If you think mn is strongly transphobic....

[midgebabe]

I find it very unfair to be accused of transphobia when I am not actually worried about trans people as such. I am worried about how bad men might abuse legislative changes . I am worried about giving bad men more opportunities . About how people might be able to pretend to be trans. I suspect this is a threat to both biological women and trans women.

Same old rinse and repeat : shout 'transphobic !' loudly, pile in under a number of aliases and demand to shut down any kind of discussion . I value MN for its open minded attitude in resisting the TRA hyperbole and letting us discuss important matters in a civilised manner. Long may it continue.

It would also be really helpful if you could define 'woman'

Adult human female

Well, yes, that's the definition I understand, too. But apparently it's wrong. And we're bigots if we hold to that definition.

Adult human female works for me too. Y'know with it being the truth n all...

that there is therefore no safeguarding risk of consensual sexual activity leading to pregnancy

I wonder how long it will be before the first teen pregnancy. I also worry about young teens not understanding the risk of pregnancy if they are repeatedly told that x who is a biological male with a penis is really a girl. After all girls can’t get each other pregnant.

People like you harm your cause.
howitworks.png

"Woman" is adult female human. It's taken already, fellas. But personally I'd be happy for TIM's to have have all the gender-related words I don't want. They can have "ladies", for a start. Ditto "chicks" and the like.

DoctorW

There are an awful lot of assumptions in your analysis to reach those conclusions especially when the data subsequently published by noms doesn't seem to support it with the numbers of male to female trans in their entire estate. Rather a leap to make the claims you do.

I agree that it would be better if NOMS collected and published the data once and for all but scraping together random bits of data and making a whole heap of assumptions is not helpful either. Your study is no better than the Target changing room one also often cited on MN and which was put together from collected newspaper articles by an openly anti trans group!

What "openly anti-trans" group was that, Debbie?

Adult human female

That's the thing though, words have no meaning anymore. First "woman" became anyone who says they are one, and now the word "female" has been hijacked. A TRA who is male will look you in the face and say they are a female and you are a bigot for thinking otherwise. There is no way for us to define ourselves other than the word they tell us is acceptable - "cis woman".

I am not a fucking cis woman.

That just makes me bloody angry. The right to self identify, if it exists, should apply equally to all. If it doesn't its shows it up for what it is.

Which is why biology as a definition is the only one. It is neutral politically in that respect in that you twist the language, have surgery, take hormones, change your name and wear a dress but you can never escape biology.

Catching up on this thread it occurs to me that we are not being called phobic and bigots for our understanding of biology, or concerns about male violence, but rather for openly and vocally refusing to share men's beliefs about themselves.
That was the case when I first came to feminism in the sixties and it appears to me to be the subtext in this dispute. It is necessary to pretend that you agree 2+2=5 in order to escape punishment.

@DoctorW

Thanks for the reply.

I agree that if self-id is enacted then the Trans Case Board would no longer be required. However, I don't see that this would lead to all common sense decisions being abandoned.

A little more reading this afternoon revealed that the Scottish policy on care/management of trans prisoners already allows for a self-declaration model. There is no trans case board in Scotland. Instead it appears they operate on a case-by-case basis of risk assessment and supervision:

For several years, we have worked successfully in partnership with the Scottish Prison Service. It takes a self-declaration approach. If someone identifies and lives as female, they would be treated as a female in the custodial process, and the SPS would do an individualised risk assessment and place them and supervise them appropriately within the female estate.

If that system already operates in Scotland pre-GRA then removal of the trans case board in E&W post-GRA is not going to lead to wholesale abandonment of rational decision making and the removal of any risk-assessment and ongoing management of trans prisoners.

Anyway, I am still on a mission to try and get my head around the whole shebang. I have been mulling it over and weighing it up for quite some time, trying to see all sides. I must admit, whilst I am concerned about the likes of Lily Madigan getting on all women shortlists, I am not yet persuaded by the prison and changing room arguments.

BerkInBag

The Scottish system does not have a self-identification system for locating prisoners in female prisons. It might not be called a 'transgender case board' but someone in the Scottish prison service will be doing an assessment and saying yes or no to the move to a women's prison. This is the gate-keeping process that weeds out the fakes and the dangerous ones. It is true that in Scotland they are more likely to allow someone without a GRC to live in a women's prison than the England and Wales system but both have a gatekeeping step which means legal males can only be moved to womens prisons at the discretion of the prison management. That decision step will be removed if the male can sign a form and become a legal female.

Debbie666

Firstly, it is wrong to say that the noms data does not seem to support the study conclusions! If you are referring to the 125 trans reporting their gender as male and only 23 reporting their gender as female this is meanless since it was self-reported by the prisoners and might mean the new gender or their biological sex. Please read the small print. It matters.

And secondly, by referring to a group concerned about women's rights as anti-trans reveals your bias here. I doubt you'd ever take seriously anything I presented. Belittling my study doesn't take the debate any further so I will not be wasting my time engaging with you further.

DoctorW

Your contribution is educating those of us that want it. Thank you.

We are yet to see any rational proposals on this subject from the proposers, nor even any clarity on who they are. But as Brexit has shown us, this will not be forthcoming.

Our objective here is to demand a rational explanation.

Without this, any changes that have been made to rational applications of law in policy and practice can be vigorously repudiated. We are all responsible for getting on with doing that. I for one will be doing this. I can see many other people here also taking a lead on this. We all should take ownership of this problem.

If that system already operates in Scotland pre-GRA then removal of the trans case board in E&W post-GRA is not going to lead to wholesale abandonment of rational decision making and the removal of any risk-assessment and ongoing management of trans prisoners.

If self-ID comes in, on what grounds would the prisons be able to legally refuse access to the women's estate to a prisoner with self-declared GRC? Those people would then need to go in the men's estate, which would be discriminatory.

I don't think this is possible, without exemptions to self ID. If self ID came in, the only way to deal with this would be to in fact move to single sex prisons with a risk assessment criteria for which prison people were allocated to.

It is a nonsense.

It is a nonsense.

It's all nonsense! We shouldn't even be debating mechanisms by which men may, or may not, get to serve their time in a female prison.

Gender dysphoria is a psychological condition giving a man the delusion that he is a woman.

And/or, it's a cross dressing fetish.

Neither of which should be afforded extra civil rights, ffs.

*@DoctorW * Just wanted to pop in here and say thank you so very much for all that you are doing! For those of us that are feeling despair you are a beacon

Currently though if I saw a man in the women’s toilets or the woman’s changing room in the gym I could object. I could draw attention to him. Ask him if he knew he was in the women’s

Fishfinger this is already happening, and it happened to me recently in my local pub. A very large aggressive looking man came in wearing very revealing clothes.I went to the Loo at one point, and I didn't realise but he had come in behind me. I had heard somebody come in and had thought it odd that there was no sounds or flushing. I got the sense that something was off. When I came out he suddenly appeared from his cubicle.

I would not have felt comfortable at all saying anything, he was really intimidating. Later on i overheard some men discussing him, saying he had an explosive temper and was good with his fists. They referred to him as "she".

It made me realize that if anything had happened, it would have been considered a spat between two women.

I’m sorry to hear it is already happenening and women already don’t feel safe.

post-GRA is not going to lead to wholesale abandonment of rational decision making

And the GRA is rational?

Terfinater I was thinking about this loo thing this morning. The thing is with people in real life is so often not black and white. It’s rainbow coloured with bells on. I have often seen people in public whose biological sex is completely undeterminable. We can’t demand to see what’s in their pants before they’re allowed in the loos anyway. There were 2 girls in my year at school who looked and dressed ‘like boys’. On several occasions I witnessed them being told to get out the girls loos and changing rooms by teachers and lunchtime staff, and would probably bet that it happened more than that too. Totally humiliating and embarrassing for all concerned. So often the rhetoric on here is ‘butch large manly bloke goes into ladies loos to hang around being creepy’. I’m sorry that that has clearly happened to you but from my experiences I would never dream of challenging someone in a public loo for not looking like a typical female. Just incase.

I have often seen people in public whose biological sex is completely undeterminable.
Really? I don't think I've ever seen someone who's biological sex is completely undeterminable. In fact I think it's really instinctive to be able to tell sex. We are animals and we have senses other than sight. All animals depend on being able to identify males and females to make babies. Why would humans be any different?

In any case TERF is talking about how to challenge someone who is clearly physically male and behaving strangely. The existence (or not) of humans who's sex is undeterminable is not really relevant to that.

But why Quentin? I have often seen people who I honestly can’t tell if they are a man or women, maybe it’s because I love people watching and spend more time than most studying people. It’s doesnt mean that they don’t have a penis. I thought that was the problem? Not just being the definition of a heterosexual alpha male, because, lets face it most trans women are not that. The girls in my year were KNOWN by all the staff yet they still knee jerked into telling them they shouldn’t be where they had a right to be. If more and more people are going to become trans/gender fluid/ androgynous/non conforming to gender stereotypes we need to think about it. I think more mixed sex facilities would be a good thing.

If that system already operates in Scotland pre-GRA then removal of the trans case board in E&W post-GRA is not going to lead to wholesale abandonment of rational decision making and the removal of any risk-assessment and ongoing management of trans prisoners.

No - and female prison guards are the ones having to fight it - check out Andrew Burns/Tiffany Scott/Might Almighty

transcrimeuk.com/2017/10/31/andrew-burns-tiffany-scott/

He's a violent, dangerous man, with nothing but time on his hands, doing that thing that will never happen - saying he's a woman, just to mess with women and authority.