The News Agents on legislating for something that isn't real.

[southbiscay]

On Tuesday's episode, in relation to government talk of legislating to declare Rwanda a safe country, the presenters rightly derided the idea of trying to make something a fact simply by passing a law saying it is.

But few in the media or government seem concerned about the GRA which does precisely the same thing. While we tinker around with trying to amend the EA to define sex as biological for the purposes of the Act (and by implication suggesting there is more than one definition of sex, which in itself is unhelpful and will come back to bite us), getting to the root of the issue by pressing for repeal of the GRA is ignored.

I hope that the groups with sufficient clout and very high profile supporters will come around to campaigning for this.

It wouldn't have been a strategic stance a couple of years ago but the dial has moved significantly since then and it is time to make it part of the public conversation.

But that isn’t true - maybe a few decades ago, but it would be very unusual to pretend that the adoptive parent is genetically related now. Also grandparents and step parents sometimes adopt when a parent has died. Nobody is pretending that they are the biological parent. They just have the same legal rights and duties that a parent acquires automatically by giving birth or being married to the woman who has given birth.

Nobody is pretending that they are the biological parent.

I know. Precisely. A definition I once read describes a legal faction as a falsehood on which the law depends.

Everyone knows the adoptive parents aren't the biological parents but are obliged to behave as though they were.

That's how the GRA is supposed to work. Everyone knows humans can't change sex and that a biological man can't become a biological woman or vice versa but is supposed to behave as though they have.

There are two problems.

One, some people claim that the law means that those with a GRC actually have changed their biological sex. It doesn't', because it's a fiction.

Two, having to behave as though they have.actually changed sex leads to all the harms we see from people invading the other sex's single sex spaces - well, mostly males invading female single sex spaces.

So there are legal fictions that we can accept, such as adoption, because we believe them to br beneficial on the whole. And there are those many of us do not wish to accept, such as the GRA /GRCs, because we consider them harmful on the whole