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.

DonnaBe came back momentarily, she seems to have found the Peoples front of Judea.
Well I have anyway.

Every mother when I was little taught her girl(s) to assess the risk she is putting herself in when moving in the presence of men. To pay very close attention to behaviours and moods, to nonverbal cues (body language, gestures, facial expressions). To how they change when intoxicated or frustrated or angry.

When we are little, of course, it's nowhere near that sophisticated but the very first thing girls learn in this process is to spot a man. Any man, however he's dressed and wherever he may be lurking.

It is literally a survival instinct. Part of this instinct is to avoid challenging a male when we do not know it is safe to do so. Subconsciously we compute cost-benefit analyses and most of the time our instincts tell us the pay off is too small or unimportant for the risk we would assume in challenging a male. I've decided against in too many times to count, including in toilets and changing rooms.

Exactly. Explaining this to a person born male is like explaining an automatic sense of direction to someone who wasn’t raised by the Guugu Yimithirr, who always know where north is, and whose language reflects that.

Do you define having an opinion about something as moral absolutism?

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Wow. George Orwell knew his shit didn't he?

Transwomen are not women.

"Transwomen" are men.

Or better still, don't ever use the word woman about a male person.

Do you define having an opinion about something as moral absolutism?

No, I think that stating opinion as fact is. In your opinion, what I said was bizarre because it so wasn't significant or important. Not in mine. YMMV. Will you at least allow me the right to believe what I believe I believe?

And that's very sweet of you, Datun, but I was trying to be conciliatory rather than asking for help.

*Every mother when I was little taught her girl(s) to assess the risk she is putting herself in when moving in the presence of men. To pay very close attention to behaviours and moods, to nonverbal cues (body language, gestures, facial expressions). To how they change when intoxicated or frustrated or angry.

When we are little, of course, it's nowhere near that sophisticated but the very first thing girls learn in this process is to spot a man. Any man, however he's dressed and wherever he may be lurking.

It is literally a survival instinct. Part of this instinct is to avoid challenging a male when we do not know it is safe to do so. Subconsciously we compute cost-benefit analyses and most of the time our instincts tell us the pay off is too small or unimportant for the risk we would assume in challenging a male. I've decided against in too many times to count, including in toilets and changing rooms.*

God this is so true. I remember this so vividly as a teen/twenties woman going out in London. Every bus, train or tube journey involved an almost sub conscious evaluation of which carriage to get into, whether to o to the top floor of the bus, based on an all senses scan of all the men (and only the men) in the area. Where were the lairy ones that were likely to hassle me, did an empty carriage have a man with an overcoat on that could be a flasher, which men looked and smelt like they had been drinking and could be trouble. Where was a gang of young boys who might try and hassle me. It was an automatic response based on, in my case, fairly low level harrassment on public transport, a few flashers and a couple of dodgy near miss rape attempts. Christ knows what it was like for women that had been raped or assaulted. Doesn't happen much anymore now I am middle aged of course as I am not much of a target, but god I remember it well, the low level "state of alert" on every journey.

How can anyone that grew up without having to do that really understand how it informs your view on the world as a woman?

And that's very sweet of you, Datun, but I was trying to be conciliatory rather than asking for help.

Yes, that's what I thought. So I reciprocated in kind.

Well that's that fucker nicely derailed then.

Who's on the TRA rota for tomorrow a.m?

Ok :)

Here is the thing op,

You know how people see faces and human shapes in loads of different things? Like you might be walking down the street and think you see a person up ahead but when you get closer it’s just some bins?
Or you see a face in the way tree grows? That is because one of our very basic instincts as humans is to spot a threat. It’s better to have a false positive than it is to be attacked.
And it’s the same with men. Women can always spot men, always. We might well call you her or she. We might not comment or even be bothered by you being in the women’s toilets. We can be your friends and treat you as a fellow woman. But we will always know you are a man.
The reason is simple. Every woman has suffered some kind of sexual abuse or harassment, from a ‘show us your tits’ to rape.
Every single woman. Every one on this thread. All of us. I can say that with utter certainty even though I’ve not asked everyone. We all have.
We know who is a threat to us, and it’s men.

We know that most trans women are just people who want to get on with their lives in a way they feel comfortable. I respect that. I have no problem with that but the simple fact that you can’t see why a woman will find a man, even if they are called Debbie and wearing a twin set and pearls a threat then you genuinely don’t understand what it is to be a woman. We aren’t frightened of trans people, we aren’t even frightened of men. But we know how to asses for danger all the time. All day every day. We need those safe spaces.

"I think that stating opinion as fact is"

Like 'transwomen are women'?

Yeah. What she said too...

Simonbridges I mean

@ Flomper

Me too. And then occasionally you would guess wrongly and some lairy bastard would be all up in your face and you'd have to figure out if trying to change carriages would work or if that would just escalate the situation.

When TIMs are all "a man said something impolite to me on the street and now I know what harassment is like" I'm all, you don't know the half of it, mate. For the few who pass they will start to receive sexual harassment, but it isn't some sort of special unlike anything a "cis" woman could possibly understand harassment because it's happening to a male person, it's just the standard this is the penalty for being in public while appearing to be female shit that all women get. If they don't pass what they're experiencing is homophobia, and that happens to all sorts of men who're in any way GNC, even the ones who're actually straight. (A couple of my make-up wearing pretty boy exes got this all the time, and the harassers made it very clear that to them GNC = gay.)

The idea that we're all exhibiting moral absolutism is also an opinion stated as fact, amusingly enough.

Yes Simon. Also, there are super facial recognisers. People who really notice facial details and so remember a face, but this also extends to facial characteristics. Eg male/ fm characteristics. I'm spookily good with faces. And is how I re met my husband actually!

(I think the speculation about a recent news event was erroneous incidentally.)

Well I think we can be clear that we are not a small group of women invading Mumsnet. Great posts from everyone to explain why we are concerned.

The idea that we're all exhibiting moral absolutism is also an opinion stated as fact, amusingly enough.

Indeed.

Yes Simon. Also, there are super facial recognisers. People who really notice facial details and so remember a face, but this also extends to facial characteristics. Eg male/ fm characteristics. I'm spookily good with faces. And is how I re met my husband actually!

Me too, apparently! I remember people who I met once as a child when I run into them again. Introduced to someone once at an event 15 years ago? Well hello there, Simon, nice to see you again. So when people like our friend Stillscreaming are all, there are many people whose sex it's impossible to discern, I just wonder if when they look at faces all they see is a vaguely oval blob with eyes, because to me it's immediately obvious even in cases where people are trying to hide their true sex (and in some ways more so, because it tends to emphasize the parts of the face* that you would't usually expect to see on someone with that presentation).

*Body too. I've been in more than one subculture where men wear skirts, which is fine, but in general the fact that they have a skirt on makes the male waist to hip ratio both obvious and noticeable in a way that it might not be in trousers, because your brain has been trained to expect to see a female typical shape.

Angry, I think they do.

Oliver Sacks had facial blindness; he really couldn't tell people apart. I do think he just saw an outline. I know that when I switched to contacts at work several people seriously did not know who I was.

I notice tiny details and often they link to snippets of memory.

There's a photo of a pregnant woman on my maternity pack who I know Ive seen before, I think around here, and I remember her having an Essex ish accent (I'm up north).

The idea that we're all exhibiting moral absolutism is also an opinion stated as fact, amusingly enough.
Well, except that I was very careful to say
" I think you might be ". Did you miss that? Did you also miss the thing about "some" not being taken to mean "every", AngryAttackKittens? I was talking to Ereshkigal. I thought you weren't the Borg?

This is becoming rather recursive. I'm going to try and stop.