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

Men like a lot of attention. Transwomen seem much the same. The bottom line is that there are not very many trans people and many more women so we need to go for the greater good in terms of protecting women only spaces. It is very simple indeed. And we need to leave our gender change laws as they are as they are a reasonable balance.

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.

And while we wait for the utopian era to start, let’s ensure females are well protected and safe from harm, including from any form of negative sexist discrimination based on their sexed bodies.

We have had quite a number of posters in the past informing us we should be changing legislation and laws now for when males will be able to carry a foetus to full term and for when we also invent a way to vaporise every cell in the body and reform it to change that body to the opposite sex. We see these posters every couple of months.

So, meanwhile in the real world, I am still struggling to have my teen accept that STEM is not ‘just for boys’ as they have picked up from their peers over the past 5 or 6 years. And yet there seems to be this belief that sexist discrimination and socialisation doesn’t start from infancy.

That even a short time experiencing life as a male will not set patterns that remain evident decades on.

Tbh, I'd repeal the GRA, Xenia. It's caused untold confusion and harm, and the provision of legal same-sex marriage means its main provision has been achieved anyway.

The GRA is also being used as an ideological springboard for further legal fictions.

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

I would like tras to actually sit and think about this for 5 minutes. What would happen if this came to pass?

Mixed sex prisons.
Mixed sex hospital wards
All schoolchildren, from the youngest to the oldest teen, in mixed sex changing rooms
All changing rooms mixed sex
All toilets mixed sex
No 'positive discrimination' - this would include preferential things like maternity leave, which would become parental leave only, no quotas for helping women into traditionally male fields, politics, etc
All sports mixed sex
No female only spaces/groups at all, including rape trauma services
birth/breastfeedng support services
domestic violence refuges/services

What do you think the outcome of this would be?

What would happen is that we would revert back to a time before women were afforded all the very basic concessions that we have fought for and gained so slowly over the years. No public conveniences, for example - that was a fight women had to make. No recognition of the reproductive burden - because whatever you do with the legislation, us cunty types will still be the ones carrying and birthing and feeding the babies. No protections in law.

Do you understand the concept of 'women's rights', Helen, if not that of women's lib? How it came into being, and why we need it? The concept of 'equity'?

Women's bodies, women's biology mean we bleed, we birth, we breastfeed, we go through menopause, we are on average weaker than males physically.

(This isn't a qualitative judgement on women's worth or value. It's pretty straightforward biology. Women are built to bear children, physically, hence our reproductive systems, pelvis, etc)

Society discriminates against women due to these physical realities.

Over the past hundred or so years, women have fought hard for various steps to be taken to try to balance out these inequalities. This is the basis of feminism.

If you take away sex differentiation entirely, you would sweep away the rights women fought for, the protections in law, all legislation that was created to address inequalities. You would end up with rape and murder rates soaring (even) higher. Women would be excluded en masse from public life, from politics, from education, sport, etc.

You excluded healthcare/medecine, but I don't really see how that is possible. Take away legal sex and the healthcare system has nothign to hang sex on. The NHS is already recording people by 'gender', which is as we know totally unrelated to physical sex. This is leading to things like that transman failing to get smear tests, or the other transman giving birth unknowingly, etc. Transwomen demanding smears, and transwomen being put on all female wards despite the other patients objection/being distressed.

So everyone would be invited for smears, prostate screens, mammograms. (Wasn't this actually suggested recently?). There would be no planning for sex specific services by data collection (the census in Scotland is already erasing the sex differences, conflating sex and gender, which will render data collected meaningless)

The thing is, Helen, this Brave New World you suggest sounds - to me - insane and terrifying. But parts of it are already happening. So, you know, you're on the same page as many others.

This is genderism. This is where we're at. Congratulations.

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

Takes us right back to transmogrification - turning grain into mice

Well, that’s all that needs to be said about that idea! Great post @ArabellaScott 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

So let’s look at healthcare where sex is no longer recorded.

People then become what, a tick box list of organs, hormones and health conditions. Is this how you would like it to work?

So in A&E, because it is sex blind, a doctor will look at the list that says
-vagina
-hormone levels that indicate estrogen dominant vs testosterone
-breast tissue (and patient attends regular breast screening)

Will that doctor be liable when that patient is given blood from a female that has been pregnant and suffers great harm because of it?

We already have had a reported situation where a transman allowed doctors to go six months or more before one doctor realised the patient was female. This transman refused to disclose their trans status and admits they nearly died several times over the course of diagnosis. Then there was the transman who lost their life because they were pregnant and no one knew.

This is a terrible situation but highlights the very danger of ignoring sex actually matters.

In what world do you honestly think sex will no longer matter?

LobsterRider

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.

I do agree that too much focus on unconscious bias can entrench the issue more, but what I'm trying to get at here that if everything legal is race-blind, no-one will be able to notice or describe the issue if the reality isn't race blind.

I also agree that sex is far more of a concrete issue, because it exists outside humans' heads. It's interesting that I've noticed before that people who have high hopes of a fair world that doesn't recognise sex, don't want a race-free one too!

BBC www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58698406
"Rosie Duffield came under fire after supporting online criticism of a tweet, which referred to "individuals with a cervix" to be inclusive of trans men. The incident was called transphobic by trans rights supporters - but Labour MP Ms Duffield rejects the claim.

Asked about the row, Sir Keir said claiming only women have cervixes was "something that shouldn't be said".

But Health Secretary Sajid Javid attacked the Labour leader, saying his remarks were a "total denial of scientific fact". "

@ArabellaScott

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

I would like tras to actually sit and think about this for 5 minutes. What would happen if this came to pass?

Mixed sex prisons.
Mixed sex hospital wards
All schoolchildren, from the youngest to the oldest teen, in mixed sex changing rooms
All changing rooms mixed sex
All toilets mixed sex
No 'positive discrimination' - this would include preferential things like maternity leave, which would become parental leave only, no quotas for helping women into traditionally male fields, politics, etc
All sports mixed sex
No female only spaces/groups at all, including rape trauma services
birth/breastfeedng support services
domestic violence refuges/services

What do you think the outcome of this would be?

What would happen is that we would revert back to a time before women were afforded all the very basic concessions that we have fought for and gained so slowly over the years. No public conveniences, for example - that was a fight women had to make. No recognition of the reproductive burden - because whatever you do with the legislation, us cunty types will still be the ones carrying and birthing and feeding the babies. No protections in law.

Do you understand the concept of 'women's rights', Helen, if not that of women's lib? How it came into being, and why we need it? The concept of 'equity'?

Women's bodies, women's biology mean we bleed, we birth, we breastfeed, we go through menopause, we are on average weaker than males physically.

(This isn't a qualitative judgement on women's worth or value. It's pretty straightforward biology. Women are built to bear children, physically, hence our reproductive systems, pelvis, etc)

Society discriminates against women due to these physical realities.

Over the past hundred or so years, women have fought hard for various steps to be taken to try to balance out these inequalities. This is the basis of feminism.

If you take away sex differentiation entirely, you would sweep away the rights women fought for, the protections in law, all legislation that was created to address inequalities. You would end up with rape and murder rates soaring (even) higher. Women would be excluded en masse from public life, from politics, from education, sport, etc.

You excluded healthcare/medecine, but I don't really see how that is possible. Take away legal sex and the healthcare system has nothign to hang sex on. The NHS is already recording people by 'gender', which is as we know totally unrelated to physical sex. This is leading to things like that transman failing to get smear tests, or the other transman giving birth unknowingly, etc. Transwomen demanding smears, and transwomen being put on all female wards despite the other patients objection/being distressed.

So everyone would be invited for smears, prostate screens, mammograms. (Wasn't this actually suggested recently?). There would be no planning for sex specific services by data collection (the census in Scotland is already erasing the sex differences, conflating sex and gender, which will render data collected meaningless)

The thing is, Helen, this Brave New World you suggest sounds - to me - insane and terrifying. But parts of it are already happening. So, you know, you're on the same page as many others.

This is genderism. This is where we're at. Congratulations.

You are so right. 100%. And it makes me so sad to read this. People who carry babies would not be employed. People who breastfeed (I can’t bring myself to use the other expression) would not be employed. People with penises would dominate classrooms, sport, jobs. And I thought the Handmaids Tale was far fetched!!!!

I've been waiting for Butt to call posters "strident" and "transphobes" and my bingo card is now complete.

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.

The recording of sex is neither a violation of human rights not an intrusion into people's privacy. Alongside our date and place of birth, it is one of the most basic, and immutable, facts about a person.

The demand to cease recording sex and to remove all protections on the basis of sex from laws, policies and regulations comes from Principle 31 of the Yogyakarta Principles plus Ten.

This is not a human rights instrument like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which unequivocally states that women are discriminated against because of their sex. It isn't like the European Convention on Human Rights, which carefully seeks to ensure that the basic human rights of all people are protected.

No, it's an advocacy document never debated and scrutinised either at the UN or the Council of Europe or the EU, or even our UK parliaments. We know from a number of its authors that the impact of implementing its demands on women, especially Principle 31, was never once considered. It is neither interested in upholding the rights of all people, nor in remedying, or even acknowledging discrimination suffered by any other groups, especially women.

The oppression of women and girls is one of the if not the oldest forms of oppression on the planet. It has been going on for thousands of years and there is no country on this planet that has succeeded in abolishing it in practice.

The only remedy we have to oppression on the basis of sex are laws that protect us on the basis of sex and policies and regulations that take sex into account.

The demand to cease recording sex, remove all protections on the basis of sex and enshrine gender identity in law is therefore an explicitly and profoundly anti-women commitment against women's equality and liberation from oppression.

Sex and gender blind policy making is a failure to recognise the needs of women and girls on the basis of their sex, which even in an egalitarian utopia will have to be met. Such policymaking is a tool to ensure the continued inequality of women and girls.

So no, we shouldn't work towards a position where the law is sex and gender blind, because that would benefit men at the expense of women. That's not a defensible or justifiable demand if you want all people to have equal rights and you want all people to have their needs met.

Above all, this is not a demand rooted in the doctrine of human rights, whose principles extend empathy to all and afford all people equal protection according to their needs, which includes the freedoms of thought, conscience, speech, expression, belief, religion and association but the doctrine of gender identity, which seeks to impose a singular quasi-religious ideology on all of us and whose adherents seek to punish opponents, ostracise apostates and pursue laws, policies and regulations that violate all of the listed freedoms.

That's not a benign, or even neutral position to take. It is a stance opposed to fundamental human rights principles and practice.

There is no argument about that that still needs to be had. The evidence is in, we're living it all over this planet. Sex and gender blind laws is where we've been. A return to that is to remove all protections for women and girls.

[quote ButterflyHatched]**@NellWilsonsWhiteHair* thankyou*. That first paragraph is perfect. Lovely encapsulation of the issue, addressing the complexities and acknowledging the daily realities of a wide range of different people.

Some trans people get read as their assigned genders, some trans people get read as the genders they identify as, you can't always tell, people sometimes think they're passing when they aren't, people sometimes think they aren't passing when they are, and physical appearance in general is thus an unreliable means of determining sex - regardless of how you choose to define sex.

We now have a platform for a meaningful discussion on the important bit.

I completely agree that we shouldn't discriminate between trans people who 'pass' and those who don't. There just isn't a non-awful way of doing so, the whole notion is inextricably mired in misogynistic notions of 'attractiveness', and is generally just wretched. Also, a person's inclination toward being an abusive predatory shitbag has nothing to do with their appearance anyway.

we don't (as I understand it) have a lawful mechanism for allowing these women in but keeping out the Alex Drummonds of the world: trans women who do not pass and do not claim to pass, but who we still can't bar on the basis of being actually abusive as per Karen White or the Canadian with the grotesque waxing demands

Discriminating between people on grounds of being an abusive predatory shitbag is a+ ok, regardless of how you define their sex. That's obviously not in dispute.

Can we examine the first half of this paragraph, as it's quite interesting?

What do you mean by this: keeping out the Alex Drummonds of the world: trans women who do not pass and do not claim to pass

How would you define trying to pass?[/quote]
I'm not really qualified to define 'trying to pass', and tbh it doesn't affect my stance: my interest here is the experience of (natal) women.

I'm interested, for example, in women being able to access a women-only space to recover from rape and other violence at the hands of (almost always) men. A great many women, on this board and elsewhere, have explained the importance to them of this space being women-only, at a time when maleness is a very understandable trigger for the trauma they're trying to process.

• There may be some trans women who would genuinely pass in that space - who would have experienced VAWG as women, who would absolutely look and appear to other service users to be women, and who have sufficiently unpicked the male socialisation of their early years that their behaviour also doesn't read as 'male'.
• There are also the trans women who would hopefully/potentially be sifted out by risk assessment - Karen White, Jessica Yaniv type people. I don't suggest this risk assessment is infallible btw but I want to put it to one side as the more extreme, statistically less likely, and most unhelpfully strawmanned aspect of this question.
• Finally, there are a large and (IMO) growing number of trans women who fall into neither group here, in that their appearance makes it very clear they are of the male sex but they regard themselves as women. I'm content to use female pronouns to describe trans women like Alex Drummond in my social or professional life, but I think the presence of someone presenting like this in eg rape crisis services billed as 'women only' is going to be triggering for a very significant number of women.

Same argument applies just as well to women's prisons (home to a huge number of abused and vulnerable women), and women who can't use mixed sex spaces to exercise due to religious/cultural requirements.

I used Drummond as my example because she's extremely clear that she doesn't pass as a natal woman and that's fine, so I assume wouldn't be offended here. There are of course a number of trans women who do hope to pass (eg by removing facial hair) but don't, because bone structure and gait and so on are a great deal harder to change, but I wouldn't want to rub salt in any wounds by using them to illustrate this point. That's why the 'trying to pass' isn't relevant to me.

The elephant in the room here is that many males enjoy making women uncomfortable and humiliated, and sexually harassing them.

Not to say that MTF trans people are any more likely to do this than other males, but it's something most women have experienced from male people. Identifying as a woman and accessing female spaces when many women do not want you there is one way of perpetuating this.

See Wi Spa, where a convicted sex offender who identifies as a woman used a female only naked spa with women and young girls. Because "inclusive" trans policy made that possible.

Not to say that MTF trans people are any more likely to do this than other males, but it's something most women have experienced from male people. Identifying as a woman and accessing female spaces when many women do not want you there is one way of perpetuating this.

It does mean that if there is a male in a women's space, that male has self-selected as someone who doesn't care about women's feelings - whether "really trans", or "passing", or not. There are TW who don't go into women's spaces for this reason - because they understand it's upsetting. And caring, decent men who understand women's need for their own spaces would not take advantage of the situation to do it either. So if a male is there, you already know that male is not representative of males as a whole, but only the ones who want to be there which can only be for their own validation being prioritised above women, or for the pleasure of intimidating women, or for predatory reasons.

It does mean that if there is a male in a women's space, that male has self-selected as someone who doesn't care about women's feelings - whether "really trans", or "passing", or not.

Exactly. Decent male people irrespective of gender identity respect women enough to recognise we need privacy and dignity, and to feel safe. The presence of a male in a female only space for me is a hostile, boundary violating act in and of itself.

So, meanwhile in the real world, I am still struggling to have my teen accept that STEM is not ‘just for boys’ as they have picked up from their peers over the past 5 or 6 years.

This is where the sexism of gender ideology leads. In the 70s I was fighting with my school to be allowed to study physics which some teachers insisted wasn't 'a girls' subject'. Now it's young people policing their peers to conform to the 'right' gendered interests while their parents despair that we've gone backwards.

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.

This is why I find it so difficult to believe that organisations that understand the importance of identity and recognition (such as the police and security services) support this agenda for altruistic reasons.
In some situations your appearance and ID must match.

Now it's young people policing their peers to conform to the 'right' gendered interests while their parents despair that we've gone backwards.

This is absolutely what is happening. What sports to play, what TV to watch.

Including young lesbians applying pressure to others to accept dick to be inclusive.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

It does mean that if there is a male in a women's space, that male has self-selected as someone who doesn't care about women's feelings - whether "really trans", or "passing", or not.

Exactly. Decent male people irrespective of gender identity respect women enough to recognise we need privacy and dignity, and to feel safe. The presence of a male in a female only space for me is a hostile, boundary violating act in and of itself.

Yes.

The presence of a male in a female only space for me is a hostile, boundary violating act in and of itself.

Sophistry and arguments aside, if women have said very clearly they don't want males, or if they choose a female doctor, say, and a male ignores that choice/decision/preference/want, (see the London GP who is listed as 'female' on their practise website, but is male by birth, for example) they are transgressing the boundaries of women. It's a fairly straightforward matter of consent, I would say.

The presence of a male in a female only space for me is a hostile, boundary violating act in and of itself.

This, with bells on.

www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/26/now-spineless-starmer-wont-even-defend-biological-reality/

The presence of a male in a female only space for me is a hostile, boundary violating act in and of itself

Sophistry and arguments aside, if women have said very clearly they don't want males, or if they choose a female doctor, say, and a male ignores that choice/decision/preference/want, (see the London GP who is listed as 'female' on their practise website, but is male by birth, for example) they are transgressing the boundaries of women. It's a fairly straightforward matter of consent, I would say

All this. Your average bloke in the street knows this of course. He knows what kind of biological male wants to use women’s changing rooms and shower with little girls. The kind of male person who wont listen when women say no.

Given the shitshow this weekend, there's a part of me wishes I could get the post I made on Wednesday ('very welcome indeed') taken down. But I think it's better left up there to remind me - and maybe others too - not to be so gullible next time.

@Wrongsideofhistorymyarse

The presence of a male in a female only space for me is a hostile, boundary violating act in and of itself.

This, with bells on.

This, this and more this.