NUS guide to filling in the GRA consultation - predictably bonkers

[BettyDuMonde]

www.nus.org.uk/en/news/press-releases/nus-statement-on-university-of-york-students-union/

Be interesting to see what actual, grown up politicians think of that...

NUS member (a medical science too, so lol at "coercively assigned at birth"...), who do I complain to?

WTAF.

Just what.

I would think it worth contacting the Universities Minister as well as the President of NUS?

Sam Gyimah MP made the announcement earlier in the year about the importance of free speech in universities.

May 3rd 2018 reported by the Times, (extract)
"Sam Gyimah, the universities minister, will announce tough guidance on the issue at a meeting today, calling attempts to silence debate “chilling”.

He will accuse some student societies of “institutional hostility” to certain unfashionable but perfectly lawful views. A “murky” legal landscape, with guidance from various regulators, lets zealots censor those with whom they disagree, Mr Gyimah will say."

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sam-gyimah-crackdown-on-students-silencing-free-speech-x28jx85fc
thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3239267-Free-Speech-No-Platforming-at-Universities

THere is a bit of a vacuum at the top of the NUS:
ChattyLion wrote:
Simon Blake the CEO of the NUS has just left his post.
He blogged on it here:
www.nusconnect.org.uk/articles/simon-blake-10-things-i-learnt-in-1000-days

Imagine the post-it note he’s left on the file for the next person coming in! shock

His final points on that blog are (with my bolding):

9 Free speech is not under threat

Colleges and universities debate different ideas every day, thousands of times a day. Every now and then students protest, they are expressing their right to demonstrate concern. That is free speech and this ongoing focus on free speech is a nonsense. It is a non-issue that has been blown up into an issue.

10. Students are not ‘snowflakes’

The term has been co-opted to patronise, undermine and stop discussion on legitimate issues that younger generations have different views on. Given the importance of inter-generational dialogue it is a concept journalists and politicians could do well to erase from their vocabularies and find more positive ways to engage in dialogue. When students say they will not accept racism, transphobia or a white curriculum rather than brand them snowflakes us ‘older folk’ could do well to listen, to talk and try to understand. And even when we don’t understand we must trust that each generation has to find their own way and support them to do so.

And on that snowflake idea: there is absolutely nothing over sensitive about people who have experienced oppression and their allies believing their fundamental human rights are not up for debate."

"

further discussion follows this post (p27) of the third Jess Bradley thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3325623-Jess-Bradley-a-government-advisor-on-womens-rights-suspended-by-NUS-over-indecent-blog-Part-iii?pg=27

We are also calling for an end to coercively assigning gender at birth

Well that's odd. Gender isn't assigned at birth. Sex is observed. Glad we've sorted that one out.

Shares in blue hair dye must be through the roof.

I can't deal with this level of woke without a stiff drink.

[flowers[ Rowan, thanks for this links - I'll get on it today

Maria Miller's Women and Equalities Committee
Transgender Equality
First Report of Session 2015–16

"Terminology

1. Each of us is at birth assigned a sex (male or female), based on our physical characteristics. Most people’s gender identity (the gender with which they associate themselves) and gender presentation (how they outwardly show their gender) will not differ from that typically associated with their assigned sex. Trans people, however, have a gender identity which differs from that of their (assigned) birth sex. Trans identities take a wide diversity of forms."

Special legal advisers Stephen Whittle & Claire McCann
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3325882-WEP-conference-questions-for-panel-of-trans-rights-advocating-barristers?pg=3

Jess Bradley as Action for Trans Health representative was a key witness

publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmwomeq/390/390.pdf

Each of us is at birth assigned a sex (male or female), based on our physical characteristics. Most people’s gender identity (the gender with which they associate themselves) and gender presentation (how they outwardly show their gender) will not differ from that typically associated with their assigned sex. Trans people, however, have a gender identity which differs from that of their (assigned) birth sex

The 'physical characteristics' are so briefly referred too that the fact that they are the only real, objectively verifiable factor is effectively glossed over.

There is an assumption that gender identity exists and is innate. Research has shwn neither, ever. There are lots of people who claim, subjectively, to experience GI. But there are many thousands who believe in souls, or ghosts, or that vaccines cause autism, or any number of verifiable claims. They are free to believe them but laws aren't changed to make the rest of us join in.

There is no explanation of gender. There is no acknowledgment of reproductive role.

The words we assign to sex categories and gender are all social constructs, because that's what language is. What doesn't change and isn't a construct is the physical difference. It is binary, and immutable, and that has to be buried by Maria Miller, for the purpose of advancing male rights.

People should realise that transgenderism itself disproves the theory of male and female brain sex. It pisses me off that the most basic, rudimentary analysis should have stopped all this in its tracks half a century ago.

twitter.com/Rose_Of_Dawn/status/1042445353562370048

Article in The Spectator:
'How I was hounded off campus for saying ‘women don’t have penises’
by Angelos Sofocleous

(extract)
"What harm can it do saying that women don’t have penises? Quite a lot, actually, if my experience is anything to go on. After sharing a statement with that message on Twitter, along with a screenshot from a Spectator article, the backlash was swift. Less than a month after sending that tweet, I had lost my position as president-elect of Humanist Students as well as my role as assistant editor of Durham University’s philosophy society’s undergraduate journal, Critique. I was also given the boot as co-editor-in-chief of Durham University’s online student magazine, the Bubble. All for saying something that many people would surely agree with.

The reaction against me was extreme, yet it was far from exceptional. On campus, the subject of gender is now off limits for those who fail to fall into line with the new orthodoxy: that being a man or a woman is fluid. Anyone who says otherwise is liable to find themselves hounded into silence.

It won’t come as much of a surprise that the National Union of Students is leading the charge on this front. Today, the NUS announced its response to the government’s consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act. Among the NUS’s more barmy proposals was calling for an end to ‘coercively assigning gender at birth’. Is it a boy? Is it a girl? In future, it seems we might have to wait to ask the child itself when it grows up." (continues)

blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/how-i-was-hounded-off-campus-for-saying-women-dont-have-penises/

he held the banner at the protest where Bradley was bundled out of the way by pipers

That sentence, and the memory of the video, will never stop being very amusing indeed

One of the many, many things I don't understand about the TRA narrative is this idea of 'coercively assigning gender at birth'. What in the name of sanity do these fantasists think goes on in a delivery suite?

Do they think there are gender guards outside every door, making sure that each room containing a child that will be designated 'boy' is barracaded until the parents agree to the assignment? Or that there's a little table of baby genitals that the parents have to pick from, as coercively directed by the midwife?

coercively assigning gender

Ah, don't you just love a bit of hyperbole - appropriating intersex terms but with a dollop of violence, oppression and a conspiracy between parents and medical professionals.

What a world we might have had if baby girls had been forced into blue babygros and made to play rough games, before going to Eton then Oxbridge, then Parliament.

In fact, Henry the Eighth might have saved himself 5 five wives, and a break from Rome, if he'd overlooked Princess Mary's physiology and called her him Kevin.

The 'coercively assigning gender at birth' is hilarious.

See this (Canadian) article from 2014. You cannot make this up. Or maybe you can...

It's called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It's a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals.

OMG, we must put a stop to this immediately!

Absinthe

LM is bezzies with Cara Delevigne. Now I feel marginalised. She's meant to be my fwend

... Cara, I mean; not the other one

based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals

Ah, yes, it's the lack of thoroughness which really bothers their heads. Why do these medical professionals not at least hold up, say, a toy car and a dolly and see what the child prefers? Or dress it in a pink babygrow and then a blue one and see the child's reaction?

Or a dress and a pair of trousers to see which the infant reaches for?

Crackpots - poor Lily though, in her marginalised celebrity clique. It's not easy being a sleb, y'know. Check your cis-civilian privilege.

There is so much crazy here it's hard to know where to start.
The NUS Women's Officer, of all roles, saying "for too long, cis women have been comfortable avoiding this fight". Because we don't have other fights still, do we?
I also think objecting to paying a fee for an official document is ridiculous - let's all have free passports and driving licences too!

I am so livid about this cavalier treatment of birth certificates.

In other countries they're still struggling to enforce birth registration so that we have decent data about foeticide and infanticide of girls. Birth registration is a gateway to basic human rights, especially for women and girls.

Without universal birth and death registration it is impossible to accurately attack child marriage, maternal mortality and neonatal mortality.

Universal birth registration (and death registration) is essential for the protection of women and girls who are otherwise invisible. Without that all important birth certificate, young people are reliant upon others for verification of age. Child marriage can't be investigated for a non-person or where there is no proof of age. There are examples where the tactic of burning a girl’s birth certificate is used to control and bar her access to higher education. Without a birth certificate, girls are vulnerable to predation by child marriage and any unregistered child is on the margins that make it easy for them to be taken up by human traffickers associated with slavery.

How are we supposed to make progress with essential economic and social policies if the gateway function of universal objective birth records can be opened up to revision and equivocation?