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[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.

Time to dig out the tinfoil hat Donna.

Believe it or not some of us are actually capable of independent thought.

You'll find the women of Mumsnet aren't so easy to gaslight as you were perhaps expecting, OP. If you want to, we'll take this thread to 1000 posts, and then another and another. We can debate every point you want to make. We've done it before. We have researched these issues and know our own minds better then you.

@BuggerBugger , come back - I'd like to understand why all the reasoning in this thread makes you more pro self ID.

I really, really would.

Do you know what, I really like these threads where someone who obviously disagrees with the echo chamber (and let's face it, it can be a bit like that in here sometimes) comes along and starts a thread. Because it just gets all the facts out there all in one place and posters like Datun come on and hash it all out in a measured way. I hope that Donna stays to debate, I think these threads are actually really important.

I am echoing another poster's question for you Donna:

Donna, are you a woman? If so, in what ways are you and I both women?

Also, I don't understand why so few transgender people actually have a GRC? What's wrong with just getting one if you are serious about 'changing sex'?

Also, I totally disagree with just being able to rock up somewhere, sign something and boom you are a woman and have access to thinks that women fought tooth and nail to achieve for themselves.

Are there any other laws where you can actually change to be something that you are objectively, absolutely not? And be recognised as that thing you are objectively, absolutely not in the eyes of the law? I don't get it?

*If you had written, 'I am a transwoman and I don't really understand what your concerns are. Can you please explain them to me?' I would have had a lot of time for your op. I think there would have been a good discussion.

Instead you come on and tell us we're not capable of thinking for ourselves and dismiss our concerns as groundless. If I needed any further evidence that women and transwomen are not the same then I have it right here, so thank you for that at least.*

👏🏻 Floisme

women prisoners of their biology and to consign us to being brood mares

For women, pregnancy is a likely result of unprotected sex with a man. Nothing to do with identity, just biology.

Luckily we don’t have to ‘identify’ as anything other than human, but we can’t escape biology. It’s why sex education is helpful, and gender stereotypes are bad.

That's really interestingBuggerBugger, can you explain why?

'Cos that's what the script says this week?

@Donna

Changes to our laws (e.g. maternity leave, equal pay, anti-discriminatory laws etc) have improved the life chances of women. The laws are all based on the protected characteristics of sex, as in our biology, so I don’t understand your point at all.
You can’t take biology out of the conversation and why would you want to? Women don’t want to because we get that it is fundamental to our struggle for fair treatment. So why do you want to remove biology from the discussion? How else do you want to define a woman to help tackle the macro socio-economic issues such as the gender pay gap?

Ellenripleysalienbaby , yes I have worried for a while that we've scared off all the dissenters.

And a bunch of people agreeing with each other can lead to folly.

It's great to have someone turn up we can really debate with. Keeps us on track.

for DonnaBe. I'll bet you're feeling a little bruised. But I have enjoyed talking with you

To deny society is make women prisoners of their biology and to consign us to being brood mares and drudges. And it is evidentially wrong.

Yes, gender is socially constructed. Do you know why?

Why do you think that women were considered too feeble to educate, and then too uneducated to vote?

Why do you think that women are relentlessly pressured to be decorative and fuckable?

Why do you think that it was only in the early 1990s that rape within marriage became illegal?

Where do you think the image of the 1950s housewife came from? A concerted campaign after women had proved themselves quite capable of maintaining this country during the war.

The constructed gender that is applied to women means that they should be decorative, fuckable, available for sex on demand, that they are irrational and not suited to leadership. That they should wear a pinny, raise children and stay in the kitchen.

The way men identify which half of the human race apply these rules to is on the basis of biology.

Women's biology is something that men have wanted to control since for ever. Hence women being the property of men, the construction of marriage where a woman has to 'obey' her husband, the fact that they up until recently, they were not allowed financial autonomy.

Women are oppressed because of their biology, and gender roles are the means by which it is done.

Transgenderism reinforces this. By claiming the existence of a pink brain and a blue brain. By deciding that one can, very definitely, 'think' like a woman.

By telling children that their preferences for societally constructed examples of masculine and feminine determines their sex.

Sex is nothing more than a description of reproductive function. That's it.

Gender is a tool, a mechanism, to assign roles and keep women as lesser than.

Which is why feminists have been trying to deconstruct it since forever.

Claiming it is a means of identifying people, and then eliminating sex based protections on the back of it, is massively regressive.

Without sex based protections, women go backwards in terms of partaking in public life.

ReluctantCamper

I know I'm going to get jumped on, so I'll probably only make this post.

As I understand it, the aims of the new law are to demedicalise the process and for the process to not be demeaning.

Whilst I understand that some see the HCP as being a gatekeeper to transitioning, I personally don't think it has that much affect.

In reality there isn't much to stop a man walking into a 'woman's space' as it is. I can't see this change making much difference. Some people will try to abuse it as they do now. We just have to make sure the safeguards are in place. On balance (and these things are always a compromise) I think more people will be helped than harmed.

I genuinely feel that a lot of what I read on MN is scaremongering. I've watched the way dissenting voices get closed down. Most people who click on this thread will read the OP and know the way it will go. 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. A great victory is then proclaimed that the OP has been driven off. Thats not debate or reasoned discussion.

I know that I will be subjected to the same claims, so I as I said, I will leave this thread and change username. I suspect I'm not the only one on MN who feels like this.

Most of the time we relate to people socially. Not biologically. It's the social presentation that maintains 99% of our interactions with other people not the biologiocal.

This is true to an extent and is the reason until recently that many people had no problem using prefered pronouns etc. Most people do want to be nice! And I personally welcome a broader range of social self expression amongst the sexes - even from those big blokes with beards that you mentioned.

However, as other posters have noted, women absolutely do notice whether or not other people are male or not. Until recently, it was the perception amongst women that trans identifying males had removed their penises. So whilst we might have known many were male, it would have seemed cruel to exclude them from women's spaces.

We keep being told we are anti trans. We are not. Most women would support sharing their spaces, shortlists etc with trans identifying females, as we have a shared experience and biology with them, even if they embrace the gender stereotypes a lot of us reject.

We are not anti trans, a lot of us are just wary of men, male bodied people, and quite specifically berarers of penises, as when it comes to it that is what rapes.

We are trained tp spot males from a distance, from an early age. Becuase it is the boys and the men who make the comments in the street, who lift the skirts in the playground, who ping the bra straps in the corridoors, who text the nudes to their friends, who talk over us at work, who are listed to over us and promoted above us at work, who feel entitled to look and to touch, who approach us in the dark, who feel entitled to our bodies because they bought us a drink, because we wanted it that other time, because we are dressed like we want it, because we looked vulnerable. etc etc

This article was posted on another thread and explains it much better than I can. OP if you have any interest in trying to understand where the feminists on this board are coming from, please read it. And let us know what you think?

kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/

@Donna and please answer my question as to why you think there is a gender pay gap in the first place. Are men more clever?

Datun I was going to quote a couple of bits from that post and then carried on reading and decided that the whole thing just needs a big fat ^THIS^

Where do you think the image of the 1950s housewife came from? A concerted campaign after women had proved themselves quite capable of maintaining this country during the war.

Also, am I going to have give back my 'Feminist' card because I hadn't even thought about this?

Cos that's what the script says this week?

Kind of proves my point.....

BuggerBugger

yeah, I worry that the inevitable pile on that accompanies we've got a live one!! does turn people off. There are so many people here that feel so strongly that it can be inevitable.

I think the issue I have is that a GRC allows you to legally change sex. To see sexism we need to be able to see sex. If the group 'women' contains a whole load of men, how can you be sure what is happening to natal females?

With the advent of equal marriage and pension equality I don't think GRCs are required at all actually, as the marriage thing was primarily what they were created to address as I understand it.

Yes we should all treat each other decently, but there are existing laws to cover that - no new ones are required.

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.

Oh come on. That OP was extremely patronising and dismissive of the women on this site who the OP apparently thinks are unable to make up their own minds. Of course you appear to think you're outside that and more highly evolved in debate skills, but of course people are going to react to such blatant 'splaining.

Donna with respect I think you have been misled on the feminist position w/r/t gender. And I don’t entirely blame you, there’s a massive concerted effort to ignore and misrepresent what our position is.

As briefly as I can summarise:

• Sex is what makes us women. Gender is a concept that builds a societal hierarchy around that. It tells us how we as women should think/act/dress/etc in society.

• But these things included under ‘gender’ aren’t inherent to being women. Society might tell us that if we don’t think/dress/act/etc in a particular way, that we’re in some sense being women ‘wrong’. This is false - there is no right or wrong way to act as a woman, or to dress, or think or behave or believe.

• in general, we want to tear down the hierarchy of ‘gender’. Let men and women dress and act and behave however they want.

• and at the same time, we don’t want to abolish the concept of ‘women’, because we need a name for our sex. If we don’t have a name, we can’t name the ways in which we’re oppressed, and we can’t tackle that oppression.

@Donna I think your post is very interesting and refreshing. There has been a lot of nastiness on this issue published on Mumsnet. It is disturbing. Something is off about the tone of the debate here. I do wonder if vested interests are at play, which would be a shame.

As I understand it, the aims of the new law are to demedicalise the process and for the process to not be demeaning.

Yes, but unfortunately the original law was also nonsensical because people can’t change sex. It was an imperfect way of helping people to live in a society that demands conformity.

Instead of challenging whether people who don’t conform should suffer discrimination, the new law is endorsing the idea that the difference between men an women is their identity. This is regressive rubbish.

Kind of proves my point.....

Pointing out that the transactivists have a hive mind with a couple of talking points that they push for a few months and then move on to a couple of new ones proves your point how?

It's a pattern of behaviour and clearly observable.

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

TIMs frequently tell us that they use our spaces without us even noticing and that this has never been a problem. Your analysis of the reasons for this is incorrect.

Of course we knew that you were using our spaces. The reason it wasn't a problem is that we were being kind about it and we felt able to be kind because we didn't feel threatened. This has now changed because now we are being explicily bullied, threatened and railroaded by people claiming to be trans. Now we do feel threatened and so we are defending our spaces.

I'm simply giving facts about the current state of things and what the actual proposals to change the GRA are.

What are the facts? Can you quote the actual proposal so that we can make up our minds with facts?

I don't see how the proposed changes offer any harm to womn.
Women do. Women have lived their entire lives dodging men who are threats. We know what they are are who they are. We know the lengths they will go to.
If you don’t understand that then I suggest you have not been ‘living as a woman’ at all. That is what it really means. Not lipstick and high heels.

It's only since the 90's that men have been shoehorned back into very gendered clothes

I would say more mid 2000's.

90s we had Kurt Cobain in a dress, Britpop guys in skinny velvet trousers, tight tops and eyeliner, goths wearing make up and skirts, David Beckham in a sarong, 'metrosexuals' and lets not forget the emo/scene kids.

Trouble is there is no alternative/counter culture scene to speak of for the last 10-15 years.