Labour have committed to single sex spaces

[flumpetto]

Excluding trans

This is a step in the right direction at long last....

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-trans-women-labour-b1924832.html

@ButterflyHatched

You're leveraging your social capital to make an important and necessary point about stereotype threat and tone policing; you're also doing so without expressing whether you actually agree with any of my arguments, which I think is important. Even if you think what I'm saying is bullshit, you're arguing for my fair treatment in expressing it, and that includes what now amounts to several pages worth of people implying that my matching the strident tone of discussion is betraying either male privilege or a lack of femininity.

You are one of the few voices on this site who has done this. Thankyou. It's very welcome.

No problem. My comments on here generally receive a pretty hostile response, because I am what most people on the forum would call a ‘TRA’. But at least as a cis woman my views aren’t immediately dismissed for being purely the product of male privilege (although they have been repeatedly dismissed as being purely the product of other sorts of privilege).

I don't know what your particular views are - I've not seen you post much yourself, at least in the discussions I've been involved in - but I'd really enjoy seeing more of what you have to say on the subject! If you're willing to answer, and under no obligation to do so:

-Do you think the existing EA2010 is fit for purpose in conjunction with the GRA?
-Do you think it would be fit for purpose with the GRA amended to include Self-ID?
-Do you think it would be fit for purpose if the GRA was repealed?
-Do you think Labour should be committing to support what is, ultimately, the status quo on this matter?
There’s a lot here and it’s a bit late to try and answer in detail, but broadly my starting point is that we should be working towards a position where the law is sex and gender blind, and people are not required to be registered as male or female at birth for legal purposes. (Though it would of course still be important to include the information on their medical records). That being the case, I’m not sure there’d be any heed for the GRA. I think the EA probably needs a general review to make sure all of the protected characteristics are still the right ones and expressed in the right way.

Doesn't the whole passing thing actually act counter productively for trans people as a whole? With the strong emphasis on hiding trans ID? That's not positive is it.

That's an interesting point, NiceGerbil. I've seen the same students who celebrate being 'out and proud trans' obsess soon after about 'passing', like they can be simultaneously overt and covert.

And it all hinges on the moment of observation. Oh no, except it doesn't - it's an innate essence. It's like Schroedinger's alchemy.

I'm talking about people experiencing oppression due to the patriarchical enforcement of gender roles, so...absolutely, yes.

So are you saying that your reaction to this was to transition?

My reaction to the patriarchal enforcement of gender roles was to be a feminist and fight against them.

Try to change the world in other words. If I'd tried to change myself instead that would have seemed like admitting defeat without even trying.

Sorry for multiple posts.

You're working on it. You're not getting very bloody far are you.

And you still believe that gender trumps male/ female.

And what counts as abuse?

And how come those shouting loudest are often bog standard MEN. that's a puzzler isn't it.

Recently there was a post by a non binary male. One who does not feel inclined to alter presentation. Or it seems. Very unpleasant feelings about women.

The gist was about a popular point.

Predatory men will attack women and girls if they want to. The idea that labels on doors will stop them is ludicrous! If a man wants to rape a woman or a girl then that won't stop him!!! Hahahaha. Women who want single sex spaces are such fuckwits. If a man wants to rape them he will! And that's that.

This was retweeted by another bog standard male.

The comments are a riot!
Laughing and joking over the idea that single spaces will stop anything because we're going to get raped anyway! Hahahaha.

You see I found that. Very very unpleasant. Laughing about the idea of trying to stop women and girls being violently attached because let's be honest. It's going to happen whatever.

This stuff is MAINSTREAM. it is a major argument as to why single sex spaces for women are pointless.

This makes me very very angry.

I would really appreciate you thinking about that and giving a considered view.

We desperately need to get our house in order; our community has grown from a tiny fearful little bunch to a massive - and often very young or socially awkward, and often incredibly shittily socialised - group of people with a very wide range of opinions and ranges of experiences, many of whom really should know better.

These are the people who you expect women to put up with in female only services. You have finally described them honestly.

There was another poster a few months ago that followed a similar pattern, a week of complaining about our hideous transphobia and how all the women he knew were so much more evolved.

In a last post he actually finally said that he agreed there were a lot more "baby trans" (I'm quoting) out there now than years ago who did not know (and I'm quoting again) how to behave "as women", the ones that tweet "die cunt t**f bitch" at women 24/7 and turn up screaming abuse at middle aged mothers meetings.

Give them 10 years said this poster, they will learn how to be women and won't be as bad.

Well it's us that are expected to act as a socialising service for these aggressive nasty "baby trans" while they "learn to be a woman" . This is the fucking problem being dumped on women.

I couldn't believe the casual suck it up shite.

Reactionary my arse. Ours is the ONLY RATIONAL response to this situation.

He instructed HQ to delete every post.

If only society was sex blind. No more sex discrimination in the workplace, no more dismissing the health needs of the community who birth the children, no more bodies with vaginas being killed every week by bodies with scrota, no more sexual harassment in the streets, no more rape.

@NiceGerbil

Surely the most positive thing would be for trans women and trans men and all the other genders to be loud and proud?

We are here. We are disciminated against in employment etc. That is illegal. Trans women are trans women. And people. Let's work to get past the society norms that judge us in all sorts of ways. Let's face up to the biggest problem. Men. And work for change.

Not. Denying biology. having the greatest achievement as successfully misleading. Insisting that males need to be everywhere that is for female people for really important reasons- on the day so of the male who wants in.

Not in insisting that we are referred to in newspapers medicine etc. By our cunts. Something men have always done.

Own being a transwoman.

The current situation and what we can all see coming. Is a huge fucking disaster for women and girls. For our most basic issues and needs. For our lives. Everything.

You're quite right. It's a matter of not insignificant guilt for many of us who escaped, and we try to utilise our social capital as 'people who are not percieved as trans' in a world that is regrettably still very much trans-hostile to achieve good things for all women without detonating the safety and integrity - and gender euphoria - of our lives. Everyone deserves a right to be happy and live free from oppression.

Amen! I'm so glad that the general direction of feminist discourse over the last thirty years has concerned itself with acknowledging and being mindful of our subjective differences in experience and perspective while we strive to tackle intersecting systems of privilege and oppression. Down with the patriarchy!

There’s a lot here and it’s a bit late to try and answer in detail, but broadly my starting point is that we should be working towards a position where the law is sex and gender blind, and people are not required to be registered as male or female at birth for legal purposes.

So you're suggesting that there should be no single-sex spaces at all, and everything should be mixed sex? Including prisons?

That I would no longer be able to ask for a female doctor to examine me or to have a female chaperone if the only doctor available was male?

That my elderly mother would have to accept personal care from a man even though that would make her feel uncomfortable and unsafe?

Have you given any thought to where your 'sex and gender blind' utopia leads in the real world? Sounds like a utopia for sexual predators and a nightmare for women.

@Whatiswrongwithmyknee

To go back to basics, perhaps, what has never been explained is WHY we need spaces segregated according to identity? And if we were to do that where would most women (who had no gender identity) go?

So maybe we'd end up with

1. spaces for people who identify as women
2. spaces for people who identify as men
3. spaces for people who don't identify as either but have XX chromosomes and
4. spaces for people who don't identify as either but have XY chromosomes

That is a lot of spaces.

But really what people are suggesting is that we have

1. spaces for people who are female (yes, we do all know what that means) and does or does not identify as a woman plus anyone who identifies as a woman or uses that as a cover story to get into women's spaces for any number of reasons plus some transmen who don't fee safe in a men's space due to male pattern violence

and 2) spaces for men and some transmen.

But that means that spaces are NOT segregated according to identity. The same argument of 'there's been trans women in female spaces for years without all this fuss which is proof that you don't need female spaces' can be used to say that 'spaces never have been segregated according to identity which is proof that we don't need spaces segregated according to identity.

I'd really like someone to just simply explain (because of the adage that suggests that if you can't explain something simply, it's probably because you don't understand it)

1. What does it mean to feel like a woman?
2. Why do we need spaces etc. segregated according to identity?
3. If we do segregate spaces according to identity, how do we know how to draw the boundaries between one identity and another? How much do I have to feel like a woman to justify going into the women's rather than the men's spaces?

I'm going to bed now - will try and find the energy to respond to this tomorrow as it's a great set of questions.

Fitt

I remember the baby trans poster. Yes. They did insist that women were to wait 10 years or so. Still insisted that they be included in single sex spaces though if I remember correctly.

Yes. One moment posting abuse, next moment women are expected to share space with them while in a vulnerable position.

Helen's post indicates. As a female. That she would like:

No capture of sex for any kind of statistics, planning, analysis, at all.

No way to understand any problems that impact boys/ men/ women/ girls. As a whole or in subgroups. In order to address them.

Around the world no words or way to even have an inkling of really serious things affecting either sex.
Rape as a weapon of war.
Mass graves of men over a certain (very young) age, and the boys and younger men taken as child soldiers.
The levels of violence against gay men in any society.
Boys receiving education while girls are not.
And here?
The level of boy on girl sexual assault in schools that is not being dealt with at all.
Identifying that white boys from certain backgrounds are underperforming in schools to a worrying level.
And of course. To invisibilise the fact that VAWG is different in nature to male on male. To have no way to see the dynamic with sex offences.
And so on.

Butterfly. What do you make of that idea? It's been offered in good faith. And it's not the first time I've heard it.

Thoughts?

I copied the most shocking post Hellofabore. I will try to find it.

For me,

Let me ask you a question. Does the man in management who proudly declares that he"can't see colour"do anything positive to end racial discrimination with that statement?

I say he doesn't. He congratulates himself on how wonderful he is, and wends his way through life, never noticing that he is more likely to chuck CVs in the bin if they have a name at the top that suggests the applicant isn't white. He never notices that he never promotes people who aren't white. He never notices that the only department that does employ Asian people in a ratio typical of the town's population demographics is the cleaning one.

Now I ask, what happens when someone says "I can't see sex"?

If you call men and women something else, people will still joke about one sex not being able to parallel park. And they will still assume that a female HCP is a nurse, and that the male one is the doctor.

What we will have is the result of a group that has historically controlled knowledge and language—and what was considered legitimate language— gaining greater control over a group oppressed for thousands.

Our missing words to describe which group is which will mean we have no ways to describe the cruelties specifically experienced by lesser groups, thereby further disadvantaging them.

And finally, if this young woman hadn't been placed in a ward with three men, could any of them have attacked her in her hospital bed?

www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/judge-criticises-hospital-after-girl-sexually-assaulted-by-man-63-on-ward-1.4170837

@Spoonrider wrote this on another thread a few months ago and then deleted it but I had copied it and answered.

I would appreciate the basic courtesy of not assuming all anime trolls saying "suck my lady dick" are trans.

Some are genuinely trans, of course. And they don't know what that kind of insult means. That's because they are stupid and inexperienced, and have barely lived as women (and many simply don't get seen as women because they went through a violent male puberty) and don't know what that kind of wording implies. Give them a decade and they might. But baby trans (as in "recently transitioned") rarely get it.

This "give them a decade" comment? Who has to "give them this decade"? We have gone from 5,000 GRC holders to Crispin Blunt telling us there are half a million people wanting GRCs. A massive chunk, going on the waiting lists that have escalated in the past five, years are these "babytrans" who don't "get it" and are "stupid and inexperienced" according to Spoonrider.

Women are the people you are expecting to "give them a decade". This is the problem we are talking about, exactly as you have set out here. Why do women have to provide this socialising of young adult males who are not women, in universities where it is already causing havoc, in dating sites, in lesbian groups, in politics. Why?

This is just abusive. I am glad you set out so clearly how the older generation expect this influx of males, some with autism, some with porn addictions, anime trolls saying suck my lady dick to be just dumped on women in real time to cope with it.

We know this, this is what we are saying. You have just confirmed it.

We have to give them ten years do we?

Let me ask you a question. Does the man in management who proudly declares that he"can't see colour"do anything positive to end racial discrimination with that statement?......Now I ask, what happens when someone says "I can't see sex"?

I don't know, I think these are really different.

The first is to some extent aspirational. Race really is a construct, and if we cease to perceive it, it no longer exists. As long as there is race, however, there is racism. It does require some reflection and self-awareness to try and avoid the problem of unconscious bias going unexamined, but too much emphasis on the other hand and you simply ingrain the idea of race as real even more, and lose the possibility of it becoming an irrelevent construct.

Sex on the other hand has a material reality that manifests itself directly in things like pregnancy, or indirectly through culture in things like art or customs around childbirth (that is gender in the anthropological sense.) Not only would it be undesirable to lose that awareness, it isn't really possible, we notice the effects of sexual difference, we're hard wired to notice sexual differentiation, and we are cultural animals who mediate and express our experiences through culture.

Race and sex just aren't analogous in that way.

Racism is predicted on a very visible thing. Skin colour.
A fact of biology.
The constructed part is about what overt or subconscious things a person thinks when they see a person with certain biological attributes that exist due to their biological background.

Same as sexism.

Both involve the fact that some (many) people have biases or prejudices when they look at a person who is recognised as X due to something that is usually obvious, and is a part of their genetic makeup.

Why do we need spaces etc. segregated according to identity?
The simple answer is we don't. Women (as a sex class) have nothing in common with trans women that would necessitate us being grouped together. The only advantages in doing this are for males. This is why it is really a pointless exercise to even discuss it. If an action is only for the benefit of one sex, it is unfair. And that's before you even get into the many disadvantages for women.

we should be working towards a position where the law is sex and gender blind, and people are not required to be registered as male or female at birth for legal purposes.

@Helen8220 have you thought about what tha twould mean in practical terms?

Start with healthcare.

If males and females are not acknowledge then how do we get sex specific health care? You know, how much provision of, research into prostate and cervical cancers, for example?

Or do we just accept that the status quo, where male bodies are the standard for all medical research is accpeted and the sex based differences are ignored? Men and blood transfusions; Men and vaccine efficacy; etc. It's not only women who would be failed by this.

And are you happy that, with no way to determine sex, all female bodied people would be wholly at the mercy of those male bodied people who choose to be controlling, abusive, physically aggressive, sexually aggressive because we do no safeguarding? That we cannot identify the single characteristic of any individual that predisposes them to being more aggressive, to anyone, because we no longer recognise sex?

And all sorts of other reasons that sex actually matters.

CLloud Cuckoo Land!!!

Life isn’t sex blind. Women will always depend on specific services that men don’t to participate equally in society, e.g. contraception.

I’m surprised that any adult wouldn’t be aware of this, but it’s particularly odd to argue that sex is irrelevant on a website that focuses heavily on pregnancy and birth.

we should be working towards a position where the law is sex and gender blind, and people are not required to be registered as male or female at birth for legal purposes.

Why would that be desirable? I can see very little to recommend it and a huge amount not to. Are you really this overinvested in pseudoscientific gender identity ideology that you think nothing else matters? Women's rights? Women's healthcare? Why? Privilege is not sufficient to describe it.

Or do we just accept that the status quo, where male bodies are the standard for all medical research is accpeted and the sex based differences are ignored?

And how would we know that was even happening if we didn't record sex?

The idea that you can just magic away sexism by clapping your hands over your eyes and shouting “la la la I can’t see youuuuuuu” is so deliciously bonkers, I can’t tell you how much it cheered me up on a wet Monday morning. Thanks, Helen!

Very disappointed to see butterfly resort to name calling. If you are merely mirroring the tone of the discourse from the women here, I’d like you to show me where anyone here has called you a slur that gets people cancelled off social media and sacked?

Also, If we are “transphobes”, then what, in your opinion would non transphobic championing of women’s and girls rights look like?

I suspect that it’s not possible, to be honest, but would love to be proved wrong, because it’s extremely tiresome to be called names by people who are riding roughshod over things that are important to me, and if there was a way I could stop it, then I would.

Also, @PurgatoryOfPotholes has made another excellent point upthread- if you think this place is “transphobic”, what do you make of places like Pistonheads, and will you be educating them, too?

and people are not required to be registered as male or female at birth for legal purposes. (Though it would of course still be important to include the information on their medical records).

So they do actually need to be registered as male or female at birth.

I'm not sure if Helen cares about sexism or misogyny. She's alright, Jack.

Women (as a sex class) have nothing in common with trans women that would necessitate us being grouped together. The only advantages in doing this are for males. This is why it is really a pointless exercise to even discuss it. If an action is only for the benefit of one sex, it is unfair. And that's before you even get into the many disadvantages for women.

This.