Small acts to push back

[IDearlyLoveALaugh]

Today it was my child's 2.5 year check with the health visitor.

I had two questionnaires to fill out. On both I quietly crossed out "gender" and wrote in "sex" before ticking the biological sex my child has.

It sounds silly but in a world of Twitter and school policy madness in a small way I felt like I was pushing back against TRA.

I also spoiled my ballot in the local elections.

Has anyone else got any small acts to push back with? I think a constant, dignified clarification of biological facts may go some way to help keep the debate in the general publics eye.

I now ask whether changing rooms are single sex, and if they are I ask what the returns policy is as I have to try the clothes on at home.

Diversity & Equality policies are worth a look at. All schools, services, organisations etc will have one (usually online)

It highlights the issue as only sex & gender reasignmnent are protected characteristics (not gender / gender identity). Also that many statutory services will have used their LAs in good faith and is pretty shocking how many LAs were incorrect. Will be interesting to find out how that happened.

Link here to info from WPUK
womansplaceuk.org/grassroots-womens-pressure-forces-local-authorities-to-comply-with-the-law-over-sex-and-gender/

I've altered a question on a homelessness application form from "gender" to sex on behalf of a client whilst pointing out the incorrectness of the question to the homelessness adviser - who completely agreed with me!
Small victories....

Is it ridiculous that I want to check the policy at my (eldest) child's school when they start in September... BUT I'm worried that if I draw attention to gender identity politics the school might panic and dive straight into some mermaid-Esque brainwashing teaching??

Good point about the changing rooms, will do that too.

Is it ridiculous that I want to check the policy at my (eldest) child's school

I don't think so, its a very polite heads up that they might want to have a look at it. You don't have to link to WPUK but you can see from their links how councils responded.

Its important legislation and it matters when its misquoted.

There was an announcement by the Govt last week that they wouldn't ammend to Eq Act 2010. Its topical so you checked.
They will likely be very grateful to know if its wrong and be able to have it corrected by the new school year.

See current thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3301871-What-do-educators-make-of-what-is-happening-in-our-schools

(The LA issue will come out.)

Also re schools, the Guardian article is really useful as it covers a great deal:
www.theguardian.com/education/2018/may/15/transgender-row-teachers-afraid-challenge-breast-binding

There's a great interview with SwearyG for Let a Woman Speak which has suggestions:

(extracts)
Could you give women one piece of campaigning advice that anyone can do?

Talk. That’s it. You don’t have to do it in person, or using your own name, but find a way to share the message. The best person you can do this with is your MP. Go to their surgery and talk to them about your concerns. Take the factsheet from sages.org.uk or downloads from fairplayforwomen.com and talk to them about your concerns. These people get to make the laws, so the more people that speak to them with worries the better. Please speak to your MP.

I want to help. What can I do? Where can I read more?

You can do anything! None of us are particularly special, we’re just out there doing things.

Be a man on Fridays – manspread, mansplain, walk in a straight line, don’t reverse on a country lane.

Speak to your MP, your councillors, your School Governors

Look at Fair Play for Women, Transgender Trend, Lily Maynard, ManFriday, and all the websites they link to. There is so much information, and so many resources out there that you can read and share."

www.letawomanspeak.org/hannah-clarke

Work had a staff survey about working environment recently and it asked me to "describe my gender identity" two lines below a paragraph saying that they needed to ask about sex! There were four options: female, male, "prefer not to say", and "I prefer to describe my gender identity in another way". I took a deep breath, noted the "your feedback will be anonymised" bit and wrote in the "I prefer to describe my gender identity in another way" box that I don't have a gender identity, I am biologically female, and the EA protected characteristics they should ask about are "sex" and "transgender status" because both biological sex and hormone therapy would affect the answers to the questions (about working environment e.g. temperature and light levels) but felt gender identity wouldn't.

It was so obvious that they had changed that one question in response to "advice" from one of the usual charity suspects, but not gone up two lines to change the "sex" bit to match, and not said "hang on a minute, we're asking about whether people are cooking at their desks, not whether they are bullied for their trans status, let's ask questions about biology that are useful for this situation ". Does anyone even impact assess these changes?

They didn't ask about disability either, and they should have done, because mine's been made worse by the heat and light. People and organisations will bend over backwards to accept identity politics but completely omit the class effects of disability and sex.

I'm a translator and, as far as I am able, I make sure to use sex and gender correctly in my translations. I can't go into too much detail about where I work but I have translated documents on equality etc and of course I am not able to distort the meaning of the source text even where I disagree with it, but I do what I can to ensure things are as clear and correct as I can make them.

It is actually the same word in my source language in most contexts! There is a word for gender that is not very commonly used that would literally translate into 'sex-costume / sex-disguise', which I quite like. I assume it was created by feminists. But usually it's the same word used and I translate it differently based on what I think it should be in English in the context . Usually that means I translate it as 'sex'.

The second part of the word for gender also means 'fake, man-made'. So it's a nice word as it kind of literally says that gender is bullshit as part of the way it's constructed.

I participate on several other message boards that cover other topics and have managed to raise the trans issue on all of them. I also talk about it, mainly with people I already feel are likely to have similar concerns. All have said that it's good to be able to speak about it without fear — and everyone's very respectful in their language. All the hatred is coming from the other side. Most people's response when I voice a GC point of view is 'Thank goodness you said that, I thought I was going mad but I was too scared to say so.'

A friend started talking about the terrible lesbian protests to a group of mutual friends. I said I agreed with the protesters and suggested they Google cotton ceiling and Tara Hudson. They were shocked that so few transwomen went through with surgery but wanted access to female spaces.

I don't mention things on my fb account but I'm going to promote Nanette on it.

I've been getting as much gc things in as possible at work (teaching) and delighted to find a few in agreement.

Today I reclaimed a small amount of tax online. It was incredibly difficult and involved lots of pass words , codes and generally difficult to do stuff. There was a feedback form right at the end so I said the process was poor, too intrusive, too many questions and because I self identified it shouldn't be necessary!

I have just looked at my children’s school equality policy and instead of ‘sex’ they have written ‘sex (including transgender)’ as the protected characteristic. Gender reassignment is a separate row...

I have started talking to people about the kids/safeguarding aspect and mentioned the lesbian Pride protest in a conversation about men reacting poorly when women assert a boundary yesterday. Even if you don't get the chance to explore things in the conversation, it gets people thinking & they may go off to do some reading of their own.

These are really good ideas and definitely things I can start to do myself too.

I love the changing room one. If enough staff hear this and deport it back to management it could trigger a positive change.
Also the challenging Gender boxes on forms. I'm going to write a note in my phone so I can copy an articulate comment based on the responses upthread. Thank you

@wacademia this
I am biologically female, and the EA protected characteristics they should ask about are "sex" and "transgender status"
Thank you

I also had an anonymous work questionnaire asking for my gender identity, with options of 'male', 'female', 'prefer not to say' and 'other'. Like wacademia I ticked 'other' and said that I don't have a gender identity but my sex was female.