On trans rights:
You seem like a reasonable, thiughtful person, @Lwrenagain, so I'd like to ask you a question.
What rights do you think trans people do not already have, and which you think they should have?
The main laws we have in the UK protecting trans people are the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act.
The Gender Recognition Act allows people to be legally recognised as though they were the opposite sex to the one they actually are. This was important back in 2004 because some trans people considered themselves to be in heterosexual relationships and wanted to be able to get married. Leaving aside the question of whether defining your same sex relationship as an opposite sex relationship is suggestive of internalised homophobia, this is now redundant since anyone can marry someone of either the same or the opposite sex. In other situations, having or not having a gender recognition certificate seems to have little practical impact beyond validating someone's identity. It is recognised that in most situations it is not appropriate to ask someone if they have one, and so in reality access to single sex spaces is already a question of self ID anyway.
Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and the SNP think it should be made easier for people to get a gender recognition certificate by removing the requirement for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, reducing the length of time during which someone must have been "living in their acquired gender" and reducing the age at which someone can change their legal gender.
It's not really clear to me why this is such a priority, since in reality gender recognition certificates seem to make little difference anyway, and it's also not clear to me why someone not suffering from gender dysphoria would need to be able to change their legal gender.
The legislation is also rather confusing, in the sense that it continually conflates sex and gender. It refers to male and female as genders (i.e. not the usual meaning of these words) but fails to define male, female or gender. And it is clear that the intention of the legislation is that the person is considered to have changed sex.
Why?
Well, because changing gender wouldn't have any impact on anything, because nothing in society has ever been organised according to gender in the first place. That's why there are urinals in men's toilets and sanitary bins in women's toilets, and why there is no such thing as a toilet for non binary people.
Now on to the Equality Act.
The Equality Act establishes a number of protected characteristics, of which sex is one and gender reassignment is another.
The protected characteristic of gender reassignment is fairly broadly drafted and includes anyone planning to undergo gender reassignment. I'm pretty sure gender reassignment is not defined and so there is no requirement for this to involve undergoing any medical procedures or obtaining a gender recognition certificate. So in practice, this makes having a transgender identity itself a protected characteristic, meaning that you have a legal right not to be discriminated against on the basis of it.
The provisions of the Equality Act relating to sex have some specific features, including the fact that in some limited cases an organisation can provide single sex spaces or services on the basis of sex, and that even a trans person with a gender recognition certificate can be excluded from these spaces for members of the opposite sex where such exclusion is a proportionate way of achieving a legitimate aim. The legislation specifically gives the example of rape crisis services.
Despite this, there is now some confusion, not just among trans activists and lobby groups, but even among judges, over whether sex means biological sex or legal sex. To me it clearly means biological sex, given the specific reference to it being able to override a gender recognition certificate in limited circumstances. But now there is a question mark over this, which is why some people are calling on the government to clarify the Equality Act.
Why is this important?
Well, the way I see it, trans people already have their own protected characteristic, but trans lobby groups are trying to essentially remove the protected characteristic of biological sex from natal women by claiming that sex means legal sex and not biological sex. They aren't satisfied with trans people having their own protected characteristic and the right not to be discriminated against; they don't want women to have sex based rights of their own or the right to any single sex spaces. This is despite the fact that, in practice, hardly any organisations are willing to use the exemption in the Equality Act to provide single sex spaces or services to women at the moment anyway.
The CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis centre, Mridul Wadhwa, is a trans woman who applied for the role despite the fact that it was advertised for a female candidate, relying on the exemption in the Equality Act. Wadhwa was appointed to the role and then went on record saying that some rape survivors are bigoted, and that women seeking rape crisis support who do not accept that trans women are women and have a right to provide single sex support to natal women need to "reframe their trauma" and can expect to be challenged on their prejudices.
This is not an isolated event. Sarah Summers is suing the Survivors' Network after they refused to designate even one of their women's groups as single sex and doubled down on their stance that "trans women are women". Many trans activists suggested that if Sarah and other women want single sex rape crisis support, they should fundraise for and set it up themselves rather than expecting any of the organisations that already exist to provide it. But then when JK Rowling funded and set up Beira's Place, a rape crisis centre for female survivors only, those same people immediately said this was disgusting and transphobic and that her only motivation was to give trans people another kicking, and that it should be forced to accept trans women or else be shut down.
So with all this in mind, what rights do trans people not have?
Because it seems to me that trans people already have more than sufficient protection under the law, whereas natal women's protection under the law is under constant attack from trans lobby groups.
The way I see it, they feel it is not sufficient for trans people to have protection from discrimination or the same rights as everyone else. They don't want natal women to have any rights, protection, services or spaces which exclude trans women, even where there is a clear need for them, and even where trans women can have equivalent but separate right, protection, services and spaces.
And that's where they lose my support and sympathy, I'm afraid.