Just wondering ...

[PamsterWheel]

Is it going to 'acceptable' to say that someone USED to be a man or would this be considered hatespeak because that person has self ID'd as a woman ergo was always a woman?

MNHQ genuinely not being goady and would really like to know where I stand on this so I don't get myself a criminal record in the not too distant Orwellian future.

I know I got a strike on here for implying a prominent transwoman used to be a man...even though it's a matter of record.

I don't mean saying it to someone's face but perhaps in conversation with someone else

'oh so and so used to be a man which may help to explain why they've knocked 1.4 seconds off the female world record in the 200m. More muscle mass etc'

Interestingly I wonder how Drs will get around this when explaining to a transwoman that they are more in danger of A, B or C because they ... well ... because ... of something they are not allowed to acknowledge.

Clearly there's going to have to be some guidelines. Perhaps new words will be invented.

It's a very interesting topic to discuss . Discussion, of course, still alive and kicking on these boards, right?

if the person has GRC it is illegal. Even if they haven’t, you may be breaking the law. It depends how you got the information.

Let's say it was a well known person, someone in the public eye who was born male and lived as a man for sometime before transitioning and that this person's history is documented in books, newspapers, magazines, film footage interviews. So common knowledge.

You are saying it may possibly be illegal to say that they used to be a man?

I wonder if it might then one day become illegal to say so and so used to be a criminal of someone who has renounced their life of crime for an honest life.

I wonder if it might then one day become illegal to say so and so used to be a criminal of someone who has renounced their life of crime for an honest life.

Or to say that they had won Olympic medals, just f’r instance.

I don't think a person would be upset at being acknowledged for winning medals but clearly they might get upset at the admission that they used to be a man (or a criminal) because that'snot who they are now.

Does anyone remember that programme years ago about the man who identified as a lion and went through various surgeries to change his appearance? Wonder what happened to him.

Anyway, getting off topic there.

@Pamsterwheel I’m only reporting what the law is.
My own opinion is that we’ve all got things in our past we probably don’t want known and bringing them up should not be done gratuitously.
Here’s an example. A prominent woman is getting married. In the run up to her wedding, you publish pictures of her ex boyfriends. Or an unflattering picture from when she was younger.
It’s a tactic that is disrespectful of human dignity.

No that would just be a big old chunk of misogyny.

Another false equivalence.

Surely it would only be illegal if you were revealing the information and you'd gained it via a private route - eg. if you were their doctor, or if you were in HR at their job, so you're breaking data privacy regulation. If it was public knowledge, what grounds could there possibly be?

I can't see what law you'd be breaking otherwise - some kind of defamation perhaps? Although being a male/female is hardly an insult, perhaps it could be seen as defamation in these sorts of circumstances - especially since I thought I'd read that the truth isn't a defense in UK defamation cases (!)

Yes.
Otherwise it would become illegal, for example, to discuss a history of rape or child abuse in the context of safeguarding.

@upstartcrow Good example. I don’t work with children so I didn’t think of that one.
It’s absolutely not ok to publicise what happened to victims of crime and abuse without their informed consent.

Apologies if my language is off! I work with adults, not children.

I think the lion guy was severely mentally ill and died actually.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_Cat

People who egg on these ill people to do more and more extreme surgeries by encouraging their delusions should be ashamed of themselves.

So how are you supposed to know then? If a person has a GRC or not. How do you possibly guess how someone wants to be referred to and what their paperwork is?? Are people going to be wearing pronoun badges in actual real life future, because I’d say there are going to be plenty of cases where people say the wrong thing. Especially where it’s not obvious where-dare I say it trans people don’t adhere stiffly to gender stereo type wardrobe. God forbid.

"if the person has GRC it is illegal. Even if they haven’t, you may be breaking the law. It depends how you got the information."

Can you back that assertion up with reference to the relevant act of parliament/statute/case law? Because to the best of my knowledge your assertion is quite straightforwardly false.

As others have said, there may be situations where it is illegal to disclose information obtained in confidence - but that's because the information was obtained in confidence, not because of the precise nature of the information. It would apply equally to disclosing someone's confidential medical records, financial affairs etc. if you had obtained the information through being in a position of trust. It would not apply to, say, a tabloid journalist "dumpster diving". There is no law of "privacy" in this country (other than for children).

We must not sleepwalk into a situation where people bandy around false claims about freedom of speech being illegal. And posting such falsehoods looks far too much like trying to scare dissenting women into silence for my liking.

I've been thinking about the pronouns issue, in case I am ever asked for my preferred pronouns which is probably only a matter of time as I work in a public institution. I find it incredibly confusing when the plural They / Them is used - I tried to read an article about someone where they/them was used throughout and found it unreadable. I kept wondering what I had missed, who the other person/people were, why they hadn’t been mentioned. This made me think about how impossible it would be for someone for whom English was not their first language or for someone with even mild learning difficulties. So using pronouns exclusive to oneself is actually very EXCLUDING. It’s making a little personal club for other people to join if they can remember the password. And for someone like myself with a lousy memory, in a new job with about 100 new names to remember if I had to remember individual pronouns as well, at risk of causing offence if I forgot, well it’s asking an awful lot. So it’s REALLY RUDE, INCONSIDERATE and NON INCLUSIVE.

Yes, a number of people have raised those concerns, Iused2. We have one poster with Aspergers (in fact she may have left over this issue) who finds she cannot use the wrong pronouns because of her disability. She has to tell the truth about how she perceives the world otherwise it causes her severe cognitive distress. We also had a TEFL teacher on here recently talking about how a single trans-ally immediately wittering on about safe spaces and pronouns had single-handedly destroyed an online discussion group for new students from other countries, because they suddenly became so worried they'd "make a mistake" in their second language, they just stopped talking altogether.

Of course, that's the point. The language policing isn't about inclusion at all, it's about forcibly silencing dissent - and it does an absolutely top-notch job of that. (As does promulgating falsehoods about it being illegal to misgender/deadname).

I would be violently offended if anybody dare ask me what my pronoun was. Cheeky sod! would be my first reply.

My second would be I identify as a gender critical woman.

It is currently completely legal for a citizen to reveal that a person used to be a man, or indeed still is, regardless of GRC status.

The law cannot and does not compel private citizens to lie, and it cannot prosecute people for speaking the truth.

(If you have acquired that information via your job, as privileged information, THEN you are not allowed to disclose it publicly, much as in the same way your doctor can't tell his mates about your bunions.)

Can you imagine if you could prosecute a person for saying "Mary is Fred's brother" or "I went to Eton with Tara" or "he used to be my sister's husband"?

That's the thing about this legal lie of changing sex.
Like all lies, it's unsustainable, and requires more and more lies to try to keep it going.

People will try to scare you by telling you it's illegal, but it isn't.

To quite a lot of trans people, their past sex is an important part of how they think about themselves and their life trajectories, and so acknowledge that although they now e.g. identify as a woman, their childhood self was a boy. The belief that they were always the gender, or sex, they now identify as, applies to some trans people, but by no means all. In those cases, it would surely be quite rudefor other people to insist they must adhere to the belief that transitioning also applies retrospectively.

if the person has GRC it is illegal. Even if they haven’t, you may be breaking the law. It depends how you got the information.

The usual way you know someone is trans isn't that you came by the information surreptitiously - its that it is bleeding obvious. A GRC doesn't mask the fact that someone is trans, it just prevents people saying out loud what everyone is thinking.

Not talking about disclosure of information - that's a whole other duscussion. I was asking about saying it in conversation about another person.

Not illegal now but how feasible that it would become so? I used to think this was only possible in dystopian novels. Now, I'm not so sure ridiculous as it may sound.

For those of you who have asked me to back up what I’ve been saying, the contents of the GRA are available on the government’s web site.
Personally, I’d recommend contacting a lawyer and getting them to interpret it rather han do it yourself.

www.legislation.gov.uk