Responses to Scottish Govt GRA consultation now online

[howonearthdidwegethere]

www.gov.scot/Topics/Justice/law/17867/gender-recognition-review/review-of-gender-recognition-act-2004-list-of-orga/published-responses-from-organisations

Not sure what the deal is with individual responses. None published. Maybe the SG don't publish them as a matter of course or everyone opted not to have them in the public domain.

The problem with so many of these responses, is that they seem to have given no thought to the consequences of self ID. From the Quakers' response:

We see a parallel between the contentious objectors having to “prove” their deeply held beliefs, and trans people having to “prove” their gender identity.

We believe that when it comes to something that in essence can never be truly known or experienced by anyone other than that person, a certain amount of trust has to be given to individuals to know themselves.

Well, yes, fine, identify yourself any way you want. If we were talking about people being able to self-identify according to their 'gender identity', and that was kept totally separate from the category of sex, there would be no problem with this.

What they seem to have failed to understand is that this means that any man can self-identify as a woman, and demand access to all women's safe spaces as a result. Of course, an honest consultation would have spelt out that this is what was being proposed.

The Quakers' response, along with some other vaguely supportive responses, seem to be quite vague, with just yes, no, don't know ticked and not many comments. It indicates a lack of understanding of the issues.

Glasgow Feminist Collective has grown increasingly concerned at what appears to be a coordinated campaign of media articles and programmes, and social media attacks concerning trans and non binary issues in the past 6-8 months. The public discourse on this has been full of vicious abuse, threats, and misinformation, and has heightened the sense of threat to mental health, physical safety and access to employment, entitlements and services, that trans and non-binary folk already experience in the UK. We are particularly concerned that the very existence of trans and non-binary people is deemed to be up for debate, that supporting trans and non-binary children is being called child abuse, and that those objecting to these non-scientific, ideologically or religiously based attacks are said to be threatening free speech. Adopting the most inclusive, supportive framework possible for trans and non-binary people into Scottish law would be a massive statement and would offer considerable push back in the current climate.

Just wow. Feminists that don't centre the female experience. Bit later on:

This Consultation response was developed by a sub-group of the Collective led by group moderators. We thank the Trans Alliance for their very thorough guidance on how they responded to the Consultation as that assisted us with preparing ours.

This Consultation response was developed by a sub-group of the Collective led by group moderators

Hmm. One wonders how representative their response was.

Quite!

No one is debating 'existence' - when will they get that into their silly little heads?

Or does that just come from chapter one, page one of the 'Poor Wee Me Playbook and Guidelines (subtitle: how to get your own way on aoat everything)'. What next - holding breath until you turn blue, sqweeming and sqweeming until you are sick?

Exist all you like - but be what you are and don't try to take over another groups hard fought for space.

For information

163 responses from organisations
12 did not wish to be published
1 did not say they were for or against but did make some interesting legal points (Faculty of advocates)
115 in favour of self id
35 against

now we wait for the individual responses and the Scottish Governments analysis