The history of the Gender Recognition actand Labour's role

[AdamRyan]

There have been lots of threads recently about Labour's position on gender and their role in the GRA. A poster on another thread made a slightly off topic point that I thought deserved a thread of its own. Please scroll on past or hide this thread if you aren't interested in discussing further!

Thanks to @bigcoatlady....

The Gender Recognition Act 2004 only allows people to apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate if they have two written reports by medical professionals confirming that they have lived in their affirmed gender for two years as well as evidence of any medical treatment they have undergone. There is no requirement for a GRC to be issued that the applicant has undergone surgery, the reason for this is the original bill introduced by Labour restricted GRCs only to those who had received surgery and this was removed in the Lords by Tory peers uncomfortable with the requirement that 'men' undergo surgical removal of the penis.

That much is ancient history. Less than 5000 people in the UK have a GRC.

In 2015 the Home Office launched a proposal to remove the costly and time-consuming medical assessment of applications for gender recognition in favour of self-ID. This was a Tory proposal from a Tory government. They have since reversed their position on it but it was never a Labour proposal.

The Equality Act 2010 has always made it possible to exclude trans women from women only competitive sports (s.195), women only services (sch 3), all women shortlists(s104(7)), communal accommodation (sch23), women only associations (sch16) and job requirements (sch 9).

As a result employers who want to recruit a woman but not a transwoman to a role such as 'rape crisis counsellor' have always been able to do so. If a rape crisis service wanted to offer rape crisis group therapy ONLY to women and not trans women they are entirely permitted to do so. If a domestic violence refuge (and I have chaired the board of trustees of a housing charity which offers refuge services for many years) wants to only accommodate women and not trans women it can do so.

Services such as Survivors Network are choosing to include transwomen in their service for whatever reasons but there is no legal obligation on them to do this.

Even had the Tory proposals to permit self-ID gone ahead it was never proposed that the law be changed further to reduce the protection for women only spaces in the Equality Act.

You can call that a gender ideology scandal if you like but its pretty tame.

There is another scandal. During those fifteen years, those of us who have been scrabbling to fund frontline services have been hard hit by austerity. In the city my charity operates in the women-led charities which delivered refuge services went to the wall in the first round of austerity. By 2015 we had no DV refuges at all. Our Rape Crisis nearly went bust and is currently closed to new referrals. We are not a women only provider but we started to offer specialist accommodation for women at risk of homelessness 8 yrs ago because of the massive demand. Women leaving violent partners were becoming street homeless and ending up in hostels surrounded by aggressive mean with drug issues due to the shortage of safe accommodation.

Two years ago the govt did create a statutory duty on councils to urgently accommodate households leaving DV BUT by then it was too bloody late, the good charities had already sold up their properties and moved on. The sector has been ripped apart by the last fifteen years

This is a bigger scandal than the GRA.

Who knows? Different times, different leader, different circumstances. I don't want to waste time speculating.

I have not "expressed hope he's more left wing than he's letting on". I've expressed hope he'll move to closer EU relations but isn't saying because the debate is toxic. We will see. That's not a game changer for me and who I'm voting for.

I'm centrist believe it or not. If duc is right and Cameron came back with the same ethos he had before his epic act of national self harm, I'd even consider the Tories.

I wouldn't have challenged him either he's 6ft 5.
He still managed to get into a woman's prison and a woman's refuge.

OK, that's interesting then as that shows that you know really there is no way to keep sex offenders out of public toilets if they want to go in.

It is ridiculous he was in a womens prison. The refuge thing looks a bit more complex but I can't really comment on their policies.

Sorry Adam, are you saying the fact that the victim's family thought KD was a man means they couldn't have thought KD was a trans woman?

I hate to break this to you, but despite years of TWAW, the vast majority of the population still view a trans woman as a man who dresses as, and has possibly had surgery to become more like, a woman. It takes a lot of effort to fully reprogramme the way your mind perceives familar concepts and applies your native language, and in day to day language when people aren't policing themslves woman still means adult human female, man still means adult human male and a trans woman is still a man who wants to be a woman.

I've been deleted for pointing out their hypocrisy!

Well giving them the option of identifying as women and having the right to be there certainly doesn't help.

I'd hazard a guess that if a 6ft 5 man who didn't identify as trans followed two young girls into a public toilet then security guards or other staff or members of the public may have intervened.

What's fucking ridiculous is that the notion of trans has meant that people don't. It's all accepted because we must 'be kind'.

Actually, it is the GRA that gave this sex offender the courage to openly enter a women's toilet. Simply by putting on a dress he felt pretty sure he wouldn't be challenged and could blag his way out by crying victim.

You really do suffer from tunnel vision.

On previous threads, both you and BIossomtoes have expressed the belief/hope that Keir Starmer is more left-wing and more pro-EU than he is letting on

Not me, gov. You’re mixing me up with anyone poster. Starmer’s fine with me exactly as he is. Don’t drag me into your fabrication.

Re - Mordaunt as next tory leader. In one way it is a valid point. I've been keeping an eye on what the bookies think (as their livelihood depends on being right as much of the time as possible) and Badenoch has been favourite to succeed Sunak for a long while, BUT Mordaunt is now second.
However in the unlikely event that Tories keep enough seats to form a govt, presumably Rishi will hang on in there. So I can't see any circumstances where Mordaunt (or Badenoch) is PM in the short term. But pretty likely that one of them will be leader of the opposition.

I didn't used to report and nearly got banned. Life is much better for me now I do. I would encourage anyone to do the same.

It's rather cathartic! 😄

So @AdamRyan to go back to your post earlier where you stated that :

'if we were under the risk of self ID you would agree' with the point that @Snowypeaks made about reducing the risk of assaults in single sex spaces such as toilets by making them single sex.

We already have a scenario where a man is not questioned because he is wearing women's clothes because society has told women that TWAW and to be kind and to lower our boundaries.

So what difference would Self ID make? We already have it in effect. No one can ask for a GRC for these males to gain access it is literally based on what they wear or what they say.

The membership was furious with the parliamentary party for ejecting Mordaunt from the final two so they couldn’t vote for her. There’s a very good chance she’ll lose her seat so they’re unlikely to get their wish unless she’s parachuted into a safe seat in a by-election.

And here's the inevitable result of blurring lines.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/25/gang-hid-changing-rooms-pools-film-young-women-undressing/

I don't think I'm mixing you up with anyone.

I also had to correct you only 10 days ago when you falsely claimed that Labour had never proposed self-ID - you are just as disingenuous as AdamRyan, who quoted the same false claim in the op.

My goodness, that really is a stretch. They sound like incels to me.

What the hell has that to do with anything? That’s a straw man argument and you know it. How many females are you willing to sacrifice? because one is one too many for me. Why do people like you want to make it so much easier for men to commit rape? Or are you one of the idiots that claim men wouldn’t identify as women to gain access to women in order to commit a sex offence? There are numerous instances of sexual offences committed by trans identifying men in Scotland alone, and we are a tiny country, when it’s rolled out across the UK it’s not trivial, far from it. God only knows how many there are when you consider that it’s happening all over the western world. Only men commit rape, with their penis, to argue that they should have access to women in states of undress and in vulnerable situations is beyond callous, it’s downright cruelty. None of us are saying that they shouldn’t have access to their own spaces, for trans women, just that they should stay out of ours. That’s not unreasonable, woman are not human sheilds to protect men from the actions of other men.

I don't think I'm mixing you up with anyone.

Well either you are or you’re telling porkies because, as I say, I’m perfectly happy with Starmer.

Yes exactly!

As I said earlier what a gift trans ideology is.

That was considered far fetched or something to the like by Adam.

But yes of course incels and misogynists benefit from the removal of safeguarding of women. If only someone would give a shit.

There is no single way. There is no 100% way.

What there is - well, used to be - is a mesh of ways. Social expectations. Possibly authority figures nearby. Confidence in ones right to challenge. Confidence that if one feels at risk one is justified in making a fuss. Confident if one asks for help others will not question the validity of the request and most liekly will help. Each one reducing the risk, adding into a mesh of support. Still not 100% but way way better than 0%.

TWAW and the appropriation of pre-existing single sex provisions as mixed sex single gender resources blew a great big hole right through the middle of the mesh. Not because all TW are a risk but because there's no part of the mesh that can distinguish a safe male from a risky male so to accomodate TW as W the whole thing had to go.

So it's 0% now. Someone wants in and they are in. Luckily most men don't want in so in practice most women only spaces are still female only most of the time, but we can't assume it now and when they aren't there's no recourse to make them.

It would be ridiculous to ask people to self id as either dangerous to other people or not dangerous to other people, base resources on that, and expect people to self id honestly. Yet that is exactly what we are doing by making the dividing line not whether someone is in the group known to correlate with risk but whether they identify as being in that group or not.

Oh, I don’t think so.

AdamRyan
I don't give a monkeys who you vote for

You clearly do!

The membership preferred Badenoch at the time and still do. They should have opened out the vote properly but it was a carefully managed succession.

You just said that rape prosecutions were your priority while at the same time defending men in places where women are vulnerable or in a state of undress. Those are conflicting aims. How is that not odd? Your not quite as clever as you think you are.

Indeed.