Balanced BBC explainer on women's rights and transgender people

[CheeryTreeBlossom]

Just wanted to signpost this article I spotted on the BBC front page which is possibly the most balanced reporting I have seen on this issue.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-53154286

No "assigning of gender/sex" at birth, clear explanation of why women are concerned about single sex spaces and says that it is legal to exclude those even with a GRC if required, e.g.

An example given by the Equality Act is that organisers of group counselling for female sexual assault victims could exclude a trans woman if they judged that clients would be unlikely to attend the session if she was there.
However, refusing a trans woman entry to a pub's female toilet is likely to be unlawful.
Legally changing your gender does not guarantee entry to single-sex spaces, the government says, and the consultation would never have resulted in these exemptions being removed

Dare I believe that there is at last a move towards reasonable discussion in mainstream media?

Good article but they have said transgender is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act rather than gender reassignment. If you click on 'contact the bbc' at the bottom of the article you can submit feedback on factual errors. Which I have done! Can you?

I'm not convinced.

R4 6pm news had someone on who was very upset, describing the dreadful humiliating process (without specifying what it actually was).

I think the BBC have a long way to go still.

So, despite living as a woman and having surgery, this person didn't pass enough to stop a woman from complaining about there being a man in the ladies?

That shows you how unnecessary any ID card or ‘genital examination’ are. In real life men and women are identifiable as such.

R4 6pm news had someone on who was very upset, describing the dreadful humiliating process (without specifying what it actually was).

I don’t understand the humiliating process aspect to all of this. I gave birth to DD1 in front of DH and a male midwife (who was really great) and whilst delivering did a shit in front of them both.

That’s humiliation...

My first pregnancy was a miscarriage - I was examined (a second time, already done by the registrar on admittance) by a male gynae with the entourage at the bottom of the bed (as in the 1960s Doctor series). After telling me to make myself 'decent', the Gynae turned to entourage and said 'that pregnancy's a dead loss' and walked off.

Then when I came to sign the permission forms for the op, I got told off for reading what I was signing .

Totally humiliating first experience with a hospital (and that was only part of it)

I was listening to the 6pm news on R4, and it's pretty damn clear where their sympathies lie. Unfortunately for them, the TW they chose to interview sounded like Barbara the TW taxi driver in League of Gentlemen.
What really annoyed me is when they stated something like (I'm afraid I've been out all evening, so can't remember it exactly) 'there had been vitriolic discussions on the subject'. When all the vitriol comes from one side.

Hmm, that's interesting because I was planning on posting here later (if nobody beat me to it) about a BBC article on their news page that I thought was quite biased, and was thinking of complaining! Am now slightly confused and will have to check later whether it was a different one or what (or possibly they edited it?).

I forget all the things that annoyed me, but one was giving unquestioning definitions of "gender", "gender identity" etc as though these were either absolute facts or at least generally agreed meanings, when many of us don't believe in them (or not in the sense they were being used) at all. A bit like saying "Jesus was the son of God" rather than "Christians believe that....". There was more as well I think, but I'll need to look again.

We don't have laws about who uses which bogs. It was a strong social convention. That has been destroyed.

Well we do in schools but everyone's ignoring the law on that.

We don't have laws about who uses which bogs. It was a strong social convention. That has been destroyed.

Of course we do have laws about this! The only reason why you are allowed to put ‘ladies’ or ‘gents’ on a toilet door is because you are making use of the single sex exemption under the equality act.

Hmm not sure. Interesting point.

I think they just were, weren't they?

The BBC were pretty biased on R4 at 6pm.

Maya Forstater with a considered look at the pub toilet case in Kirklees referenced up thread.

a-question-of-consent.net/2020/05/29/the-case-of-sb/

@Jux

The TW in that case had undergone sex reassignment surgery and had been living as a woman for 20 years. Generally, I don't mind that at all. I wonder what the woman who followed the TW into the loo and told her not to use them was thinking? It sounds a bit suspicious to me, tbh, more like a set up; and under normal circumstances I would not support the woman against the TW.

Well at least thank you for saying TW instead of MAN. Some being insulting towards trans persons is not feminism it is bigotry. Anyway trans people will continue to use the loos of their choice, as they have always done for decades. Nobody is going to suddenly start policing loos and nobody is legally required to produce a GRC. Anyway mistaken accusations would be made and then our loos would become war zones.

The difficulty is that years ago the stonewall umbrella didn't exist.

@ByGrabtharsHammerWhatASavings

It also actually lists "using the facilities of your target gender" as a way in which transpeople might prove they have been "living as a man/woman" for 2 years. Our case for excluding TW from women only services like crisis centers is really strong, but the argument for excluding them from women's toilets is sadly much weaker.

Hmm, I don't agree. For the very simple reason that the Equality Act itself unequivocally gives us the right to single-sex facilities. What's been causing the problems is that from its inception, the only groups consulted by the EHRC in the writing of its statutory guidance were trans rights organisations, for whom the sex-based exemptions in the EqA were a serious setback.

This resulted in guidance misrepresenting the law in regard to the sex-based exemptions. This guidance was then referred to by the government in general and by the Government Equalities Office. Essentially, misrepresentation all the way down.

The case that the BBC quotes here is completely irrelevant, because the claim was uncontested. The claimant won by default and no arguments were made in defence (which means none were made and then refuted in regard to whether the sex-based exemptions applied to a legal male or not.)

Sorry, posted too soon. So the argument that excluding a male who identifies as trans fron a pub toilet would be unlikely to be lawful is based entirely on misrepresentation of the law and not the actual law.

@Jux

The TW in that case had undergone sex reassignment surgery and had been living as a woman for 20 years. Generally, I don't mind that at all. I wonder what the woman who followed the TW into the loo and told her not to use them was thinking? It sounds a bit suspicious to me, tbh, more like a set up; and under normal circumstances I would not support the woman against the TW.

Not quite. The claimant had been crossdressing on and off for a number of years, but socially transitioned only in 2009 and had various surgeries from five months after the incident in the pub.

And looks obviously male in later photographs.

I'm surprised also at your speculation about the woman here. I've been in plenty pubs, needed to use the toilet, left my seat and arrived at the toilets at the same time as other patrons. What is much more likely is that it was indeed a complete coincidence that both pub patrons headed to the loo at the same time. The woman then realised someone she recognised as a man was going into the Ladies and complained. There's no trap and none is necessary for this situation to arise quite naturally. (The simplest explanation is always the most likely. )

@fatblackcatspaw

they'll probably be sacked!

Or at least be forced to issue an "updated" version and apology, after they've been re-educated. 🤷‍♀️

Well at least thank you for saying TW instead of MAN.

It is a simple statement of fact, not an insult - they are men. What is bigotry and an insult is insisting women redefine themselves because men say so. Or ignoring women’s needs for safety, privacy and dignity and the law because a male decides that is what he wants to do.

@Aesopfable

Well at least thank you for saying TW instead of MAN.

It is a simple statement of fact, not an insult - they are men. What is bigotry and an insult is insisting women redefine themselves because men say so. Or ignoring women’s needs for safety, privacy and dignity and the law because a male decides that is what he wants to do.

I strongly disagree. But I am not going to argue. Good luck to you.

Yes I read that article today and was gobsmacked at the bit explaining the difference between sex - that is 'recorded' at birth (not 'assigned'!) - and gender. It was like a breath of fresh (factual) air.

For some reason <a class="break-all" href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-51806011?intlink_from_url=www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c4nr0wvjr85t/gender-dysphoria&link_location=live-reporting-story" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this article also appeared on my BBC news app earlier but I couldn't find it when looking just now - then found it and it's dated from March. About detransitioning! Yes they have to put the proviso (so they don't get death threats on twitter):
The stories of these two young people are complex.
They may not be typical of people who have transitioned to another gender. And they are not a judgement on the decisions of other trans people, be they trans men, trans women or non-binary.
But still, good to see some truth out there.

I think it was the same article I saw, I obviously had a different take on it than some people, though on re-reading it it's probably not as bad as I thought either.

A few bits that did rile me: Firstly as I mentioned, the unquestioning stuff about gender, gender identity and "people who are non-binary" - well I don't believe "non-binary" means anything, either we all are (as nobody conforms exactly to stereotypes) or nobody is, and it is not recognised in law currently or anything, but just chucking it in makes it sound like a generally accepted fact. (Same for the "gender" and "gender ID" stuff).

Also this bit: "Many trans people have said they found the system intrusive, costly, humiliating and bureaucratic. Fewer than 5,000 people had legally changed gender by 2018, leading the government to set up a public consultation", and then going on to say there are between 200,000-500,000 trans identifying people, as if that was proof of a failure of the GRA. But if they knew anything about its history, they would know that the number of people who now have a GRC was almost exactly the number of people the gov't expected to, when they researched it beforehand. So the issue doesn't seem to be that those in the target "market" couldn't get one (it's apparently very rare to apply and be rejected), but that the definition of "trans" has massively widened to include people the GRA was never originally intended to cover, with no dysphoria, no intention of making physical changes etc. In which case, surely it's reasonable to ask whether this new group should also qualify for a GRC, before looking at how to make it easier to give them one.

Then there was the pub toilets thing of course, which I also thought was questionable, but that's already been discussed above!

All that said, there were definitely some good parts too, and I liked that they finished with the concerns about childhood transition. So it certainly could be worse.

Yes, I wouldn't expect an article on the BBC to make GC points and it makes sense they use the terms transgender people prefer when referring to them, eg. non-binary.
Key for me was the lack of emotive language, fake suicide/ hate incident statistics, and an acknowledgement that there is a conflict. That only some will actually medically transition. Also that gender identity is all about self perception, which surely highlights the falsehood in the "TWAW and always have been".
A lot of people in the UK and abroad see the BBC as an impartial reporting outlet, more so that Murdoch papers etc.
So I think it is poignant when they have stopped posting unquestioning support for reform and Twitter pile-ons of JKR as news. To be acknowledging these points, a lot of which she made, feels big. I'm in a glass half full mood this week.

I very rarely post, but I just sent a comment to the BBC News website about this very article, to ask them to change this line:

Under the Equality Act 2010, no-one should be discriminated against because they are transgender.

That is not true, is it? It is gender reassignment that is the protected characteristic, and we know that Stonewall and others keep promoting other interpretations... BBC themselves link to Equality Act and to EHRC, and even EHRC, who have form, say: However, the advice and guidance on this page applies to current law and therefore uses the terms referred to in the Equality Act 2010.

@Goldencurtain

Good article but they have said transgender is a protected characteristic in the Equality Act rather than gender reassignment. If you click on 'contact the bbc' at the bottom of the article you can submit feedback on factual errors. Which I have done! Can you?

Yes - I just did that - see my post - and then came on here! I think it would be good for everyone to point this out...