I have emailed Penny Mordaunt and am just about to email my MP (he was pretty good when I met up with him in the autumn) with a CC of it.
Here it is. It is a bit crap because I am tired and have a sleepy baby on my boob and am not v good at with typing other hand...
Dear Penny,
I note with concern your thoughts re: the upcoming GRA consultation and in particular your statement that “Transwomen are women, that is the starting point for this consultation”.
How can it be a consultation if in one sentence you have conflated sex and gender? Sex is biological and cannot be changed. Gender and gender identity is how people feel about themselves, their minds, their bodies, where they ‘fit’ on a spectrum of feminine-masculine.
Men cannot change into women. They can wear clothes/make-up/hairstyles that they feel belong to women, but they cannot change their biology.
Women as a class are more vulnerable than men - men commit approximately 98% of sexual offences, for example - and it is therefore currently considered appropriate in just a few situations that certain spaces are kept separate due to sex rather than gender.
This is to protect women and girls. It is not to hurt anyone’s feelings. Women in a shelter for domestic violence victims need to feel safe, so men are not allowed. Women getting changed for swimming need privacy and dignity, so men change in separate areas. Women’s bodies are different to men in other ways so there are separate sporting categories. It is widely accepted that the socialisation of girls puts them at a disadvantage in certain areas of life, so there are certain scholarships, recruitment programmes, award schemes etc open just for women. On hospital wards and psychiatric wards, women are already feeling vulnerable and possibly immobile due to ill health, it is therefore considered best practice to protect their physical safety by placing men in separate areas.
None of these things are disproportionate when you consider violence against women and girls. In a country where two women a week die at the hands of a partner or former partner, it is only sensible for a government which cares about this 51% of the population to acknowledge that in these few areas, women and men are kept separate. Men can still go swimming, go to hospital, play sport, enter politics etc - just alongside women, not right in the middle of the space they need.
For you to claim the transwomen are women, you seem to have already nailed your colours to the mast. Did you know that around 85-90% of transwomen keep their penises and testicles? Many women do not want to be around male bodies when in situations like the ones I have listed above. Men dressing like women or ‘feeling like women’ does not change their sex.
This consultation needs to provide a glossary to terms if you are going to alter the meaning of words. As far as I know, and for many other people I know, woman means adult human female, the same way that sow means adult female pig or mare means adult female horse.
Transwomen have many rights which need protecting. They do not need to own the word woman. If we include transwomen in the word women, we cannot properly measure the sex pay gap, we cannot look at crime statistics in a meaningful way (six ’women’ were convicted of rape last year, how is this possible?), we cannot see that a boardroom full of men in women’s clothing is not quite the equality we need, nor can we cater for those women desperately in need of shelter places who simply cannot share a room with a ‘woman with a penis’.
Please Penny, can you consider women and girls? Girls have enough to deal with, growing up in this era (I grew up in the 1990s, pre-internet, and I am so grateful), and now schools are starting to tell them that they need to share changing rooms/toilets/dorms on school trips with transgirls - ie fully intact teenage boys. This is not acceptable. But it is the trickle down effect of ‘transwomen are women’. Because then ‘transgirls are girls’. And then girls need to make room in the changing room for the students with penises.
I would really appreciate a reply to this, Penny, however brief. There has to be a way to make transfolk feel their rights, dignity and day to day life is happy and meaningful without the need to tell women and girls to move over, shut up and sit down.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
[my real name]
(teacher, mother, concerned citizen)
Sent from my iPhone