''Abolishing legal sex status'' - presumably this passed an ethics committee.

[Thelnebriati]

Apologies if there's already a thread on this.
A new report suggests benefits to a radical re-organisation of society, by abolishing legal sex status.

Abolishing legal sex status: The challenge and consequences of gender-related law reform;
www.kcl.ac.uk/law/research/future-of-legal-gender-abolishing-legal-sex-status-full-report.pdf

From page 7;
''6. Concerns about decertification also emerged from our research. These concerns mainly related to gender and sex-specific services, data collection, violence, and positive action. Some research participants worried that measures to abolish sex as a legal status would make it harder to retain provision and spaces based on distinctions between women and men (or females and males) and that this would disadvantage women.''

''9. Several interviewees suggested that the present political climate was not a suitable or safe one in which to question the architecture of equality law or to radically alter gender and sex categories. Decertification may therefore be better approached through the prism of ‘slow law’. This involves transitional legal reforms (e.g. making gender transitioning easier, and legally recognising other gender identities) while also attending to far-reaching structural concerns of poverty, violence, exclusion, and exploitation. Decertification does not rely on these concerns being resolved.''

The writers: all academics from sociogender airy-fairy land, no one there with a solid background in knowledge of sex based issues, law or any representatives from women's groups. Oh What A Surprise.

And clearly explained that gender good, sex is bad, whole thing spun to get rid of nasty old silly sex and tuck it away behind gender ideology.

Case set out, and I'm not even a quarter of the way through yet. This needs to end up in the bin where it belongs.

Oh page 20 we get into how GOOD women's groups don't use sex based definitions, how there's no such thing as harm to women in mixed sex provision because burble burble burble and - yeah, as predicted, this is all about removing sex based legal protection from female humans because they're damn annoying boundaries to the absolute freedoms and wishes of male humans.

Cannot be buggered to read any more of this biased propaganda.

Case strongly there for a women's specific group such as FPFW or coalition of them to produce the answering report that is not wholly prejudiced against females having rights.

Point 6 - no shit, Sherlock. If the people writing the report didn't already know that, and understand it's importance, then they must be living in the most privileged ivory tower known to mankind.

I’m feeling particularly sensitive right now because I’ve just been referred to the breast clinic within two weeks, but God has it made me acutely aware of my sex. This is something which men, on the whole, never have to think about. If they get rid of the legal basis of sex in society, women will still get cancer in their breasts. They will still develop breasts at a young age and suddenly be thrust into a hyper sexualised world. They will still breast feed and suffer discrimination at work, and a lack of support. These very real issues, stemming from our sex, won’t go away. And these issues will persist without any legal recognition or framework which will surely make them worse.

I thought this rang a bell - there were threads about the survey that I assume this has resulted from a year or two back:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3913843-Future-of-legal-gender-and-mumsnet

Isn't he whole essence of Queer theory that you can make problems go away by changing the words you use to describe them. For example, orphans will suddenly have parents if we would just stop calling them orphans.

Hope all's okay, WeeBisom.

Sending good thoughts and support, WeeBisom.🌻

So all prisons could be mixed-sex, including Wakefield which holds more Category A sex offenders (i.e. highly dangerous men) than anywhere else? By this reasoning, women could be locked up in Wakey with the most terrifying rapists in the country? Broadmoor would have no single-sex wards? The NHS would invite everyone for both smears and prostate exams?

Mosques and Orthodox synagogues would not be able to have separate areas for men and women, so women in those communities would be excluded from religious life as well as public life. This is full-scale ignorance of the realities of life for actual women, isn't it?

Why not abolish all the protected characteristics! No more discrimination, no issues with equality, it will be veritable paradise. What a wonderful idea, just amazing it hasn't been thought of before. Reminds me of something Kathleen Stock tweeted about being educated into stupidity.

I read the report. They didn't even aim for representative sampling of interviewees and clearly over-sampled those who belong to various gender identity organisations. This means that the responses they received are unlikely to be informative of all the relevant concerns.

The word 'gender' is almost completely undefined in the report, though we are told that it would certainly have self-identification as one part, but perhaps amended with other characteristics, depending on the specific context. Even biological sex could be one of those additional aspects of gender!

In some parts the report uses 'gender' and 'sex' as referring to the same concept while in other parts it distinguishes between the two and privileges 'gender.' But a concept which cannot be defined, which is argued to be fluid and changing (though they speculate, in a footnote, that some argue sex is also changing over one's lifetime) cannot be seen as if it will be used in discrimination cases the same way 'race' or 'sexual orientation' is used. They justify deleting the concept of legal sex because there is no concept of legal race or legal sexual orientation, though they also argue that sexual orientation should be replaced by gender orientation.

They play little lip service to the idea that women, as a sex, could be handicapped in all this, and they also passingly mention that changes such as removing 'mother' and replacing it by 'gestational parent' (which they support) are overwhelmingly done only to words referring to the female sex. I have yet to see 'impregnating parent' in any context whatsoever. This new ideology is deeply sexist and rather open about it.

The justifications they make for the project of erasing legal sex are, in addition to the usual trans arguments, that not having legal sex would somehow stop parents from bringing their sons and daughters up differently and would somehow magically start erasing sexism and misogyny.

If that was true, we should no longer see any racism or homophobia, given that neither race nor sexual orientation is mentioned in passports etc.

This is a shockingly bad piece of research. All of the “concerns” raised by participants are refuted, either in the text or in the footnotes or both, in order to set aside the actual fears of those they interviewed, in favour of preaching an ideology. This is no way to conduct a piece of research - complete failure to engage with the ideas expressed by those you are interviewing, when their views contradict the ideological beliefs of the researchers.

The whole thing is so obviously ideologically-driven that it makes no pretence whatsoever at being a methodologically sound piece of social science research. The conclusions were obviously known to the researchers before they ever started researching. I cannot imagine how on earth this gained ESRC funding - I actually feel angry on reading it and have had to put it down.