Streeting apologies to Rosie Duffield

[Theeyeballsinthesky]

Well well

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/28/wes-streeting-apologises-to-labour-mp-rosie-duffield-who-felt-ostracised-due-to-gender-views

Could they maybe possibly at last be listening?

Yes. The Tories should be making the changes now to clarify the position, as that will make it harder for whoever is the next Government to go back to insanity and misinformation.

Could they maybe possibly at last be listening?

Uxbridge and South Ruislip has made Labour very nervous. They were confident they would walk it.

They didn't.

Streeting is responding to electoral feed back which makes him look on dodgy ground.

The timing of the 'apology' after this by-election isn't a coincidence.

The relevant sections of the interview here:

https://twitter.com/TimesRadio/status/1685357127064559616

And only six weeks after
https://www.itv.com/news/2023-06-17/i-would-die-happy-wes-streeting-reveals-ambition-to-be-pm

Yes, indeed - hoping Kemi Badenoch is working on this as we speak.

TheirEminence thank you for your thoughtful posts. I appreciate a lot of what you have said. I think the GRA is a damaging, mendacious anachronism and needs to be repealed.

GRA’s whole purpose arises from outdated sex stereotypes, homophobia and misogyny. It seems a bizarre policy position in this day and age, to retain government legal processes that reflect a retrograde official position that it is preferable to legally pretend that eg a man is actually a woman, than it would be to allow two men to be in a gay relationship etc. Or that men or women who just want to live in a gender non conforming way, would need some kind of government recognition or government validation of them being gender non conforming. That’s all GRA is doing (if we accept that nobody is born in the wrong body. And humans can’t change sex).

The world has changed hugely since 2004, we now have much greater awareness of how women’s spaces and opportunities and free speech are being ruined by male colonisation, all of which is supported by GRA. These incursions on womanhood are especially impactful for lesbians, and for any women with vulnerabilities and/or a greater dependence on public services. All of this makes retaining GRA the exact opposite of inclusive.

Government could remake its response to the challenge of the Goodwin case, now that the UK has same sex marriage, equal pension age and an Equality Act which (..with some amendment as required..) would protect gender non conforming people. The government could explain to ECHR that the 2004 legislative experiment of GRA has failed in the UK and the balancing of everybody’s interests in society means that it’s now necessary to remove it.

Hi Slothtoes, thank you, I agree with you, and I guess here is where the (at least stated) TRA position and the GC position overlap: both believe the GRA is outdated and both acknowledge the monumental social change that has occurred in Western societies in the past 20 years.

The GRA could indeed be repealed and gender non-conforming people be protected by anti-discrimination legislation. However, a) trans activists do not want this, b) they might argue that to rely on relatively recent social norms to protect any group is vulnerable to reverse social change and c) for a subset of trans-identified people, the outdated sex stereotypes, and the opportunity to dominate and humiliate women seem, sadly, to be a major attraction of the current model. It will be very hard for politicians like Wes Streeting (to come back to the subject of the thread) to acknowledge this.

Completely agree with these comments about the GRA. And in addition, the reconceptualisation of 'transgender' has obscured the way in which the GRA was intended t ooperate in the first place.
For the tiny number of people that were the intended beneficiaries of the legislation (people who had had the surgery which in those days was called a 'sex change operation' plus hormonal intervention), the reform was spoken of as a protection of privacy in the rare bureaucratic situations in which documentation such as a birth certificate needed to be produced.
I think a large part of the motivation was the very much greater prejudice there was against gender dysphoria in those days. Not hostility, necessarily, but just a very profound incomprehension, almost shock, that people would want to transform their bodies to appear like the opposite sex. It was precisely because we so profoundly 'othered' transsexual people that we flt the need to lie on official documents in order tp protect them from 'exposure'.
Since then, there has been a change in social attitudes and, in addition, the Equality Act, which provides the framework for preventing discrimination against transgender people.
If the Equality Act were reformed to clarify sex and gender it could, in addition to protecting women's sex-based protections, provide such a clear articulation of trans protections against discrimination that the GRA would become superfluous.

If the Equality Act were reformed to clarify sex and gender it could, in addition to protecting women's sex-based protections, provide such a clear articulation of trans protections against discrimination that the GRA would become superfluous.

Agreed. IANAL but when I read through the GRA with this in mind, this was my conclusion too. From memory, the first sentence needed a minor tweak (otherwise it would be a non-sensical statement following this clarification) but rest then fell in to place and already seemed covered elsewhere. The right to get legal sex recognised is the exception but then there isn't really a benefit to legal sex, other than a birth certificate which effectively falsifies reality for an unclear benefit.

There are posters on other threads who highlight the impacts of repealing the GRA. It sounds like it may have wide-reaching implications. Leaving it in place but superfluous sounds like it could be a good outcome.

Oh, and since privacy was central to the purpose of the GRA, it is also significant that we have a much tighter framework now for the protection of personal information (the gdpr). Anyone who is in a position to ask for documentation such as a birth certificate or a passport (which have a whole load of potential sensitive info on them, in addition to the sex marker) is under a range of statutory duties relating to how they can and cannot process that info.

.... And to bring my point back on topic with the thread....

Now that Wes Streeting has started listening to Rosie Duffield, rather than actively shutting her down, we might get a good debate on whether or not the GRA should be repealed. I'm not sure how many signatures the petition has yet but if it gets to the 100k mark, we could be in for some important and helpful discussion.

x-post, bonfire. Yes,' in place but superfluous' (with any misconceptions about its significance cleared up by an improved Equality Act) might be, policially, a more realistic outcome

Which petition is this BonfireLady?

I don’t think that we can retain the GRA (or any element of legal ‘sex change’) and solve these problems. You can’t even legally ask to see a GRC (as written into the GRA) because they are so legally secret and shameful so it effectively allows self ID into the spaces and opportunities reserved to the opposite sex. Clearly with a much worse impact on women. GRA is the perfect storm of misogyny. I don’t know how anyone can defend that. If Labour are waking up they need to see that. (as do all parties especially the party of current government, but we’re on a Labour thread..)

this is what I mean about GRA being a law rooted in homophobia, misogyny and shame. Those values are not consistent with modern day law making values. The heavy secrecy provisions are all about hiding trans status. That is so easily abused.

I don’t understand why it’s apparently off the table to get rid of GRA, the magical thinking workaround rooted in archaic and shamefully ‘othering’ views of gender non conformity, even while GRA is causing effective self ID …while we are being told that both major parties don’t support self ID?

That means all the statements of knowing what a woman is are actually pointless unless protections for women are legally shored up in every single situation which is pretty impossible. But by far the simpler and more effective approach would be to just remove GRC, and it’s secrecy clauses and that chilling effect that allows self ID. Amend the equality act to protect gender non conforming people and to clarify biological sex and gender identity are two different things, job done.

That should have included quote marks around the reference to ‘shame’ ie referring to the actually transphobic attitudes when GRA was being written:

‘You can’t even legally ask to see a GRC (as written into the GRA) because they are so legally secret and ‘shameful’ so it effectively allows self ID into the spaces and opportunities reserved to the opposite sex.’

Ah, just looked and it's closed. 16k signatures and ran out of time.

Shame. It would have been an interesting debate given the shift that is (ostensibly) currently happening in the Labour Party. Even if the conclusion was to keep it but render it superfluous, the conversation itself would have been the important bit.

Repeal the GRA petition

So someone just needs to say they have a GRC and they have to be given all the advantages it offers. But they could be lying because they can't be asked to show it and no one can ever know, which makes you wonder exactly what the point of the legislation is supposed to be. What was that South Sea Bubble quote? 'A company for carrying an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.'

I don’t understand why it’s apparently off the table to get rid of GRA,

When was the last time the UK "got rid of" a piece of legislation? We almost never repeal acts, we just add new bills that overwrite them.

IANAL but I get the impression that repeal causes a certain amount of legal havoc plus personal havoc for anyone who has relied on the GRA so repeal would probably leave a kind of legal hole and leave some people in limbo. I'm happy to sign a petition in favour of repeal to get the subject aired but it might not be the most practical solution in the end.

I'm not a lawyer either but given that I believe it took until 2008 to abolish the blasphemy law in England, I'm inclined to agree with your point. However sensible a solution it might sound, I just can't see it happening in either my lifetime or my child's.

Can’t you say, as of today no more GRCs will be given?

And also amend the EA
to say GRCs do not change sex for: (list) single sex spaces, services etc ?

IANAL but there would always be provision made for the people who already have their GRC if GRCs stopped being issued. Absolutely. GRCs are issued for life. A very serious thing. Essential that nobody would be left in any kind of limbo or uncertainty. There could be new provisions put in around current GRC holders in new Equality Act amendments that would protect those people plus any other gender non conforming person without a GRC from discrimination on that basis.

We would need a committee of MPs to look at this- starting that off just needs political will. It’s exactly what the Tories did a few years ago when they wanted to update the GRA to introduce self ID. After an outcry from women, then the leadership u-turned to say they weren’t going to touch it apart from bringing in the £5 GRC.

If Labour are saying they would touch it then that is an opening for discussion which is needed. As PP on here have rightly said, future politicians could now have that discussion with the benefit of cost not being a realistic barrier to getting a £5 GRC any more.

‘Future changes to the law happen through the passing of another Act or delegated legislation. An Act can also be repealed so that its provisions no longer apply. Parliamentary committees examine UK laws and recommend the removal of out of date legislation.’

https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/acts/#:~:text=Future%20changes%20to%20the%20law,of%20out%20of%20date%20legislation.

If you get rid of it, you open the door to all kinds of batshittery. Much better to amend the EQA and defang the GRA

I do appreciate your point but I’ll stick with moving the Overton window on by calling for total repeal. I think any politician who moves on this would only give with one hand while taking away with the other. So not need to go in cautiously now.

The details of working out the knotty legal issues in Parliament are not my problem to resolve as a voter either. I just want to know from the politicians who want our votes next year, that women are not going to continue to be disadvantaged by GRA. Calling for repeal is the simplest call to express that urgency.

I think the Overton window has already moved. A few years ago it was unthinkable to openly discuss GRA repeal. Yet a few months ago The Critic published a short piece by Alessandra Asteriti discussing that very issue. That’s a win, no matter what will happen in the end.