Debbie Hayton in the Times

[Igneococcus]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/women-are-right-to-have-concerns-over-trans-reforms-5kj5k28sd?shareToken=aa090ad90f6f886db629247a0d6ca19b

This conundrum of the real life test also feeds into the crazy situation we seem to have now of stereotypes reinforcing gender, which goes against what so many women have been battling against for years. I'm not a woman because I wear a skirt, but there again, I don't wear skirts - am I less of a woman? I certainly don't think so.
I think your use of the expression 'phyrric victory' is very apt Debbie. Transwomen are losing the support of women is spades at the moment.

I didn't realise Debbie was on the thread. So... do you think there's a scenario where someone born male should be able to serve their sentence in a female prison?

Cwenthryth

I agree with you on principle. I don’t quite know enough about what kind of offences get you on the sex offenders register and for how long, but it would seem that someone who is on the register should not be granted a GRC. What about other violent/abuse/antisocial crimes though - assault, public order offences, coercive control etc? Should they bar GRC applicants too

Yes there must be gatekeeping.

Debbie, although I've been to see my MP and I've spoken to friends, I haven't dared share anything remotely GC online.
I would feel comfortable sharing your article though - it gives me a way in. So thank you.
Perhaps one day we'll live in a world where I don't need to rely on you to have a voice but that work isn't yet done.

deepwatersolo

So how are you going to ensure that only male people with a GRC and SRS get to be in female only spaces and keep all other males out?

Thank you Debbie.

I welcome this:

"What works for one works for all: trans women, fetishists and even abusive men seeking access to women. It is a safeguarding nightmare."

I am a pretty normal middle-class woman, with two children, a mortgage that is almost paid off, and a mother with dementia. I have never been political, though my children tease me about reading the Mail-on-line (because it is accessible) and quoting, mainly health, stuff from it. I also look at the Guardian, but find some of the opinion stuff irritating. I work hard, as does my husband, pay my taxes, and volunteer in the community, focusisng on children's access to green space and sport. DH and I follow AFC Bournemouth. We are good people.

I did not have strong view on transgender, beyond sympathy for Jan Morris when I read her book many (many) years ago. I once stuck up for a local transgender woman, who I recognised from community meetings, when she faced verbal abuse from some younger Arab men in the doctors waiting room. I shared some of DC's concerns when a troubled teen annouced they were transgender. Not about the transgender part, but about the fact they were troubled, and changing identity might be not prove to be the solution. I do not know any transgender people personally, but have no problem working or being friends with anyone who is straightforward and reasonable.

I have suddenly found myself angry. And despairing.

Two things.

1. Free speech. My voice has been taken away. There are suddenly all these shouty people who would call me a TERF and a hater, and who seem to have immediate priviledged access to decision making. My daughter would not be allowed to even hear a gender critical voice at her University. My husband has to undergo regular diversity training. Not a problem in itself. He, like anyone, may be prone to unconsious bias when managing or recuiting. But the focus on gender identity, and innovations like gender neutral toilets, seems to have crowded out other parts of the agenda, and perhaps increased resistence to an overall message. It feels like the Weimar Republic.

1. Safeguarding. Good law needs to be properly consulted on. Whatever the intention, the devil is in the detail. When I worked in the Civil Service we would refer to the "Sun Headline Test". Would the current Self-id proposals pass that test - No. Earlier in the week I was the only person in the womans communal changing room/shower block at the Tooting Lido. I realised I would be really uncomfortable if I was sharing the space with a male bodied person, whether trans woman, fetishist or abusive. I would have enjoyed my swim less, and be less inclined to return. More importantly the pre-teen girls who spend their school summer holidays at the Lido, and racing between the pool and the shower block could be deterred. Or the Council, faced with declining revenues, might need to raid another important budget to ensure safe facilities or review the financial viability of the pool.

How dare an industry of shouty people, attempt to silence me and take away things that I value. How dare they take away the building blocks - like Lidos, Girl Guides, and Gymnastics clubs that help girls have active and healthy childhoods. Yes participation may only decline slightly, but each girl who loses the opportunity to engage in out of school activities, should matter. In the same way that each girl who refuses to drink during the day because they dont want to use a gender neutral toilet, should matter. Or each girl who bunks off games for the same reason. Or gives up sport because they can't or don't want to compete with male bodied people.

And I haven't even started on the impact on vulnerable girls and women.

Despite the shoutiness of people who identify as females, it feels as if the purpose is to impose a fictional female gender identity on women: passive, accepting, inactive, silent and vulnerable.

It is always a mistake for politicians to stop listening to ordinary people. Migration and Brexit/the rise of the right in Europe is one example. Ordinary people may be "wrong" in woke political and media circles, but actually most will be a mix of kind and accepting, and conservative. Societal change can happen but it needs time. Not a bad thing when it comes to proposals that threaten harm as well as good.

Rant over. But I am still angry. I want my voice, and I want women and girls to be valued and safe and to be able choose what being female actually means.

Thanks for sticking your head above the parapet, Debbie. I think the points you've raised in your article and your post above are very reasonable.

Needmoresleep, you've raised some points there that tap into something I really concerned about in all this.

I have two areas of worry in this whole debate: one is the one that is regularly discussed here (ie the whole loss of sex-based protections that were established because women have been at risk of male violence for centuries), but the other is about the impact that Jess Bradley, Amy & David Challenor and now Karen White are having on the whole progressive approach to gender nonconformity and transsexualism. How the hell have these young people escaped even the basic due diligence that most people expected to be public representatives would get?

Personally, I quite like the overall push by younger people to socially validate gender nonconforming folks. In my youth (the 90s), there was plenty of that sort of thing about, but it tended to be tucked away in subcultures. If there is more social acceptance of not adhering to stereotypes ten years from now, that would be bloody great in my eyes.

But Bradley, the Challenors, White and now the Goldsmith's LGBQT "gulag" stance and the ongoing "razorblades" hoax are not, by any reasonable measure, helping mainstream social acceptance of any kind of GNC expression. They are the equivalent of the gay marriage campaign being conflated with making polygamous marriage legal at the same time - just too radical, too fast, too likely to pull the Overton window further right instead of further left.

The lunatic fringe taken over the entire public message.

Needmoresleep yes, bang on.

an industry of shouty people,

Debbie, why do you not consider treating women with the respect Miranda does?
He understands that he has no right to women's spaces and he doesn't use them.
He understands that to make himself the exception to the rule is a hypocrisy, but more importantly, breaks the rule and weakens the protection of women, and destroys our autonomy.

Many women are fighting for the right of recognition of what we truly are. For reality to be acknowledged.

I am not fighting for the right of my daughter to 'only be forced to change with the males we've decided are probably lovely and have been rubberstamped with a certificate to prove it'.

This isn't about loveliness or harmlessness.

I'm not fighting to be grouped as 'people, both male and female, who are kinda like men, but less likely to hurt each other'. The fox in the henhouse is a metaphor for male in a female only place. It doesn't mean ALL men are harmful. You know this. You understand #NotAllMen is a tactic to dissolve women's boundaries.

Each time I read what you write it edges closer to #NotAllTrans. You seem to be advocating that women MUST be made to accept some men/nice men/ally men/harmless men/surgically changed men/certificated men/men that believe they should be the exception to the rule. Because that's the reasonable position? It isn't.

If you argue for safety for people like you I'll be right with you. If you show that you understand that females have a right to say 'no' to YOU, because you respect and accept that we should have the right to say no to you then I think we'll be allies.

But if there once was a time that I was desperate enough to keep most men out of my definition and spaces that I compromised in accepting some men, then that time has passed. My bar is not set so low, and I am not so desperate. I'm not content with the crumbs of compromise.

I want safety and autonomy for both you and me. I can support you when you look women in the eye and tell them you support their right to say no to you, and you accept that.

Otherwise you're not so very different from the people you want to differentiate yourself from. They won't take no for an answer either.

So how are you going to ensure that only male people with a GRC and SRS get to be in female only spaces and keep all other males out?

Well, the whole point is, you cannot do that. What you can do, is make it very clear for women that they have every right to throw someone out, as soon as they see a penis, and that it is acceptable for women to call management to make sure some person is female (natally or via SRS) by politely demanding documentation.

How would you do it?

Good post

It is always a mistake for politicians to stop listening to ordinary people. Migration and Brexit/the rise of the right in Europe is one example. Ordinary people may be "wrong" in woke political and media circles, but actually most will be a mix of kind and accepting, and conservative. Societal change can happen but it needs time. Not a bad thing when it comes to proposals that threaten harm as well as good.

This. The woketopians, who are mostly bourgeois, fail to understand that working class social conservatism has more to do with valuing stability (if your economic life is precarious, you value community stability) than it does with hatred or bigotry. Social upheaval is viewed through this lens.

There's no such thing as trans

What point is Debbie making? Debbie appears to think it's fine for transwomen to be in female prisons as long as they pass some sort of test. No men in female spaces, thank you.

This.

want safety and autonomy for both you and me. I can support you when you look women in the eye and tell them you support their right to say no to you, and you accept that.

Me too.

Debbie - agree with your basic premise that self-ID will be a disaster for transsexuals. You've not persuaded me that prisons should be anything other than strictly sex segregated though.

Vulnerable women in prison should never be accommodated with male people, even low risk transsexuals. That said, adequate safeguarding should also be applied in the male estate - a low risk transsexual prisoner needs safeguarding from a high risk sex offending cross dresser such as Karen White just as much as women do. And I appreciate the other issues about low numbers and ability of friends and family to visit etc, as we were chatting about the other day.

FWIW - I think the dig at Janice Turner was a bit tone deaf.

Thanks for the piece, Debbie. If I were boss of the world, then we would re-centre transsexuals, get rid of the Stonewall umbrella, affirm basic scientific principles again, and go from there. Problem is, I bet that transsexuals are vastly outnumbered and under-represented. I despair at how many people are getting confused with sex/gender/intersex. Personally I think at the core of the issue is the inability to clearly define “trans”, “male” and “female.” We’re also blind in this debate as to when biology matters, including for safeguarding. Personally, I think the difficult cases like prisons/sports/shelters/changing rooms should use third space solutions, at least until we have more data on impacts. The only evidence I have seen regarding violence is unfortunately that transsexual MtF retain male pattern criminality post-transition (might be reduced with better healthcare-another reason for medical involvement). Until someone has commissioned a good study to disprove this (and include a range of people in transition, starting from uttering the words “I identify as a woman”) and shows that “trans” reduces the statistical likelihood of committing crime at the rate of same sex peers, then I think we will have to err on the side of caution. Also, if there is no definition of who is trans, and no way of telling the “real” from the “fake” it will cause massive distrust. If Ian Huntley ever does legally transition (and TRAs don’t create distance between themselves and such psychopaths), then your average father on the street will start thinking that the Ians of the world could get completely legal access to his daughters in the changing room... That is when the backlash will get scary.
So I have massive sympathy for the issues facing transsexuals, but there are so many competing interests here that really the only way to solve this is with first principles and more research. I think we have to wait. Because it’s up to the people who want to change the law to support their claims, I don’t think we’ve got the evidence. And as long as the Stonewall definition of trans includes cross-dressers then I am afraid I will oppose their initiatives.

I don't want my daughter to have to see a penis in female only spaces before she has the right to have someone removed,

deepwatersolo.

Women and girls need and want female only spaces. Why is that unreasonable?

Don't commit an offence that warrants a custodial sentence - you know, like the rest of us seem to manage to do.

You can be held in custody without being convicted.

Women disproportionately find themselves on remand for a first offence. When they do go to court (after being remanded) many of them are either found not guilty or there is no subsequent custodial sentence.

Stats below.

--
Women in prison are more likely than men to be on remand (i.e. not convicted of an offence and therefore presumed innocent) - 45% of women entering prison in 2015 did so on remand.14 Less than half of women remanded and subsequently found guilty are given a prison sentence (71% of those remanded in the magistrates’ courts and 41% of those remanded by the Crown Courts did not receive a custodial sentence).15

However, the overwhelming number of women are imprisoned for non-violent offences and a disproportionate number are there on remand.

Prison Reform Trust Key Facts www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Women/why%20women_final.pdf

More women are sent to prison to serve a sentence for theft than for violence against the person, robbery, sexual offences, fraud, drugs, and motoring offences combined.6

• In 2015, 80% of female theft offences were for shoplifting.7 ...

• Women’s offending is more likely than men’s to be prompted by their relationships. Nearly half of women in prison (48%) questioned for the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SPCR) survey reported having committed offences to support someone else’s drug use compared to 22% of men.9

• A Cabinet Office study found that 28% of women’s crimes were financially motivated compared to 20% of men’s.10 Earlier research on mothers in custody found that 38% attributed their offending to ‘a need to support their children’, single mothers being more likely to cite a lack of money as the cause of their offending than those who were married.11

• Women are more likely than men to be in prison under sentence for a first offence...

TV licence evasion accounted for 36% of all prosecutions for women, but only 6% for men. In 2015, 70% of all the 189,349 defendants prosecuted for this offence were women...

Women in prison are more likely than men to be on remand (i.e. not convicted of an offence and therefore presumed innocent) - 45% of women entering prison in 2015 did so on remand.14 Less than half of women remanded and subsequently found guilty are given a prison sentence..

Agree, heresyandwitchcraft. I blame all the prudish idiots who started saying gender when they meant sex because even writing "sex" made them go all squirmy. Tosspots.

I don't want my daughter to be told which men she can exclude and which men she MUST accept.

I don't want her to be told she's hurtful for excluding a man with no penis. For asserting that she is as different from a penisless man as she is an intact one.

I won't stop fighting until every man accepts he has to stop pushing past her boundaries, that he isn't a special case, and that even if the law allows him, the law gets it wrong sometimes.

I won't stop until men acknowledge, respect and fortify women's right to say no to them.

Sorry Debbie.

No. Not even you.

What point is Debbie making?

I have viewed this Times Comment by Debbie as a careful invitation to open dialogue between different fractions, which implies that you don't want to immediately turn off one side or the other, but create space for dialogue and open minds. Debbie did not offer some ready 'recipy book'. (Not sure how people see this as Debbie making any specific demands).

I quite liked that.

Re: the long screed about women in prison, I accept the topic here is more specifically about transgender prisoners.

And, women prisoners are a disproportionately vulnerable group in so many ways.

It is always a mistake for politicians to stop listening to ordinary people.

I also agree with this statement. In the world of social media,everyone is classified as being right or wrong depending on your viewpoints, and there is no nuance to people having complex views on issues. So right wing commentators are rightly vilified by right-on people due to their racist views, but then it means that if they comment on trans issues they are dismissed.

Same on the other side. Because Jeremy Corbyn has acceptable views on social issues, then Labour’s views on Antisemitism and Women’s issues are just accepted.