This is what TRA are circulating to act to the gender rights new this week

[MrsPeacockInTheLibrary]

This is what the TRA are circulating. We need to act also.

CN: trans rights. GRA consultation.

(for those of you who need to conserve spoons and emotional energy at the moment)

(OP - I shared this from a lesbian friend who is furious at what she sees going on with some of her friends silencing debate etc)
If like me you are upset and angry about the response to the consultation and anti-trans proposals leaked in the Sunday Times a very trusted friend posted this regarding some urgent action you can take today and tomorrow:
"The Sunday Times article admits Boris Johnson hasn't yet agreed to Liz Truss's proposals. Liz Truss is due to speak in parliament about equalities this Wednesday morning. So Boris is likely being asked to agree to the proposals within the next 48 hours. The Sunday Times article is an attempt to push him to approve and to check what level of public objection there will be.
So get as many people as possible to URGENTLY call on Boris not to take forward any of these proposals by tweeting @BorisJohnson @10DowningStreet and emailing using the webform at email.number10.gov.uk"
[Zan: note the form is limited to 1000 characters for the response. Below are some suggestions of points to make from the post although you probably won't have space to include them all]
"Our best chance of stopping this is to make Boris Johnson feel it could be personally toxic as a legacy and a headache he can do without. If he doesn't sign it off, Liz Truss can't do it.
Get as many cis women allies as possible to complain that these proposals will harm them as well as trans women. That any tall woman, or flat-chested woman, or deep voiced woman, or butch woman, would be at risk of being excluded from women's services and toilets - there's no way for her to prove she's not trans - and men will likely use these proposals as a mandate to grope women's genitals on the pretext of protecting other women by checking if she has a penis.
Get as many allies as possible to also point out that these proposals would force cash strapped local councils to waste public money hiring toilet genital police to patrol toilets and demolishing long established gender neutral facilities from existing schools and leisure centres. What an atrocious waste of money during an economic crisis.
Try and get opinion pieces and letters to the editor by cis women into newspapers today and tomorrow. Try and get women's orgs of any size to publicly denounce the proposals as unnecessary and harmful to all women and girls, not just trans women. Get them to say there's nothing wrong with the way single sex services are currently operating and these proposals could even result in less provision of single sex services and closure of local authority public toilets."

We all know that Dominic Cummings is very good at using focus groups so I doubt he (as Boris’s puppet master) will be swayed by tweets generated by lobby groups.

I feel 100% certain that if you asked the average man or woman on the street if they thought you should be able to change the sex on your birth certificate or go into opposite sex toilets and changing areas without a medical diagnosis and without surgery they would say no.

Women won’t feel safe, even if they can’t articulate exactly why and men won’t want their wives, daughters and mothers sharing those spaces with what I think the average person would consider to be a ‘weirdo’

Not to mention the sheer stupidity of lying to Boris Johnson about what Liz Truss is doing, as if he's not going to find out.

You know I would love to say you’re right. It does seem totally deranged to claim that clarifications that sex segregation is based legally on natal sex rather than self ID would result in genital/ID police by bathroom entrances, buut... this is exactly the argument that “won the day” in the US when the NC “bathroom bill” was overturned.

TRAs in the US actually convinced a majority of people including major corporations And sports organizations that This Bill was a ploy to allow conservative Perverts to inspect people’s genitals at public restrooms. Really.

When is Liz Truss presenting this in the HoC? I thought it was today?

The Times readers survey has 94% of 11,500 against self id. There are also very few comments in favour in any trans article. One commentator is called ' DominicCummings' who is certainly GC and said Mumsnet was influential in opinion forming for Liz Truss. Is this the real guy? Don't know, but would be a little strange if not. The Times is the paper grown up politicians read.

One commentator is called ' DominicCummings' who is certainly GC and said Mumsnet was influential in opinion forming for Liz Truss.

Dominic Cummings is apparently fond of saying to MPs, "Ignore the noise; listen to the message" and he is known to be GC so it could well be him.

Yes it does amuse me that even British TRAs can't seem to grasp that Britain and America are very different countries...

unherd.com/thepost/the-british-imitation-of-america-goes-well-beyond-race/

Really interesting thread but I'm not at all comfortable with the description of post surgery vaginas, it's just not called for.

It's just the sorry of thing used to show how awful gc people are.

The post on the op is mind boggling though! Main point being that there are no laws about who uses what toilet. It's enforced by social convention/ agreement. And up until a couple of years ago, women could challenge or report a bloke coming in. They have already managed to break this social convention and more than that, get places where there is law (eg schools) to break the law.

They always focus on toilets because they think it sounds trivial.

Well it's not a vagina but ykwim. Seems overly personal. Most transgender women have no genital surgery anyway.

The good thing about being grown women tho, is we each get to determine our own speech, and no one else’s. This isn’t a political party and there is no agreed agenda. We’re just adult human females, of all ages and backgrounds, no one of us is responsible for any other.

When I first arrived here I was genuinely shocked by the forthright not-at-all polite language that some long term FWR posters used (and I turned up when the new moderation rules did! I woulda been proper cats-bum-face if I’d gotten here before).
I’m a massive Pollyanna and I thought I would be able to carefully navigate the middle ground.

But!

I got told to choke on a ladydique and die in a grease fire and told my boundaries were worthless because they would be using our spaces whether I liked it or not.

And I realised, to quote my Nan (b.1918)

‘If I had shit on bread they’d want to take it off me!’

Maybe some people can be kind, polite, respectable while their rights are stripped away, but I won’t be.

It’s not as if we are posting this stuff on their subreddits, or painting it on signs, or shouting it in the street. Women can be impolite, women can be bawdy, women can tell male people to fuck off, women can resist when autogynephiles appropriate our genitals but shame us for organising for our health and reproductive rights.

Physiologic autogynephilia: arousal to fantasies of body functions specific to people regarded as female
Anatomic autogynephilia: arousal to the fantasy of having a normative woman's body, or parts of one

That any tall woman, or flat-chested woman, or deep voiced woman, or butch woman, would be at risk of being excluded from women's services and toilets

'Would be at risk'?

That implies the law I changing.

"Get as many allies as possible to also point out that these proposals would force cash strapped local councils to waste public money hiring toilet genital police to patrol toilets and demolishing long established gender neutral facilities from existing schools and leisure centres. What an atrocious waste of money during an economic crisis."

Again - the law isn't changing.

Michelleoftheresistance - a lot of people (ncluding some feminists!) have got caught up by a pro trans campaign to get everybody to write letters to Boris Johnson claiming he is somehow going to edit or something the whole GRA reform proposals that have been sitting in a cupboard somewhere while Women's Ministers come and go.

Liz Truss was giving evidence today of "gay conversion".

If you believe the badly times Sunday Times leak, the GRA proposals will be published at the end of July just as MPs go off on holiday.

I was initially critical of the ST for publishing aleak which they had already done in February.

Now I think it was an act of support for JKR as it has taken the heat (a little bit) off her.

PN have published this today: "Thousands of cisgender women sign letter urging Liz Truss to halt anti-trans plans: ‘We do not need protecting from trans people’ "
www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/06/17/liz-truss-gender-recognition-act-reform-cis-women-open-letter-trans-equality/

liztrussopenletter.wordpress.com/

I looked through the list.

The signatures aren’t all female, they don’t all identify as ‘cis’, loads of them are from outside of the U.K. and the handful I specifically looked up on Facebook are under the age of 21.

TRAs trying to game things again? Who'd have guessed!

Well as fact check have proved the truth is not part of the PN work practice. But anything for an overstated headline.

Has anyone found out why they were under the impression that Boris Johnson was going to take and sort of decision about the GRA reforms. I doubt he's even read it. He is probably waiting for Cummings to tell him what to say.

and men will likely use these proposals as a mandate to grope women's genitals on the pretext of protecting other women by checking if she has a penis.

But... I thought no man, ever, would dream of abusing a provision to take advantage?

Also: how will men grope us, when not allowed in our spaces to begin with? Hard of thinking as an argument, that one. Though the concession that men are inherently more likely to sexually assault than women is duly noted.

The Times readers survey has 94% of 11,500 against self id. There are also very few comments in favour in any trans article. One commentator is called ' DominicCummings' who is certainly GC and said Mumsnet was influential in opinion forming for Liz Truss. Is this the real guy? Don't know, but would be a little strange if not. The Times is the paper grown up politicians read.

People in newspaper comment threads can use any names they like. I've seen a Rasputin more than once. I'd be pleased to hear that Cummings is GC, but I would be astonished to have anyone in his role post that freely, and that indiscreetly, anywhere.

his is exactly the argument that “won the day” in the US when the NC “bathroom bill” was overturned.

A 'bathroom bill' would be new legislation. (And very odd, as we don't have public bathrooms in the UK...).

Unless I have missed something the most that Lynne Truss will be doing is clarifying guidance for existing legislation.

sorry Liz Truss!

be organised and ready to give them impossible questions like what they use on us

Monsieur Freud, your slip is showing

Really interesting thread but I'm not at all comfortable with the description of post surgery vaginas..

I'm not comfortable with that use of the word vagina.

So nobody is happy - welcome to the club of unhappiness.

I did in my next post say,

'Well it's not a vagina but ykwim. Seems overly personal. Most transgender women have no genital surgery anyway.'

Does that help?