Would you back self ID if...

[daimbars]

Once a trans women got their GRC they had to wait a period of time (say 5 years) before they were able to have the same rights as all women? For example they would only be able to apply for a job as a women’s officer, appear on a female only panel or to compete in women’s sport after five years of lived experience as a woman?

Someone I know is meeting with her MP to discuss how to propose this legislation. She thinks it will address possible repercussions from self ID and stop it being abused. I thought it was an interesting idea I could get behind.

Would you back self ID if... NO. NO. NO.

You can get ID saying female even if you don’t have a GRC.

Maybe they should not write laws that promote and facilitate fraud, eh?

Agree, bewilderness.

@PeakPants
'But Kettle how would a DV refuge know my birth sex? You can get ID saying female even if you don’t have a GRC."

Then clearly that identification would be useless.

Let's have one piece of legal materiel that reflects reality! Birth certificate. And not give it away with false information on it to everyone who asks. It does not make sense to allow people to change legal documents like this.

Plus not everyne has a passport or a driving license but everyone has a birth certificate, and even if it has been lost, a replacement can be ordered.

YY, it makes no sense to alter a birth cert. None.

A trans friend of mine is campaigning to remove the need for counselling before accessing HRT

Sorry, I'm a bit confused. Why would someone trans want HRT? Aren't cross-sex hormones more usual? Or have I misunderstood and your friend is detransitioning?

Sorry, I'm a bit confused. Why would someone trans want HRT?

It's their Orwellian framing. Of course they aren't actually "replacing" anything.

Women and their doctors call it Hormone Replacement Therapy therefore transpersons prefer that name to testosterone or estrogen because it affirms the illusion.

Yes, exactly.

I agree that birth certificates should not be altered and that there should be a register, available in limited circumstances, where other forms of id which are easily altered are linked to that original birth certificate.

I’m afraid that toilets and changing rooms may be lost and that it would perhaps be best to make these unisex. If the facilities are recognised to be unisex the difficulties inherent in that must be recognised and addressed - it’s the misrepresentation of unisex facilities as single sex that allow issues to be handwaved.

What has been shown is that civility, empathy and concern for the rights of others are totally nonexistent in some people and can not be relied upon as they have been to some extent in the past. If the protection of a single sex place is reliant on persons acting in good faith then that place has no protection at all.

What is needed is a hard line and a way to enforce it. If there is a question about a person’s right to access a single sex space then the onus must be on them to show that they have that right by showing either an original birth certificate or an id that can be linked to such a certificate.

I recognise that this is less than ideal but any proposal of a less draconian system must show how that system would work in the real world.

And stop confusing sex and gender!

Ah okay. I think the difference Italian is that you are talking about what should ideally happen, which I agree with. I don’t think birth certificates should be altered either.
I am referring to what is happening now and will continue to happen which is that ID can be changed quite easily and birth certificates can be changed too. In the current position, the only way you will get an inkling that someone is trans (if they have changed their ID) is through sight. No way around it.

I don’t think it’s good but it is what it is.

Oscarino I agree re the unisex point. It’s actually better I think to have unisex facilities and take serious steps to ensure safety like having full length stalls with sinks etc to protect women when they will be among male bodied people than to pretend that male bodied people who claim to be female are 100% safe and no threat and do nothing. Maybe the emphasis should be on providing individual privacy rather than sex segregation. That might also help those who don’t feel comfortable being undressed etc around members of the same sex either.

No, sex separation is required, and the UN and Amnesty agree that single sex provision is best for Women and girls.

It's a transactivist argument that full height stalls would solve the problems caused by male and females sharing.

I mean where you have a sink and bin and everything in the stall, not just full length. You are not sharing facilities then. It’s not the same as a load of cubicles with shared sinks. I wouldn’t want unisex loos the way they are currently designed but if they were rebuilt to be completely self contained units, I would prefer that to sharing the current ones with male people.

I certainly did not mean to make a transactivist argument .

I absolutely believe that sex separation is what there should be; that female spaces should be for females only. I just don’t see how this is going to be achieved when people are already self id-ing into those spaces.

What we have now is the worst of both worlds - spaces like toilets and change rooms are effectively unisex and we are supposed to pretend that is not the case. Who is going to police those spaces? It is not fair to expect someone on a shop floor to argue with a person who will happily lie to their face and is likely to create a huge problem, and possibly get violent if they are thwarted in getting the access they demand.

This does not make me happy and I would like to know what the solution is, I just can’t see it myself given the current situation.

Women and their doctors call it Hormone Replacement Therapy therefore transpersons prefer that name to testosterone or estrogen because it affirms the illusion.

In the same way that there can never be uterine transplants for transwomen. There can only be implants.

Unisex loos can mean you are trapped in a cubicle with a predator in the room outside.

Many women don't support self ID.
Its not the criteria for self ID that are the problem. We don't support self ID.

You are still sharing facilities! Obviously.
Even the mixed sex toilets off corridors are worse. A man could just push a woman waiting inside a cubicle. No one would know.

I agree with Oscarino. Not trying to advance TRA argument but we are where we are and given the extreme lack of regard politicians have had for the arguments raised, I don't think things will be getting better any time soon. We can all sit round and say what we would do in an ideal world (not have changed passports, not have changed birth certificates, not allow people to legally change gender, get rid of gender full stop) but at the moment, that seems wildly unrealistic.

Even the mixed sex toilets off corridors are worse. A man could just push a woman waiting inside a cubicle. No one would know.

Only if the corridor was totally deserted and said man would most likely attack a woman in any event, whether there is a toilet there or not. Sharing facilities is mainly about dignity and privacy. You have dignity and privacy if you use a cubicle that is totally self-contained and opens up onto a corridor. Hypothetically someone can push you into the cubicle if the corridor happens to be deserted, yes. Someone could drag me into an alley if I was walking down an empty road. It's not the greatest argument. A predatory man could drag a woman into the men's toilets if they were empty too. Or into a cleaning cupboard. Or into any space that is accessible.

In many countries unisex single cubicles are the norm. I lived in one of these countries for many years. There were no issues of the type you described. You are not literally sharing facilities with men because the men are never in the same space at the same time.

I don't think the 'men who want to rape are going to rape anyway' argument is sound. Why make it easy for them?

Women are saying that they want single sex facilities, why is that something to be negotiated?

I don't think the 'men who want to rape are going to rape anyway' argument is sound. Why make it easy for them?

Yeah, paedophiles are going to abuse anyway. Let's get rid of safeguarding. They have rights too.

I am saying that a door that opens into a public space does not really give anyone an opportunity to assault women. I cannot see that it does.
I don’t think single sex spaces should be compromised on. The problem is that you will get men who identify as women using them and there isn’t much that can be done about that. It is already happening as we all know. My point was that I would rather have safe unisex contained cubicles opening into a public space than potentially unsafe toilets that are ostensibly single sex but which are in fact also frequented by males.
Maybe that is a controversial position. I am not talking about in an ideal world. I am talking about reality. Trans women are already using female facilities regardless of having a GRC. It seems impossible to police because there is nothing preventing them from doing so. So either we carry on as we are (which people say they are uncomfortable about) or we think about how things could maybe be changed to improve safety, dignity and privacy.

There was a nightclub with unisex toilets, and even given the presence of the bouncers they had a high rate of rape and assault.

Why should women be on high alert every time we need to change a tampon?