T

[DonnaBe]

Mumsnet has been invaded by a small group of people who are giving out wrong information about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act.

They claim that women’s spaces are being invaded and women are being silenced. Please read this and make up your own minds!

A gender Self ID law – like the one proposed in the UK - was recently introduced in Ireland. To change your gender on government records, you need to sign a Statutory Declaration in front of a solicitor and declare that you are living in your acquired gender and intend to stay that way. This is a legal document.

Self ID has not caused problems in Ireland. This is the kind of thing that is being proposed in the UK. It's about making a statement under oath about your acquired gender.

It has been claimed that anyone will be able to claim to be the opposite gender whenever they want. Not true. Nobody is proposing that big blokes with beards can say “I am a woman today” and have legal protection to use women’s loos. If they were, I would be campaigning against it. That is absolutely not what is being proposed

The group behind this campaign are not new. They have been conducting anti-trans campaigns for many years. I don’t think their agenda is women’s welfare so much as expressing their hatred for trans people. The self id proposals have given them an opportunity to attack trans people. Again. They claim they are being silenced, but their views are regularly aired on TV and in the newspapers. And on Mumsnet. They have a right to speak, but I wish they’d tell the truth.

Believe it or not, this all starts with a discussion about marriage. Before 2004, trans people could not marry or stay married because there was no legal way to change the gender on their birth certificates. There was no same sex marriage back then.

The Gender Recognition Act of 2004 introduced the ability to stand in front of a Gender Recognition Panel (cost £140) and get a Gender Recognition Certificate which allowed you to change your birth certificate and get married! This is a bureaucratic arrangement that involves an element of body policing which is not nice.

The proposal now is to replace the GRP / GRC arrangement with a legally binding statutory declaration. Or something like that. That’s all. No whimsical notions like “It’s Friday. I’m a woman today.”

In fact, you can now get married if your transgendered under same sex marriage legislation. So getting a GRC is less relevant. I don’t know if there’s any research on this, but my feeling is most trans people don’t bother getting a GRC anyway.

So this is how things stand today:

There is no law banning men from women’s toilets and changing rooms. There’s only an unwritten rule. The recent Man Friday campaign where women invaded men’s toilets could have the contradictory effect of weakening this rule and end up harming women. The logical conclusion of their campaign is body policing with guards on women’s toilets and women will have to prove their gender before having a pee.

Trans women already use women’s toilets and changing rooms. I do. Nobody notices. I don’t make a song and dance about it. There is no slackening of the law defending women’s spaces because there is no such law. We get on fine without it.

The Gender Recognition Act makes exceptions for things like women’s refuges. These exceptions should be used where appropriate. Already law. Not changing.

You can live in your non-birth gender already. If you pass as that gender well enough, you just do it. You don’t need a law or certificate to do it. Thousands of people live this way and nobody is harmed by it.

Aaaaand, beljan plops in for the third time to plop some MRA rhetoric which we'll all be too thick to recognise, obvs.

beljan

I'll ask you the same question. Instead of being vague and snarky, which really isn't how to debate, please cite the lies. Just one.

Let's drill down and analyse. Let's take it apart bit by bit.

Let's debate.

@LangCleg

@FencingFightingTorture35

That's just rude. Some of us are trying to debate an important set of issues.
Please stay polite.

those who are pushing the idea that women are identified solely by their reproductive organs are in danger of building Gilead here.

No

those who understand that women are identified solely by their reproductive organs are able to correctly identify women.

rolls on floor dying with laughter

The Handsmaiden's Tale has been appropriated.

Sounds klaxon

Who is going to bite first?

Let’s do some fun female facts:

A woman is required to get signed off by two doctors to have an abortion. It is a humiliating and demeaning process.

Men who get a woman pregnant don’t have to go through the same thing.

Biological fact.

*Handmaids even

Unfortunately I have no clue who Beljan so have no idea what they are talking about.

It’s like the loo brush threads. You think you’ve won the argument and then a new thread starts and nobody remembers any of your cogent analysis.

There is no demonising - women have just had enough of being told by men they know being female is just a 'feeling'; that men can choose to change sex despite every piece of their DNA staying male.

We've had enough of playing along with this game as it really is beginning to impact logical thinking and leading to 1984 shenanigans of denying truth.

No fear, know some lovely trans guys - genuine people should be supported to express themselves however they like and not indulged in a game of make believe magic sex change.

A castrated male is still male - animal kingdom has many examples if still unclear - differences between bull and cow - castration and hormones magically create different herd? No, that would be silly thinking.

The transactivists includes all sorts - who are using cover of genuine trans issues to invade women's right to privacy and identity for their own reasons - none of which many parents would agree with - so MN wrong place to believe we have been 'duped and invaded'.

I have a hope dysphoria guys will stand up and say 'not in our name' because they are not represented by transactivists.

Owen Jones: why are you do scared of accepting men (in all their varied choices) into your sex? Why do you want them to disappear and be female? It's the transactivists that are phobic.

The oppression of women is never just - you produce ova and are capable of gestating young. There's always an and

and I'll have to produce a dowry for you. better to abort you while you're a fetus

and I'll need to make sure you'll marry well. better to cut off your clitoris and sew up your vagina so the right sort of man will want you

and it's important to that women are beautiful, better to bend your feet in half and bind them because small feet are beautiful

without the and it's just facts. they're fine.

They are not interested in women's welfare. They'll harm women as long as they can eradicate trans women

You're asking me to be polite? What you wrote was highly offensive, OP. You're talking about people who are worthy of a huge amount of respect, for the time they're putting into educating people about something that is has the potential to have very serious repercussions for vulnerable women. If you want me to respect what you're saying then don't write rubbish.

I'm not convinced that you genuinely think that's what we're arguing for, but for the sake of lurkers, no rad fem/gender critical feminist is arguing for a world where women's worth is directly tied to her ability to get pregnant and she is seen as merely a walking incubator.

For a start, we're already in a world where this is the case - albeit not identically to Gilead, the same world that we are fighting to change.

What we do want is a world where we can acknowledge the effect our biology plays on the the oppression we face. Because if we cannot acknowledge this, then we also cannot counteract it.

Why do you think women are oppressed (if you even acknowledge that we are)? Do you think it's because of our femininity? If so does that mean you think that women who don't perform femininity are somehow less oppressed than those who do?

But those who are pushing the idea that women are identified solely by their reproductive organs are in danger of building Gilead here. That is what Ms Attwood was warning against.

Everything Attwood spoke about is happening to women right now. Not the male kind of women, the real ones, the ones that can be forced to continue a pregnancy, the ones who can be imprisoned for mis-carrying, who have their genitals mutilated with the idea of making them docile and unable to enjoy sex, put in dormitories to monitor their food and exercise so they can produce babies for rich foreigners, denied food in favour of men. It all happens. And none of it happens because they identify as women, it happens because they are women, because they are seen as walking wombs or useless if not.

Denying that women have to be the ones to carry babies is ridiculous and actually harms these actual women, as it means we can't name the problem. They are relegated to that less important type of women, the ones with the biological vulnerabilities that the male type of women, the important ones, aren't subject to.

the aims of the new law are to demedicalise the process and for the process to not be demeaning

Women have to go through lots of 'demeaning' medical processes. Smear tests and childbirth are not the most dignified positions to find yourself for example.

If a man cannot bear to have a simple discussion with his gp about his gender dysphoria I don't think he can really claim to 'identify' as a woman.

But those who are pushing the idea that women are identified solely by their reproductive organs are in danger of building Gilead here. That is what Ms Attwood was warning against.

That is absolutely not what gender critical women are arguing. It's the exact opposite.

Pages and pages of people firing replies to the OP who hasn't got a hope in hell of keeping up before then giving up.

How are threads supposed to work then?

I never understand this...and there have been Ops who have aaid 'i will do my best to answer' and thats been accepted

And its not even the OP complaining

donna is doing the best they can and isnt plopping

(I fucking hate ploppers)

But those who are pushing the idea that women are identified solely by their reproductive organs are in danger of building Gilead here.

Women are Identified by their reproductive organs. How else do you explain 117 million girl foetuses aborted before they're born? It's not their gender identity.

FGM is performed on people identified by their reproductive organs.

10-year-old girls sold into marriage, are identified by their reproductive organs.

Girls miss out on education due to menstruation by their reproductive organs.

Women are raped through their reproductive organs ffs.

This is really, really basic. Feminism 101.

Of course, if all women determinedly disguise themselves as men, they may not be targeted. But that's hardly a solution.

It really never ceases to amaze me that transwomen's affinity with, and knowledge of, women is this weak.

I agree that OP can't call people liars and then pearl clutch about politeness.

Fun female fact No.2

Women who are sexually mature have periods (although society sets mandatory age limits for sexual activity) and can get pregnant if they have unprotected sex with a man. They carry the baby and take the risks associated with child birth.

289,000 women died in childbirth worldwide in 2008. That’s just the ones properly recorded. In countri d like Yemen they are often not recorded properly because women labour without medical assistance.

Men suffer no risks from getting women pregnant.

@grandplans

I agree with you. That's not what we want. That man was clearly faking it and should not have been allowed into a woman's changing room. He was misusing the system.

I'm living in a female role. I cannot use male changing rooms. And it's also difficult for me to use female ones unless they are cubicled as I'm pre-op. It will be several years before I get surgery on the NHS. Or tens of thousands to get it done privately.

I'm not playing the system. I don't want to go in a changing room to ogle or harrass women. I'm not even sexually interested in women. I just want to get changed so I can go for a swim, which I love doing.

By all means shut out the chancers. But most of us are genuine. Don't shut us out too.

That man was clearly faking it and should not have been allowed into a woman's changing room. He was misusing the system

How transphobic of you.

"I agree with you. That's not what we want. That man was clearly faking it and should not have been allowed into a woman's changing room. He was misusing the system."

And we're meant to be able to tell which ones are genuine and which ones are perverts how exactly?

By all means shut out the chancers. But most of us are genuine. Don't shut us out too

A - how can we tell
B - if we do, and are screamed at for being transphobic, and our managers contacted to try and get us sacked for it...are you going to pay the mortgage?

By all means shut out the chancers. But most of us are genuine. Don't shut us out too.

Brilliant suggestion.

How?

That suggestion, by the way, makes you a 'terf'.