Women’s Place talk: full text House of Lords Oct 10th 2018
"As I hope is clear to everyone by now — thanks to campaigns like that of A Woman’s Place and Fair Play for Women — when it comes to developing public policy around legally changing sex, there are several sets of interests at stake, and not just one.
To put it in a nutshell: if you’re going to make it very easy for members of the biological male sex, socialised as men, to get the word ‘female’ written on their birth certificates, you are going to get at least two problems, simply put:
· more opportunities for some males to harass females, because now males can be more easily legally treated as females, and so have greater access to females.
and
· an undermining of the positive actions which have historically promoted equality of opportunity for females; because now some males can ‘self-identify as females’ and so get access to these opportunities (all-women shortlists being the obvious example).
You are also going to get a lot of confusion for questioning, gender-non-conforming, children, working out who they are in a world in which ‘changing sex’ is now apparently easy.
So the question for all of us is: how to balance these competing interests?
I want to talk about how, in attempting to answer that question, public organisations are being misleadingly advised, sometimes with harmful results.
I take it that the selection of advisors on a particular issue should follow four basic and commonsensical principles:
· All groups affected should be represented
· Advisors should have relevant expertise, and should advise only on areas where they have expertise.
· Advisors shouldn’t have backgrounds which undermine their credibility.
· Advisors should, where possible, appeal to independently verified evidence to back up their views." (continues)
medium.com/@kathleenstock/womens-place-talk-full-text-house-of-lords-oct-10th-2018-b1f3d70c4559