The Critic
'The trans rights that trump all
Women’s rights were not considered in legislation that allows trans people to effectively decide their own gender'
By Julie Bindel and Melanie Newman
April 2021
(extract)
In 2004, with the passing of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) the UK became the first country in the world to legally recognise trans people as the opposite sex without medical treatment. The Act passed without controversy, and with little media coverage. The law was framed thus: a transsexual person (the terminology used at the time by legislators and most trans people) must acquire a gender recognition certificate from a new gender recognition panel made up of lawyers and doctors.
In most cases, to get a certificate a person will need confirmation from a specialist doctor that they have gender dysphoria, have been living in the acquired sex for two years, and that they intend to continue doing so. It is not necessary to have undergone surgery. Anyone issued with a certificate is entitled to a new birth certificate in their acquired sex and to marry someone of the opposite gender to the acquired gender (equal marriage had not yet become law). There are caveats, such as sport. The Act allows sports bodies to exclude those with a certificate if the sport is “gender-affected”: that is, where strength, stamina or physique provides an unfair advantage.
How quaint this all sounds today. The now defunct proposed amendment to the GRA, which would have dispensed with the need for any medical intervention in order to legally change sex, sparked a culture war between feminists seeking to hold on to women-only services, and trans activists who insist “trans women are women” based on an inner “feeling”.
What few people know is the influence the Act had on the international stage in the early 2000s.Two years after the GRA was passed, a set of 29 guiding rules on recognition and treatment of LGBT people were laid down at a meeting in Indonesia. The “Yogyakarta Principles” demanded that a person’s self-defined gender identity be legally recognised without the need for medical treatment, transforming the GRA from obscure British legislation to a minimum standard for the entire world.
Professor Robert Wintemute: change of opinion came from listening to women
The Principles were drafted and signed by a group of lawyers, human rights experts and trans rights activists, including Robert Wintemute, professor of human rights law at King’s College London. Since then Wintemute has had second thoughts. He says women’s rights were not considered during the meeting and that he should have challenged some aspects of the Principles. (continues)
The majority of the 2006 Yogyakarta signatories were men and trans men. “The issue of access to single-sex spaces largely affects women and not men. So it was easy for the men in the group to be swept along by concern for LGBT rights and ignore this issue,” says Wintemute. (continues)
Wintemute did not notice the change in 2017, however. Despite his focus on LGBT human rights, the furious debates raging across the world between feminist groups and trans activists had failed to penetrate his world. He finally woke up to the conflict in 2018, when he was lecturing at a summer school. His lecture included a discussion of the UK’s “spousal veto” provision, which gives spouses of people transitioning the right to divorce before the transition is legally recognised.
“I explained that spouses didn’t sign up to a same-sex marriage, so their consent is needed before they are made part of one.” A trans man in the audience objected. “I talked about needing to consider the rights of others and said that trans rights don’t trump everything else. The person became angry and stormed out of the room.”
Since then, increasing evidence of the impact on women of males self-identifying as the opposite sex — with and without formal certification — has emerged. In the UK, Canada, Argentina, and Ireland, female prisoners have been locked up with trans women with histories of violence, including a trans woman described as a “grave threat to women”. (continues)
Having listened to women and had his “eyes opened”, Wintemute has travelled so far from his original position that he now wonders whether the GRA and prior laws in Europe should have been passed. “The arguments made at that time were that people had done everything they could to appear to be of the opposite sex, but the fact that their appearance did not match their official documents put them at risk of violence, harassment, or discrimination,” he says.
Instead of changing the person’s legal sex, the law could have simply sought to protect people from harm triggered by the difference between their legal sex and their appearance on the basis of their presentation, he suggests. “This would remove much of the current conflict, as it would affirm trans people’s birth sex as their legal sex, while ensuring their protection from discrimination based on gender non-conforming appearance or behaviour.”
He adds: “Birth sex is less important now, with same-sex marriage and equal state pension ages. But in my view birth sex is not an irrelevant detail and should not be automatically ‘trumped’ by gender identity in single-sex situations.”
It’s a view that is gathering weight among activists who argue that women’s rights organisations were not consulted before the GRA was passed. In January a campaign website, www.repealthegra.org, was set up to argue that people should not be allowed to “misrepresent their birth sex”. (continues)
concludes
Towards the end of 2020 Amnesty International Ireland signed a letter calling on politicians to “no longer provide legitimate representation” to those who “stand against the right to self-identification of transgender people”. The letter prompted condemnation from the grand-daughter of Amnesty’s founder. Wintemute struggles to understand Amnesty’s stance. “I agree with the vast majority of the demands of the trans rights movement. But there are limits when those demands affect the rights of others.”
Vitit Muntarbhorn, international human rights expert and professor of law at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, is another of the original authors of the Principles. But unlike Wintemute he remains steadfast in his support for the notion of “gender identity” and does not accept that this has led to an erosion of women’s sex-based rights. “When you talk about trans women in toilets, well, many countries don’t have toilets, so how can that be a primary concern?”
Whether the Yogyakarta Principles will attract more scrutiny may depend on the bravery of other signatories to stand beside Wintemute and admit they may have been wrong. A number of others were approached for comment. We were unable to reach Correa. Some other signatories responded that they had not given the matter sufficient thought. Perhaps they should have considered the implications for women at the time. But then, women’s rights have always been an afterthought."
thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2021/the-trans-rights-that-trump-all/
current thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4207947-Julie-Bindel-piece-interviewing-a-now-dissenting-Yogyakarta-drafter