Will Scottish reform of the GRA end in Repeal?

[Readingmum01]

The discussions over self ID in Government rattled on for years and England and Wales decided against it, so will Scottish government insistence for self ID lead to public support for repealing the Gender Recognition Act?

If the Act isn't got rid of, there will always be calls for 'reform' - for non binary to be included, for the age to be lowered, for extra genders to be added.

Isn't everyone sick of this legal lie? Why should anyone have a falsified birth certificate?

I think it will lead to repeal but I'm not sure what it will take for enough people to 1.understand why and 2. How it could be achieved.

What do you think?

So much this @vivariumvivariumsvivaria
Every word!

Not quite! "Christine" Goodwin was a divorced father-of-4 near retirement age who demanded fake-ID and various other privileges to wipe the slate of his former life clean, and start again 'as a woman.' He wasn't seeking to marry another man before equal marriage was law. He was after a falsified birth certificate with the wrong sex on it. "Gender recognition" procedures are the only way to do that in the UK, a bizarre exception to the general rule that creates an obvious safeguarding loophole.

But you're right that one of the most common post-rationalisations of the GRA is that it was necessary for gay marriage before gay marriage. I have grounds to believe that the political erasure of sex by ending the practice of recording sex on birth certificates was the actual driving motivation.

@pinchpoint

Socialist divisions delay Spanish gender self-ID law

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/15161b4e-5068-11ed-b120-ca4f3ffbcdc5?shareToken=c1f1c7aff0aec1e010e9b0725794bcb1

Indeed @CharlieParley
There are now officially zero ways in which women's subordinate social status, and the way we contribute new human being + unpaid work in the home + taxed work in the paid economy, is compensated by the state. Nice!

As regards the supposed "privacy" issue, this is an error of law caused by cognitive capture of international legal bodies - the UN and European institutions. Article 8 rights are provisional and subject to limitations by women & children's Convention rights.

There is an obvious conflict between women & kids' Convention rights, and men's supposed entitlement to stronger state secrecy about their fake ID than people in the witness protection programme.

The Art 8 "rights" of people who believe in transgenderism was grossly overstated in Goodwin & the GRA that put the trans lobby's Wishlist on a statutory footing. It grossly vitiates women & kids' Convention rights.

That error of law must be swept from the rolls. Repeal the GRA.

Women are fighting hard in Scotland against the GRA reform which basically removes womens' rights to safety and to be recognised as biological women as opposed to trans identifying males.
The voting on the reforms will go ahead on Dec 21st despite numerous amendments being put forward and a huge backlash from women, and many men.
We will be there at Scottish Parliament to make our voices heard.
#womenwontwheesht

Because it's political. The SNP rely in support from the Greens to get their laws through parliament. Greens are very much in favour of this and therefore the SNP have to go along with it.

There is also the issue of showing that Scotland is very different from England/Wales/N Ireland, that attitudes are different, that we're more liberal, more forward-looking and therefore need independence and not to be "shackled to Westmonster". She did the same all through the pandemic - went harder, different sets of laws and rules north of the border so she could show that she was different and caring. And lots of SNP voters love it.

@CharityShopChic very telling that challenging selfID law (yes, it's law) in Ireland is casually derided as being lead by West Brits or even Tans. Basically women (and some men) seduced by Westminster.
The irony of exchanging ideology from one set of blokes in dresses for another is lost on them. Google "Barbie Kardashian" - violent male offender in women's prison.

I’m not sure it can easily be recategorised as a protected belief.

A few reasons for this:

1. it’s a belief about themselves that differs from how the rest of society views them. Protecting this belief may make therapeutic interventions that encourage the individual to reconsider it may become impossible. And it’s really important that we don’t do anything more to align proper therapeutic exploration with ‘conversion therapy’.
2. It’s an issue of identity. But, despite all the shouting about how identification is something people do themselves, the issues generally arise from the fact that transgender people want everyone else to identify them according to their own self-image. It’s not merely a neutral belief; it’s a belief that intrinsically requires everyone else to conform to it and act as if it is objective fact (rather than belief).

The problem is that TRAs do not want a position where gender ideology is treated as a belief. They require the world to be reordered to match that belief. It’s not a live and let live situation.

This is just like with Scotland: the GRA 2004 is pure self-Id.

"Self-ID Reforms" are basically marketing to drag more people aboard the juggernaut, but no man needs a GR certificate to self-ID his way into women's prisons/refuges/races/prizes etc

Welsh Gov doesn't, therefore, need to do anything to "permit self-ID." It's already there, and has been since 2004. It's all marketing.

We need to get rid of the GRA that legitimates the creation of "trans people" when it's clear that transgenderism is just a weird belief.

Me too @TheInebriati

Keep Prisons Single Sex have confirmed the damage to DBS system

I haven't considered that the damage to our data systems caused by the political erasure of sex campaign might be used to justify introducing biometric ID...towards the Chinese social credit system we slip and slide, at perilous speed😬

It'd be cheaper and better for civil liberties if we just repealed the darn GRA and stopped messing up sex-based data.

@TheYummyPatler

"The EA 2010 was poorly written in it’s inclusion of ‘proposing to undergo’ gender reassignment rather than just people with GRCs. That opened up the door to some of the current crap in unforeseen ways."

Not quite - the GRA 2004, which predates GR in the EA, requires nothing to be done to the body for someone to acquire a "legal gender." Gender laws have been self-ID from the very start.

"Of course, no one realised that in the last few years it was going up morph into ‘transgender’ and activism would try to shift the definition away from anything even vaguely objective towards some internal feeling (that might shift on a moment to moment basis). No one thinking about the issues faced by transsexuals nearly 20 years ago envisaged any of this."

I'm afraid not. The "gender identity" agenda dates from John Money's psychosocial experiments on adult men and little kids back in the 1960s. The intention of trans activists since the 1970s was always the political erasure of sex, and in the UK they got a long way with it before people started to say "no!" in serious numbers.

Although women technically have sex-based rights in the EA 2010, in practice we just don't: the GRA & GR in the EA completely undermine sex and make it inactionable. Men can waltz into all women's spaces without even bothering with the admin to acquire "legal gender." Women have to crowdfunding half a million to assert a watered-down, provisional sliver of their rights.

"Nor did they foresee the impacts on society as a whole, or the large numbers of people with other protected characteristics - including the ones that everyone in society has (sex, sexual orientation, etc)."

Not so. Remember Martine Rothblatt's The Apartheid of Sex? His vision from the 1990s was that biological sex itself must be dismantled via queer theory in law and policy. We are living in his intellectual creation right now, until we repeal the trans activists' laws.

I think I mean no one in mainstream society foresaw it. It was all pretty niche and people assumed it was ridiculous. That’s the problem, of course. The complacency opened the door too, rather than considered the implications of this stuff. All because it seemed to just be a very small number of people who were too troubled to cause any wider problems.

I do think the planning to undergo was a mistake in the EA, especially when the GRA requires no medical intervention. It makes a vague aspiration to decide you are a woman into a protected characteristic.

It was a dreadful mistake. All of it. The concept of gender should never have been anywhere near the UK statute book.

"bowdlerised" - perfection @TheYummyPatler

Yes, the Labour Government didn't have the guts to put forward a same-sex marriage bill because they didn't think it would be supported by the public. Instead it proposed the GRA, presenting it as an administrative solution to a problem faced by a tiny number of people. And look where THAT got us...

Just seen pinchpoint's correction - ignore my post above.

Do you not think that SS spaces should be compulsory? Otherwise we are relying on the goodwill of providers. The flaw with the EA2010 is that we only get SS loos or changing rooms at the discretion of the venue. If all the pubs, hospital trusts, gyms etc in your area are gender woowooed, you have no choice and no recourse except taking the venue owner to court for direct/indirect sex discrimination because they choose not to provide SS changing rooms or whatever.

IDK, I just think that if a space is mixed sex it is very important that it's clear that's what it is. The fudge of pretending a space is for 'women' when it actually admits males is dangerous, imo.

@ArabellaScott the thing about reforming the GRA so that identity documents can't be falsified is that, once you get rid of fake ID, there is nothing left.

The sole point of the GRA is fake ID!

Yeah, that's fine by me - if someone wants a certificate to say they are feminine gender or feygender or catgender or crystalgender then let them have it - it can be in fancy writing and everything. If it has no actual impact on anything other than their self validation then that seems quite logical, seeing as the criteria used to obtain it are nothing other than self validation.

'gender' is a social construction, a subjective and immeasurable, indefinable inner sense that can only be self declared; 'sex' is objectively assessable and has concrete, observable medical markers. We have to very, very clearly distinguish between the two, because to conflate them is dangerous and foolish.

If a GRA was only pertaining to 'gender' then that would be fine.

So long as in the real world, we still operate on the basis of 'sex'.

Do you not think that SS spaces should be compulsory? Otherwise we are relying on the goodwill of providers. The flaw with the EA2010 is that we only get SS loos or changing rooms at the discretion of the venue.

I agree, I think services where you'll be undressed, vulnerable, or that are provided for reasons of biology should be single use or single sex.

Two things there.

Misleading signing, massaging a tiny percentage of male egos by the pretence of it being a single sex space. (At the expense of those female users who cannot use a mixed space regardless of how a male person happens to be feeling in their gender in that particular moment, since female lives do not revolve around the very exciting inner lives of whatever male wants their services in that moment)

'Depersoning' females with barriers to using mixed sex spaces, and simply not providing accessible provision for them (because a tiny percentage of male people and their enablers get pouty even if their own needs have been fully met, Cos Reasons...), hence prejudice, exclusion, inequality.

Those females are tax payers. If society is moving to a men only plus service animals model becauses service providers and government are now wholly FUBAR, then I'm not fucking paying the same tax. I won't fund services and spaces I can't use. Why should I?

Yes, but in the meantime, what we currently have is the worst fudge - spaces that say they are single sex but are in fact mixed sex.

I suspect if spaces were clearer about their being mixed sex it would quickly reveal the problems.

Totally agree @ArabellaScott that SSS must operate on the basis of sex. The question, currently, is whether that can be achieved by clarifying that sex means sex, or whether making sex really men sex requires removing "gender" as a stand-alone characteristic in law, and categorising it as a belief.

You would be okay with people having a gender certificate, and I wouldn't care as long as the certificate recognised that someone believes they have a special gender essence - not that they are special-gendered people.

It's because we have laws that manufacture the notion of special-gendered people that the negative impact on women & children is so extreme, right now.

There are no special-gendered people, only people empowered by bad laws to politically erase sex/get hold of fake ID.

We don't just need to distinguish between sex and "gender" (which the law, conveniently, doesn't define) -"gender" was put there for the specific purpose of undermining sex.

How in practice could the GRA remain on the rolls while only pertaining to 'gender', when the sex/gender conflation is the mean by which the act destroys SSS and safeguards?

To get back to law recognising sexed reality, we must dismantle the legal lie of "gender"

@Thelnebriati gotta get rid of the "gender" loophole then! As long as service providers are faced with men in women's clothing whom they have been manipulated and conditioned into treated as thought they're women, clarifying that sex means sex won't be enough in practice. Service providers will always take the path of least resistance that is least likely to see them sued: meeting men's demands.

This is why I believe that the boundary violations will continue unabated until we repeal the gender laws that give such men their leverage.

Well, quite

The question, currently, is whether that can be achieved by clarifying that sex means sex, or whether making sex really men sex requires removing "gender" as a stand-alone characteristic in law, and categorising it as a belief.

Yes. I agree, but I'm also looking for ways and mechanisms that such a change that would protect women's rights can be achieved - retaining a 'gender' thing seems like it might be a useful sop: nobody could claim that they weren't having their inner gender essence validated if they could still get a gender certificate.

How would one go about reclassifying 'gender' as a belief? That's also a bit muddled in the EA, isn't it? Because it's not clear what is 'belief' and what is 'SSE' and what is 'gender reassignment'. It's all so bloody vague.

There are good reasons to repeal the GRA. If you want to do away with the legal fiction that men can change sex and become women, please sign. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/628382

I don't understand how it isn't discrimination against women as a sex class, that men get taxpayer funded single sex prisons yet women are forced to run the gauntlet of mixed sex prisons...

why should we pay equal taxes when we don't get anything like equal service provision?