No Evidence to suggest abuse of self ID

[Signalbox]

This is an interesting thread on Twitter by journalist Róisín Michael on Twitter.

How can governments and organisations continue to get away with saying "there is no evidence" that allowing males to self ID into women's spaces will result in increased predatory behaviour within those spaces when the data is not even being collected.

We already know this happens in the UK in relation to Males in the female prison estate and convictions of male sex offenders being recorded as being carried out by women.

I hadn't quite realised the extent of the problem though and how deep this actually goes. It's horrifying...

@ RóisínMichaux

Belgium has had self ID for almost 5 years. Not a single report of a trans woman crime? Not a single one. No stories of men attacking women in prisons? Not one.

I asked the police why. “We don’t communicate that”.

I asked the press ombudsman: “Why is there not one single report about any crime sexual or otherwise in the Belgian press of either of the country’s languages involving a trans woman since January 2018.”

He said he doesn’t know

I contact lots of journalist. No réponse. I follow up. No answer. Is there a rule, spoken or otherwise? Silence. Try to yourself: search the archives of Belgian papers in Dutch or French for the term “transwoman”

It’s all trans sob stories about living their truth.

Weird no? So I try to find out if sex crimes committed by women have gone up. But the stats are hard to parse, especially when COVID arrives. The police record everything about a crimes except sex. I ask the police repeatedly: when did you stop recording sex and why? Silence

Are there trans women in prison? We don’t record that, fellow Belgian terfs were told. But I got to know some researchers who told me yea, plenty of men in with the women. In fact, there will be more of that soon

The council of Europe apparently has decided that to separate women and men is not a familiar enough environment for reinsertion in the real world (i haven’t confirmed this). So eventually all prisons should be as mixed as possible

So Belgium being the progressive little stalwart it is has gone ahead and carried out 3 separate mixed prison experiments (ongoing, results out 2023). My main takeaway (though I’m a terf so I’m biased):

The top-tier alpha men get women, and pair off. The men who don’t pair off? They get upset and angry and tense. And the prison guards have to deal with the fallout. Prison incels. They are creating prison incels.

The people carrying out this research are young queer theory idealists. One of the prison projects roughly translates as de-gendering prisons (in French). I asked one of them: aren’t the women afraid? She said they would never let anything happen to each other.

One researcher told me that there was a case of a trans “woman” that she was aware of who had a psychotic break and attacked a female prisoner. “But that person was mentally unwell” she told me. Oh ok then!

I contacted social workers from inside prisons “I have a lot to say about that but I can’t” was one response. “I’m burnt out, I need a break” was another. I even contacted journalists who made names for themselves uncovering stories that powerful people wanted hidden. Nope.

So is the fact that there have been no stories (as far as I can tell - and I have searched on and off for months) about transwomen committing sexual crimes evidence that transwomen are not doing so? There is no reason to think this is true.

More likely: as many have pointed out, small chill countries (more dependent on institutions like the EU) like Malta, Ireland and Belgium are the laboratories where this bullshit was tested out on an unsuspecting populace.

The most shameful of all, I believe, Is an organisation I thought would be the last place we could put some hope:

@ investigate_eu : how did this all happen so fast? Where is the pressure coming from? Why the silence?

Investigate Europe didn’t even answer my email.

What a time to be alive: massive changes being stealthily made by shady American donors to our very understanding of reality itself. The investigators? The truth-seekers? Absent. Afraid. Cowed.

But then you look at their donor list: it’s the same people who fund @ ILGAEurope and @ TGEUorg and the lobbies that push this sexist regressive men’s rights movement on us.

We’re all alone. It’s up to us. Start searching, asking questions. They have fucking abandoned us.

Anyone who has been this forum a while, is familar with the medical and psychological literature, or has even looked up the defintion of woman in the Cambridge dictionary knows the answer to that question. I'm frankly amazed you would ask.

I'm sorry you are triggered by single sex services for abuse survivors. It must be hard for you being in a place where they are supported.

It's not legal to ask for birth certificates or GRCs, so, once again, it makes no difference.

Don't be daft. Birth certificates are used all the time for ID purposes.

For the purposes of determining sex it can be unlawful. From the EHRC website:

"In most circumstances it would be inappropriate to ask a person to prove their legal sex by producing a birth certificate or Gender Recognition Certificate, and in some circumstances this could be unlawful."

It is inappropriate for people to attempt to access a service that is designated for a different protected characteristic.
How do you suggest services gatekeep to protect their users?

He doesn't. He expects women to accept males into all spaces and for all spaces to be 'mixed sex'.

At least this position is consistent. I find it abhorrent, but it's at least not as dishonest as pretending one wants to preserve single sex spaces while also claiming 'sex' is meaningless.

The fact you want them to exclude transgender people is not their problem, and JKR's centre is literally the only one which uses this exemption. And my understanding is "you can always tell."

I am not a person who thinks you can always tell especially with hormones and extreme surgeries I think a man on occasion can pass (aesthetically and superficially) as female. Generally though when people are accessing services they don't attempt to access something that is clearly not for them. In the not very distant past for a service that said "women only" male people would understand what that means. With trans activism that has all changed and you don't seem to be able to rely on people's integrity any more to not attempt to access something that isn't intended for them. And the more that men are able to hide their sex (with self ID) and encouraged to push at women's boundaries the more this becomes a problem for services that want to provide single sex provision. Self ID essentially supports a misogynistic culture change. It supports men and gives them the green light to do whatever they want.

in some circumstances this could be unlawful.

So not "illegal" then.

Apologies I just reread you said "not legal" not "illegal"

A woman is an adult human female, a man is an adult human male. Transwomen are male, therefore any man can be a transwoman, but a woman can't.

So I think @DadJoke has just confirmed that a transwoman is a man, so there is no difference between a transwoman and a man.

I thought you could always tell! Are you acknowledging that you can't?

How do you check if people are really gay?

'In some circumstances this could be unlawful' doesn't mean the same as 'it's not legal'.

I'm pretty sure a prison or court could ask to see a birth certificate, GRC or any other document which proves someone's identity.

What does being gay have to do with this? Are there legal documents to prove gayness? When did those come in?

OTOH, we've always had documents which show what sex someone is.

And until now we've never made it unlawful to ask to see those documents. Especially not in a situation where a service provider could be threatened someone else's fraudulent attempt to access services not designed for them by the fraudster.

All people with a GRC are legally female? Really? Or did you just forget about the existence of transmen? Why am I not surprised?

But they are including all people who are biologically female. It seems unlikely that they'd turn away a woman just because she identified as nonbinary or transgender.

Not everything has to be for males.

Yes, of course, but not in this context.

www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/our-work/news/protecting-people-sex-and-gender-reassignment-discrimination

The point is, that people with protected characteristics don't generally have to prove those protected characteristics in order to access services for people with those protected characteristics. You want to make a special exception to this rule. You don't have to prove you are gay to enter a gay nightclub or counseling, you just have to state that you are.

I’d like to see what the Scottish govt are planning to do to evaluate self ID after it comes in. They don’t agree with the naysayers because ‘no evidence’ but surely to ensure their policy is robust they are planning studies to assess the impact? Just in case their many critics are correct? No thought not.

People with protected characteristics don't generally have to prove those protected characteristics in order to access services for people with those protected characteristics.

People who don't have those protected characteristics have no right of access. Their application is fraudulent. They either have no need of the service, or should access a different service. They can expect to be challenged and removed.

Except in this one special case (that only seems to affect services for women) where they've been given the legal right to tie services up in legal disputes.

That document seems to contradict your earlier comment that "Self ID makes absolutely no difference under the EA2010 to provisions which allow transgender people to be excluded from single sex spaces."

Under the Equality Act people are protected from sex discrimination on the basis of their legal sex. This means that a trans woman who does not hold a Gender Recognition Certificate is legally male and is treated as a man for the purposes of the sex discrimination provisions, and a trans woman with a Gender Recognition Certificate is treated as a woman. The sex discrimination exceptions in the Equality Act therefore apply differently to trans people with and without Gender Recognition Certificates.

Currently only those with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria can be considered for a GRC, and to be treated as the opposite sex under the EA. With self-ID any man could become legally female, even if he's a rapist or paedophile, doesn't have gender dysphoria and doesn't even 'identify as a woman' (whatever that means).

Of course self-ID makes a difference. Anyone with half a brain can see that it does.

Yes, people with a GRC are legally female. The fact that trans men with a GRC are legally male makes no difference in this context, because the single-sex exemption is a special exception which applies to sex registered at birth. I would be very surprised if JKR's trans exclusionary support centre didn't accept trans men.

From the EHRC website:

"In the Equality Act 2010 the protected characteristic of sex protects people from being discriminated against because of being a man or a woman (Equality Act 2010, Section 11) – defined as a male or female of any age (Equality Act 2010, Section 212 (1)). ‘Sex’ is understood as binary – being male or female – with a person’s legal sex being determined by what is recorded on their birth certificate, based on biological sex. A trans person can change their legal sex by obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate through procedures set out in the Gender Recognition Act 2004."

In the old days @DadJoke that system worked for single sex spaces, but it doesn’t any more because of transactivism. There are circumstances in which people sometimes have to provide evidence of their sexuality (eg asylum claims) but clearly it’s so difficult to do that it wouldn’t be feasible for gay clubs etc. But if you had a scholarship for black people which was inundated by white people claiming to be black, you would start to need some gate-keeping, where previously you could rely on people applying in good faith.

A GRC does not change a persons legal gender for all purposes. There are exemptions for crimes, succession, peerages, sports and parenthood.

12 Parenthood
The fact that a person’s gender has become the acquired gender under this Act does not affect the status of the person as the father or mother of a child.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/section/12