Annaliese Dodds: "sex and gender are different"

[CheshireSplat]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/24/labour-vows-to-modernise-simplify-and-reform-gender-recognition-act

You can't have both the Gender Recognition Act and an Equality Act that recognises Single Sex Services and Spaces.

Either or. One undermines the other.

And the Labour Party seem not to understand that the people that will use the GRA to access spaces, only want the Single Sex Services and Spaces in the first place.

Or they know it, and don't care.

They know that the single sex exceptions are currently unworkable in practice. Trans women are completely open about using opposite sex services like toilets and changing rooms and other services and sports are too cowardly to implement them. If they really believed the SSE are important they’d be promising to clarify the meaning of sex in the EA so it was clear it doesn’t mean men with a GRC.

They know. They’re hoping we won’t talk about it.

I was just thinking about the Uxbridge result where the SDP got 0.8%. As nobody except us knows the SDP is still going, I think we can assume that is the hard core GC protest vote. Obviously it's disappointing that it's so few, but it is also not far off swinging the result in a marginal seat. Perhaps Labour will take notice when they start to lose elections due to a pro-women candidate.

This is basically the same position as the Tory Party.

So I don't see the logic in "I'm going to vote Tory instead of Labour on this issue even though the Tory position is pretty much the same."

I'm afraid this will just give ammunition to those claiming that being GC is inherently right-wing.

Until they apologise to Rosie Duffield and meet with women’s groups and reinstate Joan Smith I won’t believe a single thing they say

This is basically the same position as the Tory Party.

Have the Tories vowed to modernise the GRA?

This is what she said earlier in the year when she was asked about changing rooms, and, as expected, she doesn't care one jot about women:

That is a slightly different question from the one I was discussing. I hope the hon. Member is aware of the fact that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has recently released guidelines on those matters. I may well already have shared such a changing room; very often, women’s changing rooms will have separate cubicles, and in any case, that is how people often choose to try on clothes. If the hon. Member is interested in that matter, he could look at the EHRC’s guidelines.

In the spirit of what I have just said, Labour urges the Government to focus on the treatment of non-binary people, and to especially focus on the need for research. The hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) referred to the fact that the Government’s LGBT 2018 action plan committed the Conservatives to launch separate calls for evidence on the issues faced by non-binary and intersex people. The Government appear to have contracted the National Institute for Economic and Social Research to investigate that area, but no research appears to have been carried out. The EHRC has also

“recommended that further understanding was needed before any legislation was brought forward”.

We believe that additional research is particularly important when it comes to those people who might describes themselves as intersex, or as having differences in sex development. That refers to the relatively small number of individuals who are born with any of several variations in biological sex characteristics—for example, in chromosomes or genitals—some of whom may describe themselves as intersex and some of whom may describe themselves as non-binary. I appreciate, again, that not everybody uses those categories.

VG point, and one we need to make more forcefully in public.

Whether a man changes gender on a whim or deeply and sincerely believes he was born in the wrong body, has changed sex etc etc etc matters not one whit: he hasn't, and women's spaces are not for him.

Surely the absolutely key thing here - which she doesn't mention - is whether the single-sex exceptions relate to biological sex or legal sex?

Because if she means the former, then we don't need to care about whether it's easier to obtain a GRC or not.

If she means the latter, then making it easy to obtain a GRC through one doctor's signature could easily open the floodgates to men becoming legally female and using single-sex spaces.

She accuses the Tories of stoking a culture war but most of the article is about attacking them rather than making clear Labour's position.

The only point of clarity is that self ID has been dropped so Labour will now be ripped apart by trans activists.

The real issue here is making sure Labour do not back track on that.

You can’t rely on the word sex anymore

Those who are fully subscribed to gender ideology use it without clarification hoping people won’t notice

Now we have to check that too.

There is little that is clear.

The whole purpose of the article is too ditch self ID but try and sound radical at the same time or at least more radical than the Tories.

It is largely addressed to TRAs. The message is the traditional one that Labour sends to activists - we will not give you what you want but the Tories are worse.

Anneliese Dodds is almost as stupid and biased as Caroline Nokes.

A few Labour mps have come out and attempted to say similar. But Starmer hasn't changed his opinion so its all pointless.
As ever, it's not what she says that matters, it was he says.

Gormless.

The GRA was an attempt to keep it to GRC males only, it hasn't worked, males have slammed the door open to the widest extent possible and exploited women and their spaces to the nth degree. There need to be single sex spaces for women that no male at all can enter regardless of what they have on paper or how they identify. Just no males. Meet their needs in other ways.

Still absolutely NO recognition (from Labour ffs) that inclusion is not a TQ men only thing: that to let those men be happy and comfortable doing their best life wherever they feel like in the moment means excluding many females from anything at all, most of them from vulnerable and marginalised groups. If you're ok with that, then you can identify as on the political left until you're blue in the face: you aren't. What you are is a male supremacist.

And as pp says: this is the argument about a decade ago. Catch up. It's much much fucking worse now, there's a mountain of mess to pick up because of politicians with their superior woke heads stuffed up their superior, over privileged, woke little arses.

"The GRA was an attempt to keep it to GRC males only, it hasn't worked, males have slammed the door open to the widest extent possible and exploited women and their spaces to the nth degree. There need to be single sex spaces for women that no male at all can enter regardless of what they have on paper or how they identify. Just no males. Meet their needs in other ways. "

Exactly this. Her big position piece basically restates the mess for single sex spaces and makes it easier for AGPs.

Single sex spaces have been effectively phased out regardless of what the current law actually says. Make them enforceable law and create third spaces.

In other words getting a GRC will be every bit as rigorous as going to your GP and getting signed off sick with stress

well as it's so hard to see a GP, I guess it would create a bit of a hurdle!

Glad she says sex and gender not the same, not before time!

It makes me increasingly angry with the left as they witter endlessly about lived experience and listening to voices and how wonderfully caring they are about everyone.

Ffs, the information on all this is everywhere now. Women have spoken in the bloody HoC, there's several grassroots women's groups you can pick up the phone to or meet with to get their views, you can youtube entire meetings where women explain it all in very small words, there are articles galore in the national press explaining all the issues.

And yet still they do not understand even the most basic bloody issues for women, or show the faintest sign of any of it having managed to penetrate their heads, and they think they can come out with bumph like this and get a round of applause for 'middle ground'.

They are expecting people to vote for them to run the bloody country. I expect a minimum capacity for some basic bloody research and capacity to get a full understanding of a situation before opening mouth on it. I wouldn't put up with this from a very junior co worker, never mind a bloody MP.

I think this is a chink of light because they've moved past the position that anyone disagreeing is automatically a terrible bigot.

In practice, their policy would be unworkable and just self ID through the back door but by recognising that single sex spaces are important and admitting that sex and gender are important they are now in a space where the merits of the policy can actually be debated and it is recognised that there are legitimate concerns.

I'm afraid after years of bitter experience, no I don't think they've moved a fraction of an inch past 'anyone giving a shit about women and saying no to men is a terrible bigot'. I think they're just realising that the Tories have an open goal here, and a few vaguely 'hmm' noises are politically useful.

They show no sign of understanding anything whatsoever about it. These kind of ideas are ten years out of date.

The only good thing about this article is watching and reading the inevitable tantrums from the TRAs.

They're trying to pretend they've listened while the content shows they've not listened at all. The positive is that they understand that it's a live issue. It's also an issue that they're never going to be able to bully journalists out of asking them about.

So every time they're asked about any aspect of this, they'll be incoherent, contradictory fools. Because there is NO rationale, science or ethical narrative behind this ideology. They'll bluff, stutter, ramble, evade & look like fools - every. single.time .

I can't see the difference in what Dodds is saying to what Starmer has been saying. She's flailing around accusing everyone else of doing things wrong but her party doesn't really seem to have .ugh support over this and they haven't moved much. She's going to just make everything easier and quicker.

I finally got around to reading the GRA out of curiosity.

Aside from the opening line which talks about "a person of either gender" (an implicit statement that there must only be two genders), the rest of it doesn't seem to relate to biological sex in any way. It uses the word "gender" throughout, presumably as a synonym for "sex" from a time where nobody really thought through the impact that we're seeing today. However...

If the EA can clarify that sex in the EA means biological sex, not legal sex as modified by a GRC that seems to sort everything out, to the point where the opening paragraph could even state "a person of any gender" i.e. acknowledging that for anyone that does believe in gender identity, they can be recognised as any gender they like, not restricted to two. Even if this then became their legal sex (i.e. legal sex is linked to gender), it would not impact their biological sex.

Let's hope all politicians continue to push the idea that sex and gender are not the same thing.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.