Could someone explain the differences between same-sex marriage and TWAW?

[cheeseismydownfall]

I am relatively new to the gender identity shitshow and, like many of us, have been grappling over the past month or so with having to rethink a lot of what I had previously accepted as Correct Opinions (Guardian, left wing, being kind, good! Daily Mail, Tories, bad!).

Part of this has involved reading more, questioning more and simply thinking more than I have done before. In doing this, I want to make sure that I stay balanced and fair, and keep trying to think of alternative points of view. I don't want my indignation and rage to make me as blinkered as the TRAs.

So, something I was pondering over yesterday is the argument that denying trans women the right to define themselves as women (something which I instinctively disagree with) is no different to the (now legally unacceptable) desire to deny same sex couples the right to marry (something I instinctively agree with).

At the time it was being debated, same sex marriage was something I didn't give any real thought to - it seemed at face value a perfectly reasonable thing for gay people to want to be able to do, and I personally didn't have a problem with it. And I would have almost certainly judged someone who did, and thought, frankly, that they were a bit of a bigot.

But what I'm now realising is that I didn't have any skin in the game. When DH and I got married, the motivation was the legal status of marriage, and, to a lesser extent, to make a personal and public commitment to each other. DH re atheists, so we had a civil ceremony. Religion didn't come into it, and if it had have been available at the time, we might have formed a civil partnership instead. So when the word marriage got legally redefined to mean a partnership between two people, rather than specifically between a man and a woman, it didn't take anything away from my marriage*.

But presumably for many people to whom marriage had a deep religious significance, this may have been deeply troubling. It forced them to accept a new definition, a new ideology being forced upon them against their will, against their beliefs. Presumably many of these people enthusiastically welcomed the rights of gay couples to form civil partnerships in order to achieve (almost) the same rights in law as married couples, but that concept of marriage wan't other people's to give away. I understand that Baroness Nicholson objected to gay marriage. Was this how she felt, I wonder?

I can't quite reconcile my position on this and would really appreciate some view points. Is the crux of it similar to the idea of proportionate response? That while one can recognise that a person with religious faith may legitimately disagree with gay marriage, their sense of 'harm' caused by the existence gay marriage is, on balanced, trumped by the harm caused to gay people by denying their right to marriage. Whereas in the case of TWAW, I can argue that the harm that would be caused to biological females through dismantling single sex provisions is much greater than the harm caused to trans women by denying them the right to be legally indistinguishable from natal females?

You can believe continue to believe that marriage is a sacred institution and that the government was wrong to extend it to gay people and the government decision has absolutely no bearing on that. You’re not going to be forced to attend any gay weddings.

Whereas with TWAW, you may well find yourself in situations which are the equivalent of being forced to attend gay weddings. And be expected to sing along.

As far as the government is concerned marriage is a contract between two people. Previously a man and a woman. When I was married it was in a registry office so had no religious aspect whatsoever.

A religious marriage in a Christian church also counts as a legal marriage. [not sure if there are exceptions to this]

However, as far as I know the Church of England, at least, still only does man-woman marriages because they think a marriage is in front of god and a same sex marriage would not count. They do not have to pretend to believe something that they don't.

Transgender activists are wanting everyone to believe "trans women are women" and "trans men are men", which is patently untrue. Stating what I have just put is considered by transgender activists as transphobic and hateful.

So the Christian beliefs are respected within the confines of the church. But my knowledge that a man cannot become a woman is overridden by false birth certificates for males who state they are women.

Ultimately this then translates into no single sex spaces for women.

The transgender activists have pushed for de facto self id which completely overturns reality.

denying trans women the right to define themselves as women

I'm not sure that's accurate actually. I don't think anyone is telling trans people they can't identify as whatever they like - they can. I have no objection to Sally who used to be Sean defining themselves as a woman. I do however object to Sally asking that I identify them as a woman because I don't.

It's more nuanced that TRAs would have you believe.

I think the difference to me is, marriage is simply a contract between two people whereas believing TW AW is far more far reaching and is demanding that people believe in a falsity that defies known biology (and I don’t believe that in two hundred years time we will find any irrefutable proof that biology explains the ‘feeling’ of being the opposite sex).

I found the comparison to other legal structures, sometimes called “legal fictions”, like adoption, helpful.

Adoption is a legal structure, whereby society through its screening and legal processes, gives adults actively parenting a child the legal rights of parents.
Nations are also a legal structure, created socially because the people in that country and neighbours,
through laws accept that nation.
Marriage is a legal structure like fhat, and the acting like you were married to someone long, long predates the civil and religious ceremonies. There is a way of “being married” that is socially understood. The spouse has rights to be next of kin etc thorough t acts of both parties to the marriage.

I don’t think being a particular age or particular sex is like that. I don’t believe that there is verb called woman. I think it is a noun.

But even marriage is a social construct - there is no objective definition of marriage as it is something that humans invented. So the definition of marriage can be changed as no one objectively 'owns' that definition. And if you don't like the new definition then it's tough shit, but as a PP said, no one is forcing you to attend gay marriages.

Humans did not invent the idea of 'man' and 'woman' (or more specifically male and female) - they are biological truths that cannot be changed and further, that biology has been used to oppress women for millenia.

The idea that TWAW is entirely subjective. It has no basis in material reality and so one can only believe it from an ideological point of view. So making someone believe TWAW is akin to making someone believe in God.

And all that is before you think about how TWAW will affect women's rights when you can no longer define what a woman is.

I have no objection to Sally who used to be Sean defining themselves as a woman. I do however object to Sally asking that I identify them as a woman because I don't.

Couldn't have put it better if I tried. Thank you

the argument that denying trans women the right to define themselves as women (something which I instinctively disagree with) is no different to the (now legally unacceptable) desire to deny same sex couples the right to marry

As pp said, if you have a problem with gay marriage, you are not going to be personally affected by it.

It will not affect your marriage. You do not have to attend one. You do not have to be involved in any way. All your issue is, is that something is happening somewhere in the country out of your sight that you don't approve of and don't think should be allowed.

The erasure of sex based rights for females - which is what this boils down to - will affect every woman in the UK, and will actively exclude (is already excluding) significant numbers from accessing any provision so that male people can exercise absolute freedom of choice and ownership over all the provisions. This will include females of various minority faiths, cultures, disabilities, females who have experienced assault and trauma etc etc. Females will not be able to carry on as normal, their provisions will be gone: in terms of this argument, the equivalent of their marriages being forcibly changed against their wills, or being forced to participate in a gay marriage. Female rights, inclusion, recognition in law, ability to name and organise as a class, even the right to be homosexual, is radically affected at a personal level.

This could be solved by the provision of third, mixed sex spaces and retention of female only spaces so everyone's needs are equally recognised and met: however the TRA political lobby reject this solution. They refuse to agree to any female only provisions specific to biological sex, even if those provisions are happening out of their sight, they have equal access to the exact same services and female people having those needs met has no effect on them nor affects or involves them in any way.

So in terms of who is unaffected but annoyed merely that something is happening somewhere that does not in any way affect them but they politically do not approve of or wish people to be allowed in the same way as the protests against gay marriage?

That would be the TRA political lobby, not GC female people.

That while one can recognise that a person with religious faith may legitimately disagree with gay marriage

I'm of unquestioning religious faith and I wholeheartedly support gay marriage. However, I really don't see how it's remotely linked with TWAW. I just don't see the connection

And my view for what it's worth: transwomen are most definitely not women. My view has nothing to do with my religion. It's a simple reality, is all.

Religions and religious people are allowed to opt-out of same-sex marriage. You cannot force a Catholic priest to marry two women or two men, for example.

No-one is allowed to opt out of TWAW. It's compelled thought. Imagine two women telling their local priest to die in a grease fire because he won't marry them - it would never happen.

Gay marriage affects nobody else - it simply affords a marginalised group of people equal civil rights. TWAW, if taken literally, impacts women's rights in numerous serious ways.

If the existing Equality Act exceptions to trans people's rights to access specified areas of single sex provision are removed - as Labour and Lib Dems are committed to achieving - and GRCs made very much easier to obtain, then any male person could declare that they were a woman, and access all women's spaces, whatever the women and/or the organisers thought or said. There would be no legal way to prevent this. This would include prisons, where almost all the women are survivors of male sexual violence, over half in childhood, and therefore find male people traumatising in what is, by design, a locked-in environment. It would mean a communal changing area, or steam bath, or women's shelter, or rape crisis centre. It would mean staff, and clientele, alike. It would mean that you had no right to specify that a female performed a smear test, or a mammogram, because a trans-identifying male person would meet your request to be seen by a woman clinician. It would mean that all provision for women, in all spheres, became open to any male person with a subjective, invisible, and unprovable claim to feel like a woman. All data would be captured accordingly. In effect, the category of women as adult human females would be lost, to be replaced by self-determined gender. It would erase us, in law, as a definable group. It would also ensure the erasure of women's success in most forms of competitive sport.

All of that directly affects us. It removes many of our own rights.

Right now, the pressure for the above is great. Lots of businesses are already being told that the Equality Act exceptions are almost never applicable. But they remain - and Labour and Lib Dems are committed, in line with Stonewall's lobbying, to remove them as discriminatory. If they weren't applicable, then that commitment would not have been made. We need clarity on those exceptions being both very much available to use, and lawful. And that women have a right to single sex-provision, should we, and a provider, wish for it. (It is not single-gender, though Labour weasel-worded with pretending that it was, in the last election.) Our protections, in law and in reality, rely upon recognising the difference between sex and gender.

Gay marriage has no impact on straight marriage at all. If you disagree on faith grounds, then fine. Nobody's asking you to be involved. Gay marriage affects nobody but the couple in question.

In fairness, gender transition itself doesn't, either. Clearly, people should have every right to express their gender, and their sense of who they are, in freedom and peace and safety, and anyone who is abusive, or discriminatory, or harmful should find the law against them. Gender is socially constructed, policing it is harmful to women as a class, but also to many men as individuals, and it's regressive and sexist to enforce gender stereotypes based on someone's sex. People should be free to dress, behave, and express themselves as they feel is most authentic to them. There's no issue with that. I absolutely support anyone in being able to express gender as they see fit. But gender is not sex. Sex cannot change. And sex matters.

Every human alive is so because of female reproductive labour - we are, in fact, the means of human production, and that is why we have been controlled. Access to and autonomy over women's bodies has been controlled by men, and still is, in many parts of the world. Being able to identify that, and ourselves, by sex, are absolutely essential. You can't defend women's rights, if what a woman is becomes nothing more than an idea in someone's individual mind. It collapses the whole principle altogether. At that point, even our consent to which males we allow to see us naked, or provide intimate care, evaporates. So does any way in which we can collect accurate data, or collectively organise as a class, in our own interests.

We are personally, directly, and immediately affected. The very category of what we are is erased. That's why I welcome the present government's assurance that our single sex rights, and the existing exceptions in law to even trans people with GRCs accessing sensitive spaces and provision, will be strengthened, and guidance to clarify that provided. It's not that I wish trans people anything but well. It's that I recognise the reality, impact and influence of biological sex on women's lives, and life chances. Gay rights don't impact straight people's lives in any way at all, and that's before you remember that women are disadvantaged as compared to men, while gay people are not advantaged compared to straight. The two are not comparable.

Jane Clare Jones has written a piece on this.

Gay marriage isn't taking away rights from other people.

TWAW is taking away rights from women.

It forced them to accept a new definition
Yes but did it expect them to give up believing in reality, in science? No. Twaw is not equivalent to same-sex marriage. It is closer to a religious belief that is being foisted on us. TWAW was originally a courtesy, a legal fiction but now we are being told it is literally true - and if we still believe that women exist as a separate sex we are bigots.

Statutory marriage was already incompatible with most religious doctrines on that point before same sex marriage was legalised. That aside, marriage is entirely a social construct and not a question of fact, altering it in that fashion harmed no one and the only ‘negative’ possibilities it opened up was a potential for an increase in tax avoidance and an additional burden for courts re divorces.

In contrast sex is not a social construct, it’s a scientific fact. You can’t just lie like that, it undermines truth itself. Additionally self ID in particular gives risk to risks to women relying on sex segregation for their safety and it’s also at cross purposes with second wave feminist schemes for equity then equality.

I don’t even see why anyone would make the comparison.

That reminds me, there’s a conspiracy theory going round that the whole TWAW thing is actually a ploy by MRAs to undermine the progress of some feminist policies, in particular ones that aim to force equity by minimum numbers on women in leadership, women’s prizes, women’s sports etc. by inserting male bodies into those reserved spots.

For me, same sex marriage means equal marriage rights, whereas TWAW isn't about equality, unless you believe that women's rights are some kind of nice opt-in extra that has nothing to do with the biological reality of sex.

Objections to homosexuality and gay marriage are based purely in morality. That you believe that two men should not be having sex or whatever.

Objections to TWAW and the assertion that men can become women are based purely in reality. That men cannot become women. And also the reality that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men, including crimes against women, and that therefore women need certain sex based rights to keep them safe from males, however they identify.

However the fact we are having these discussions at all show what a smart move it was to tack the T onto LGB. The idea of changing sex, of becoming the opposite sex, of men becoming women has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation. The 'rights' that are being demanded by trans rights activists are in no way comparable to the rights that gay people have fought for.

OP, you make a good point about people possibly feeling that no one had the right to give away the concept of marriage as joining one man to one woman.

But same-sex marriage only affects the people who choose to take part in it. Those who disapprove need never think about it. Their 'loss' is purely theoretical.

Self-ID is pretty much the opposite: a major change in law that will affect women's everyday lives, regardless of what they think of it.

As Michelle says: The erasure of sex based rights for females - which is what this boils down to - will affect every woman in the UK, and will actively exclude (is already excluding) significant numbers from accessing any provision so that male people can exercise absolute freedom of choice and ownership over all the provisions.

Big, big difference.

To expand slightly;

Gay marriage is only offensive to some people's beliefs. Nobody gets disadvantaged by the right to same sex marriage, just a bit miffed.

It's no skin off my nose if a man wants to wear a dress and call himself Esmerelda. I might find it uncomfortable, but I fully recognise my comfort should not impinge his rights.

If that man wants access to my women's only spaces, takes awards that are meant for women and cleans up all the first prizes in women's sports, then Houston we have a problem. His rights should not supercede mine.

The complication is that vice versa is also true my rights shouldn'tinfringe his - so we reach stalemate. He shouldn't be allowed into women's only spaces because to do so infringes women's rights. He shouldn't be denied the right to fully live as a woman because that infringes his rights (if you believe that).

It seems to come down to who you think are the most oppressed group, or if you believe that the best treatment for gender dysphoria and autogynophalia (AGP) is conversion therapy.

My position is that I don't believe that all trans people are gender dysphoric, and that men with AGP absolutely should not have access to women's spaces. I don't believe that the best treatment for dysphoria is to unquestioningly encourage the person transition permanently. And i don't believe that the rights of one oppressed group should trump the rights of another opressed group.

The word ‘marriage’ describes a legal contract between two people. Extending the availability of that contract to two people of the same sex doesn’t alter the meaning of the word, it still describes a legal contract made between two people.

Changing the meaning of woman from ‘adult human female’ to ‘adult human female and some adult human males’ means the word woman no longer acts as a descriptor for ‘adult human female’. It renders the word completely useless!

So, I suppose you could change the meaning of women if you really wanted to, but we would then need to invent a completely new word that works as a noun for ‘adult human female’ instead.

So it’s absolutely nothing like same sex marriage and anyone who tries to argue that it is is either clueless or disingenuous.

@titchy

I don't think it's even as much as expectation that we recognise as female, for me it's just the protection of female only spaces where making them unisex is potentially dangerous or degrading.

I don't even care about unisex rest rooms or changing rooms (if they have floor to ceiling doors/partitions) but the sight of a biological man, naked in the open (no cubicles) women's changing room at a hotel/spa was too much! Nearly all the issues can be addressed by having unisex facilities in addition to segregated.

but that concept of marriage wasn't other people's to give away.

Why not? Who owns the concept of marriage?

TRA demands erase sex based rights.
Homosexual marriage did not erase heterosexual marriage.
If homosexuals had argued sex was a spectrum and men were women so they were really heterosexual and so no one - not even churches with a religious belief opposed to it - could refuse to marry them it would be more comparable.
Homosexuals argued for new but comparable rights for who they are, TRAs are appropriating rights from a group they are not and by doing so erasing them for the original group.

@ThePurported

For me, same sex marriage means equal marriage rights, whereas TWAW isn't about equality, unless you believe that women's rights are some kind of nice opt-in extra that has nothing to do with the biological reality of sex.

Yes. And also as Michelle said:

The erasure of sex based rights for females - which is what this boils down to - will affect every woman in the UK, and will actively exclude (is already excluding) significant numbers from accessing any provision so that male people can exercise absolute freedom of choice and ownership over all the provisions.

There’s some great answers so far. I would say that marriage is, at its core, a contract between people that confers certain legal rights and privileges and binds them in a family relationship. Historically marriage could be between multiple people. You could get married without women’s consent. You could marry children. In roman times men married men. There is nothing in the concept of marriage that makes it necessary to restrict it to one man and one woman - that was a pretty late development that came into being due to Christianity. Gay marriage doesn’t actually fundamentally change the concept of marriage at all- they are still taking part in the very same institution that confers the same rights. The big debate really concerned religious people who thought it was sinful to extend marriage in that way. In any case a compromise was reached - some religions exclude religious marriage to gay people, but gay people can still get legally married.

It doesn’t quite work for saying that trans women are women. For one thing, I can define marriage very easily but trans activists notoriously struggle to define “woman”. If we say a woman is anyone who feels like a woman that seems to destroy the coherence of the concept “woman” and opens the door to anyone being a woman just on their way so- it would be the equivalent of anyone saying “I’m married” without actually being married! Those of us outside gender studies and queer theory departments think that women are human females. If that’s the case then letting men become women will have a massive effect on the category. It will redefine what a woman is. This will have massive knock on effects for women’s rights to single sex spaces, as well as knock on effects for other categories related to woman (like mother, lesbian , sister). Allowing gay marriage didn’t affect anyone else’s marriage - Christian marriages were just as sacred as before. Letting men become women, however, has a disproportionate impact on women. Women are being beaten in their own sport, are being told they are bigots for not like penis etc. In my personal case I used to work in a very male dominated field (with about 15 percent women). I know several men in that field who get past the master or PhD level as men and then transition to women. These men are now being hired as women and making their departments seem super equal.

Simply put, marriage equality for all promotes equality. Letting men become women undermines equality because it creates the situation where the oppressors of women not only become women but also claim they are even more oppressed than women! This would be rightfully rejected for any other social category (see how quickly Rachel dolezal was put in her place) so we do have to be suspicious about why only the category of women is fair game.