all this stuff but even the Daily Mail struggled to make it look like the NHS was scared of offending transwomen.

The Labour party certainly seems afraid of offending transwomen....

SC is my MP.
I don't think I can vote for her again.
She was clearly courting the LGBT vote and is now utterly unable to back down even when hundreds of women are politely asking her to consider the issues.
It makes it very hard to trust her.
She has used women's issues to bolster her career and now she is selling them down the river.

How can we support Jess @BertrandRussell?

I saw that. I think I did try down one rabbit hole.

I didn't say it was a good idea to redefine "woman," I said it wouldn't be impossible.

Other legal fictions: that companies have legal personhood. Yet throw a brick through the window of a supermarket and you'll get charged with criminal damage, not assault against the person.

The most similar is probably legal adoption: adoptive parents are parents. "Parents" has a real biological meaning. However in law, and in society, adoptive parents are indeed parents. The courts (Lady Justice Hale in this instance) have interpreted "parents" to include gestational, biological and psychological parents - so a parent doesn't have to have gestated a child or be related; being a very involved step-parent makes you a parent, as does being the gestational mother's lesbian partner and the second mother to the child for example.

I wonder whether in the future we will see a similar tripartite interpretation so that "woman" (and "man") are interpreted as biological (XX or XY), legal (has a GRC) and / or social (passes through life as a member of that sex; the Clapham omnibus test).

That would include trans men (biological but not social). It would include those with a GRC (legal but not biological). It would include someone who lives as a woman and is perceived as a woman (because as liberals point out, the employer who rejects someone because they think the interviewee is a woman capable of getting pregnant doesn't do so because he conducts a chromosome test but because that person looks like a woman and has a date of birth between 40 and 20 years ago). It would not include Danielle Muscato, who the person on the Clapham omnibus would not perceive as a woman.

This is all theoretical btw, I'm not proposing it as a legal test. Quite apart from anything else I've had most of a bottle of wine after an epically shit day

But Laura, adopted children don't get a birth certificate with their adoptive parents on it. Their original birth certificate is held and sealed, their new adoption certificate shows their legal adoptive parents - but there is no pretence that they are actually their birth parents.

There is no hiding of the truth.

By insisting that transwomen are indeed real, natal, female women that is denying the truth. Added to which reissuing birth certificates is also rewriting legal documents.

Your reasoning is a bit complicated don't you think? Why redefine "woman" to mean "biological person with XX chromosomes OR someone with a GRC OR someone who socially passes through life as a member of the class of people with the sex of people who have XX chromosomes OR biological women who are now transmen (with GRC or social or etc etc) OR those who are perceived as a woman OR

and / or social (passes through life as a member of that sex; the Clapham omnibus test).

There is a massive problem with this though. Identifying as female socially, even if you pass, does NOT change your sex. It is something that at any time you can opt out of - as soon as the disadvantage that natal women receive rears its ugly head.

Amply demonstrated by this little switcheroo.

Well I'm not doing any of it Maryz, the govt has already decided that someone with a GRC is a woman / man, and I'm looking at how I would present it in court if I were instructed to defend the position that woman is already defined by sense of self rather than biology.

Something being complicated - or even dangerous - doesn't mean it's not possible. Take another famous legal fiction, now defunct: that on marriage, a woman literally became part of her husband's person. Obviously it didn't create an actual physical conjoinment but it did a legal and social one.

The GRA is terribly badly drafted with a worrying conflation of sex and gender: s.9(1)

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman).

Where a full gender recognition certificate is issued to a person, the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender (so that, if the acquired gender is the male gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a man and, if it is the female gender, the person’s sex becomes that of a woman)

Read with 'sex' instead of gender that actually makes sense. As it stands, I don't see the point in differentiating between sex and gender as it does - what purpose does this actually serve? It just sounds confused.

It is confused.

I hope that the fundraiser to challenge Labour's position on AWS is successful because all of this needs clarification.

The current confused state isn't fair to anyone.

Has this news story been shared yet?

www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/female-labour-councillors-blast-fundraiser-1074821

The upshot - women who were elected because of a shortlist argue that transwomen should be allowed to be on the shortlist because its not about sex but about the best person for the job whether they are a man or a woman.

Someone is confused! ...

I still don’t understand how such a small minority of people are able to wield such power. It just doesn’t make sense. As i’ve said before, it’s taken 40 years for Ms to become an acceptable alternative........

I still don’t understand how such a small minority of people are able to wield such power. It just doesn’t make sense. As i’ve said before, it’s taken 40 years for Ms to become an acceptable alternative........

Because they are men!!
You look at all the times women have complained about being abused by men in the theatre and films. Everyone shrugs and the man keeps his job.
One man says he was abused and the actor is sacked and written out of history.

Women say that they would like to be safe from abusive people. Everyone shrugs their shoulders.
Men say they want to be safe from abusive people and everyone rushes to keep them safe.

Thanks Laura (and for your shit day) it’s really interesting to get a legal perspective on this. I’m still struggling to get my head around it all.

I don’t feel as though the way forward is to attack legal fictions as there are a lot of them, but to seek the exemptions to women’s spaces to be well recognised and implemented. Feels like that’s not happening at the moment even before we maybe are going to revise the GRA.

So (talking of attacks on legal fictions being maybe not the best tactic.. the article I link to below quotes Melanie Philips making that criticism!)

I have a lot of time for Peter Tatchell, as a dedicated humanitarian who has spent his life working to better the lives for LGB people in the face of personal physical attack and opposition.

But this latest blog calling for revision to the GRA has really disappointed me. It’s written by GIRES. Peter’s intro says he thinks feminists and trans rights are reconcilable. But... look at what the offered solution actually is! Link here.

Apparently, it seems to be STFU feminists. You (women in general- not just feminists) already don’t have these rights to exclude men from women’s spaces. So you will have to wait until a crime has been committed in such a space to punish that one individual for their illegal behaviour. Because actually there are no women’s spaces or women’s roles left for natal women to defend.

So I feel like Equalities and Human Rights Commission (are they the right body to do this?) need to issue detailed clarification for venues and organisations etc for when it’s OK for women’s venues to exclude men. Before we get a GRA.

Or do we need a test case to clarify the current law? A women’s venue who refuses entry to transwomen and the complainant brings a case to establish precedent?

Or would it work as an equally applicable precedent to get a man’s venue to refuse self IDing transmen, and then for those women bring a legal case? I mean, would a case involving transmen work equally well to clarify about what female spaces transwomen should be able to enter?

Sorry for massive post!

Sorry Laura, I'm not accusing you of anything; quite the opposite.

I'm just completely baffled at why it's even considered ok (legally or otherwise) to use the wrong words for people.

It's not correct to tell anyone they can change their sex; it's impossible to change someone's DNA. If transwomen want to say they are "legal women" they can (once they have GRCs of course, or if self-ID comes in; currently they shouldn't be allowed to with no GRC). But it's never going to be scientifically correct to say that transwomen are women, or female or born women; they just aren't.

It seems that Tatchell didn't consider that his argument applies to TiMs too. Stay in the men's spaces until someone attacks you and then enjoy full recourse to the law as it already protects you.

With critical thinking and logic every argument they put forward reduces down to "the rules if you have a penis are different to the rules if you have a vagina."

If a principle can't be universally applied it isn't a principle, it's a tool of oppression.

It works with self-identity too - if women were allowed to 'self-identify', en masse, away from TiMs into a different category, then TiMs and men would block this attempt.

Self identity dismantles itself if everyone does it. It balances entirely upon the pressure of preventing the majority from doing it.

Imagine if an entire population of women self identified as 'people with medically verifiable XX chromosomes, who deny gender identity exists' and demanded recognition as a category distinct from 'people who call themselves women'?

In fact, that is what we are currently doing, no? How well are our efforts to self- identity being received so far?

ChattyLion

I couldn't get through that Peter Tatchell link because it's so male, male, MALE.

Maintaining the only reason women don't want men in their spaces is in case they are attacked. And they're going to be attacked anyway, so what's the difference, buster?

Only a man could ever imagine a woman would feel zero discomfort from a non-predatory male.

It's infuriating that his absence of experience informs his opinion. Despite being told, numerous times, by women, that their experience of life is completely different to his.

He doesn't take into account men's sense of entitlement. They don't have to be predatory. They can be as benign as you like. They still take over. Manspreading and manplaining are universal experiences.

And it doesn't matter if the man in question is the most empathetic, sweetest person in the world. Women's attitudes to men do not rely on each, single experience as and when it happens ffs.

I don't want to get changed in the same room as my father-in-law. Who wouldn't hurt a fly. Or my son's best friend, whom I adore.

What really, really rams this all home is quite how many men are utterly oblivious to women's oppression.

The very fact that they argue against, firstly, so very many women all saying the same, and secondly over their bloody boundaries is enough for them to have creep stamped across their forehead before they even formulate the end of their sentence.

This linguistic masturbation over why women shouldn't have boundaries angers me almost more than anything else.

Ignorance, arrogance and a neon fucking light above their head blinking 'I'M CLUELESS'.

Barracker - "Imagine if an entire population of women self identified as 'people with medically verifiable XX chromosomes, who deny gender identity exists' and demanded recognition as a category distinct from 'people who call themselves women'?

"In fact, that is what we are currently doing, no? How well are our efforts to self- identity being received so far?"

This, 100%. In fact, you can already see this in action. The trans-ally end of liberal feminism is happy to accept the qualifier "cis". So what's happening? TRA bloggers and tweeters claiming they too are cis.

So what's happening? TRA bloggers and tweeters claiming they too are cis.

And will never stop. Because it's not the language they are after, it's the concept.

You can erase every single linguistic distinction, and it still won't stop.

They will end up purposely making a distinction in order to appropriate it.

A nightmarish, never ending chain yanking.

Which is why I went "the full Germaine" several years ago. You stop the chain yanking at the very first link in the chain by saying "You are a man. Worthy of full human rights. You can wear whatever you like. You can call yourself whatever you want. I fully support your right to live free from the threat of harrassment or violence. I fully support your right to employment in any job that is not sex segregated as allowed in the Equalities Act. I fully support your right not to be discriminated against in housing. But you are still a man."

Can someone please explain to me why it's bigotry to not accept that a man is a woman? Especially when you are accepting of transwomen and understand their rights.