Gaby Hinsliff's Guardian article May 2018
The Gender Recognition Act is controversial – can a path to common ground be found?
(extract)
"At a recent meeting in Bristol, masked activists tried to stop speakers entering the building. In Cardiff, the venue cancelled the women’s booking after threats were made. Last month, a trans activist called Tara Wolf was convicted of assaulting Maria Maclachlan, a 61-year-old feminist, during a protest at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park where Maclachlan was filming trans activists.
Oxford’s student-led protest went more peacefully, but some attendees were evidently shaken enough to leave by a back door afterwards; others were thrown at being on the sharp end of an equality demo. “I’m usually the protester,” said one woman, emerging from the scrum. But this issue turns old certainties on their head.
Woman’s Place formed last autumn out of a conversation “literally around a kitchen table”, according to teacher and co-founder Philipa Harvey, between a group of friends – trade unionists, academics, lawyers and others – worried that they had nowhere to debate freely. They wanted to discuss the potential implications for women and girls of sharing single-sex spaces – from domestic violence refuges and female prisons to swimming pool changing rooms and Brownie packs – with male-bodied people, and to explore what they see as the risk of predatory non-trans men finding a way to abuse such access to reach vulnerable women. They wanted to discuss bodies and biology without being told that mentioning vaginas excludes women who don’t have them. And they suspected other women also had questions they weren’t asking, for fear of being called transphobic. “There are people who will say nothing about this in their workplaces, because their jobs are on the line; in social situations people won’t talk about it,” says Harvey. “But there is a change in the law being proposed and it will impact women. Women have a right to ask: ‘What will the impact look like for my daily life?’”
These are women who feel silenced, erased and intimidated – and yet it is clear that many trans women do, too.
“It is held against me that ‘you were raised with male privilege’, but actually I was beaten up all the time for being effeminate,’” says Clara Barker, a trans scientist at the University of Oxford, who also leads voluntary work with LGBT young people. “Because I was trans I was severely depressed, I was bullied in my workplace, so it’s like, ‘What privilege is that?’”
She considered going to the meeting after an invite from speaker Nicola Williams, an activist with the gender-critical pressure group Fair Play for Women (the pair met debating each other on TV). But she was afraid of encountering in real life the abuse she experiences online, where jeers about how trans women are really men jostle with threats to bash “terfs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists, a derogatory term for women questioning trans rights). While the trans movement has its dark side, also hovering on the outer fringes of the gender-critical camp are a handful of men with far-right associations, attracted by a perceived fight against political correctness.
“I want to be able to engage, even if sometimes I’m going to hear things I don’t like. I’m perfectly willing to listen to the other side,” says Barker. “But it’s got to be balanced, it’s got to be reasoned. I tried to make a couple of comments [on Twitter] just to see if it was possible to find common ground and the truth is, it wasn’t.”
Yet beyond the shouting, the beginning of a more nuanced debate is discernible; one involving trans women who crave equality but not at vulnerable women’s expense, feminists with divided loyalties, and people wanting more than toxic Facebook slanging matches.
“There is a difference between social media debate and the conversations going on elsewhere,” says Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, who was torn apart over her party’s trans-inclusive stance in one notable Mumsnet webchat, but is now more optimistic about the chances of reaching some consensus. “I am encouraged by the number of women who have contacted me privately to say they want to find common ground.” Both Woman’s Place and trans activists led by Stonewall have given well-received briefings to Labour MPs in recent months. " (continues)
www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/10/the-gender-recognition-act-is-controversial-can-a-path-to-common-ground-be-found