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

The only thing they are looking at changing is the definition though

So they will fiercely contest that

We need to recognise wins and celebrate them IMO.

A change in direction can take a while and happens in incremental steps, rather than a very obvious U-turn.

The messages coming out of the Labour party are a step in the right direction and significantly different from what they were saying not so long ago. They've got a way to go, but nevertheless this is progress.

And it's happening because of women campaigning.

Well done all of us, let's celebrate!
And then keep on pushing....

Self-id by other name - eaxactly. That's all this is.

Another example of what Labour think is Kate Osbourne trying to bully other MPs into not reading Helen Joyce's Trans. She calls Braverman a disgrace for recommending it.

https://twitter.com/KateOsborneMP/status/1682443975616077824

This Labour MP is on the Women and Equalities Select Committee.

having read Dodd's peice a second time it really is meant to dupe Labour members and floating voters for whom this is a single issue into thinking Labour are safe for womne. I do not believe it. If this is their best shot at a policy then I could cry, I really could.

I think I will only believe Labour claim that they support the SSE if they also agree to clarify the definition of sex in the EA. If they are against this clarification it just proves that they consider bio sex to mean BC sex which means they think males can count as female for the purpose of the SSE in the EA.

How depressing to see this reaction to a partial climb-down from Labour. I felt encouraged by the news. Thought all those “I can’t vote Labour when only the Tories care about women’s rights” would be pleased, but now those people are casting around for another excuse to re-elect the party who has destroyed the UK over the last 13 years.

The fact that we are still arguing about what Labour actually mean in this article shows that it is not remotely clear what their intentions are. It is so easy to manipulate people by using terminology that now has more than one meaning. Many TP now refer to themselves as biological women or female. Labour need to be very explicit about what they mean when they are using words that have been changed in culture and law to mean entirely different things from previous common usage.

‘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!’

Dont worry, you’ll be able to do it online in five minutes. Signed of by a committed , compliant or just plain greedy GP.

Pink News are livid

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/07/24/labour-anneliese-dodds-trans-gender-recognition-act-reform/

Exactly.

I understand the scepticism as Labour changes position so often and rarely puts out anything concrete but this is a climbdown.

Are you expecting the Tories to come out with a sensible and clear position in September?

I don’t really see it as a climb down. A diagnosis from one Dr is pretty much self ID (and will become self ID with one more small tweak of the law). They know they have to do it in stages because it fucked up so badly in Scotland. Women are losing their rights incrementally, small step by small step. This has always been the plan and we are mugs if we go along with it.

When Starmer says that you can't change your sex and women don't have penises, then I will believe they are moving their position. But at the moment, it just looks like more of the same. Sending out women minions on Starmer's behalf to persuade the electorate that whatever they believe, is exactly what Labour is going to do.

It is a step in the right direction, but only a step.

There is more to do, but hopefully this is a nudge forward.

Has everyone forgotten it's the Tories who opened this entire can of worms in the first place with the proposed GRA reforms?

This is probably the current plan…

They are publicly announcing that they are abandoning Self ID - but in practice they are still committed to it. They now call it 'modernising', as a way to disgsuise that self Id is still what it will be.

These supposedly new panels that people will have to pass before in order to get a GRC will effectively be a show panel - designed, simply, to rubber stamp self id. (I can not entirely cynically imagine that the doctor's a panel will consist of 'Gender GP' and 'Adrian Harrop')

They also blocked Self ID, remember.

No.

They abandoned self-ID.

It's Labour we have to thank for the GRA, brought in because they didn't want to legalise same-sex marriage.

It isn't a climb down. Read the thread, all the explanations are right here. Dodds, like many other Labour people, are identifying as this being only a bit of a stray smell of smoke while the house is on fire around them.

This is also the second time in a week we've seen a bit of a strategy from people that are in bed with Stonewall and the extremist T political lobby: to make a tiny bit of a slightly not on message release, followed by Stonewall and the lobby screaming and jumping up and down and shrieking about how it's a total roll back of their rights and they're being genocided.

There's two ways you can look at this.

One is that this lobby are so lost in their own fiction at this point that they are genuine in these claims - and so lost to reality that politicians should be stepping as far away from them as possible and being very clear indeed that Trans people and the T political lunatic fringe/people with appalling criminal records screaming about hitting women through megaphones/rainbow butt monkeys etc etc are not the same thing at all, and the politicians are in no way confusing the two or propping up this lobby. And you have to ask yourselves why they're not only not doing this, but beaming under signs about decapitating women.

The other is that quiet cosy chats over cups of tea in back offices are continuing as Whittle so smugly explained years ago as how this was engineered outside of democracy and scrutiny, and the lobby have been told: we'll throw a few crumbs (which mean nothing, old stuff, 'single sex spaces' etc with no definitions that sound like we might be wavering a bit but nothing anyone can ever pin us down on), you scream your heads off all over the press using your powerful media network, and the general public will go 'oh both sides are pissed off, this must mean it's middle ground and ok'.

I know this lobby's actions over the years. I know the politicians in bed with them from long and bitter experience. I was at the funeral of integrity, any sense of morality, conscience, responsibility of impartiality, public duty, truth, reality and Cumming's eyesight. I know which one I think is more likely.

if that's a legal fiction and they reference single sex spaces for biological women surely that doesn't include people who are biologically male?

Who knows? "Biologically women" and "biologically male" are just more words, and they are just as susceptible to redefinition when it's convenient as any other words. Who's to say that a "biological male" can't mean a woman with an surgically constructed penis and a ton of artificial hormomes? Or mean a woman who wafted within 10 feet of a hormone tablet and now has brainwaves imprinted with blokeness?

The law depends on everyone agreeing what words mean. We have a group of people who want to destabilise language because that destabilises the law and suits their political aims.

Politicians can talk about the differences between sex and gender all they like, but while the law allows sex and gender to be seen as the same, no one has solved anything

Politicians need to demonstrate that they understand that issuing men with female birth certificate and strong id does nothing to maintain sse. Or they need to acknowledge thats whats happening and explain clearly how sse can be maintained without any reliable id.

Annaliese Dodds has tweeted that Labour will remove the spousal consent from the GRA.

Dodds said that “now, in 2023, we have a much better understanding of the barriers trans people face”

So her answer to knowing more about the barriers is that she's proposing to reinforce those barriers and ensure that the purpose of a GRC is purely to certify what someone thinks about themselves in their own head?

Why would anyone bother getting a certificate to prove what they're thinking if it doesn't open doors to single-sex spaces?

Don't get me wrong - obviously it would be great if single-sex spaces could actually be single-sex, but I'm very suspicious of a proposal that purports to be all about making things easier for trans people while apparently also reinstating single-sex spaces.

It feels like we've come full circle and we're back at the start all over again, where politicians were sure there must be some sort of achievable compromise and we have to sit here and watch them tie themselves in knots telling us there's a simple solution until they realise they can't please everyone. Again.