Why should self ID be "easy" or "easier"?

[BreadInCaptivity]

In day to day life we regularly go through bureaucratic hoops.

From providing proof of who we are (with witnesses) to get a passport, apply for free bus pass as a pensioner, claiming benefits such as PIP or getting multiple medical evaluations over a number procedures. All processes designed to ensure we are not falsifying our need/identity.

All the above arguably have no impact to anyone else in society.

Yet why we come to self id the only concern I hear is about the trauma of the process (that frankly does not seem that onerous) for which the outcome enables a person to impact the lives of others through fraudulently falsifying their sex through documentation.

Aside from the obvious as to why should this be allowed at all, why should this process be easy/easier?

I actually think it should be easier but also meaningless to everyone else - it should be like getting a certificate from the vicar to prove you attend church. Other believers can ooh and oh over the importance of this bit of paper and the achievement it represents, but it shouldn't change anything in the wider world.

I would happily let LGBTQ++ organisations run it themselves and everyone else have nothing to do with it. What can you use it for? Maybe queer spaces, attending trans swimming sessions, that sort of thing - not for barging into woman's spaces. No changing of important documents, perhaps an additional document, like a name change document, if necessary.

The trouble with setting hoops for dysphoric people to jump through, is once they achieve one thing, they look at the next challenge - it's never going to end. Not a single sane person would want to change their medical records, so they were actually wrong and put them at risk, but when they start with the paperwork it becomes a next step.

My second option would be to keep it at a similar level but people can only identify to things they actually are, so a man can get a GRC to say "TW" but not "F" or "Woman." Then we can have honest conversations about the different single sex spaces.

The GRC is meaningless in another way too -- the applicant has to state that their change to another gender is permanent and for life, but there has been at least one (high profile) case of a transman with a GRC becoming pregnant and giving birth.
(And presumably having to stop taking hormones testosterone in order to concieve.)
How is this deceit allowed?

And not only giving birth, but then arguing that she should be recorded as the father on the child's birth certificate. And then going on to have another baby.

Surely the GRC should have become invalid when she deliberately became pregnant the first time? Or is the convoluted reasoning that, she was really a man as 'proved' by the GRC, becoming pregnant and giving birth was actually a male activity.

Regarding the OP, currently I think applicants need to prove that it is not entirely a sexual gratification thing and demonstrate the ‘distress’ is severe enough to qualify as bona fide mental disorder and evidence that it is a commitment to a permanent change.

Since a large percentage of applicants would fall foul of this, it is humiliating to have to tell big lies, falsify evidence and anxiously wait to find out if the panel were successfully fooled.

On a different thread or two, I have been wanging on about the EA and the fact that pregnancy/maternity discrimination isn’t included as a subcategory of sex discrimination against women.

It now dawns on me that the transactivists were probably playing the long game back then - in 2010. Separating pregnancy and maternity from ‘sex’ in the Equality Act, in anticipation of someone like Freddie McConnell coming along to provide a test case to say that men and fathers can equally suffer from ‘pregnancy discrimination’, as women and mothers, so the Act and the protected characteristics wouldn’t need changing. ‘Getting ahead of the law’ as they liked to put it, so confident they would win.

If there is one single aspect of this whole shitshow that can get me metaphorically howling at the moon, it's this. The GRA is such a fucking slap in the face for women - yes, I know women can get a GRC to say they're legally male but let's not pretend it wasn't introduced to satisfy men with power in political corridors pushing to have their fetish legitimised. If there wasn't a pervasive, underlying belief that women are 'lesser', and that any man who relinquishes The Mighty Penis bestowed upon him (as a proportion of the original cohort of 5,000 GRC recipients did) also becomes 'lesser' and therefore must be a woman, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Women are more than dickless men. We are so much more than a feeling in a man's head. And to be strictly fair, neither are men merely women with their breasts removed and their hair cut short. This ideology and this bad law does neither sex any favours but its impacts are profoundly more adverse for women, and I am fucking sick of it. The very concept of being able to become the opposite sex by saying "I identify as it" is absolutely fucking ridiculous and I want to scream every time it's indulged.

(I may be particularly angry about this right now because, to prove the OP's point, I am currently completing an application for a blue badge for a relative. I need to submit on their behalf an eleven page form, a witnessed photograph, medical evidence from their consultant, proof of their disability benefits and a £10 fee. It costs twice as much to access a slightly more convenient parking space than it does to shit all over women.)

My husband has indefinite leave to remain in the U.K., evidence supposedly forever by a stamp in his passport. Except now the government are moving to electronic registration of immigration status by the end of the year, or else run the risk of being windrushed, a fact we only found out by reading a newspaper article. Except it actually seems that prior to the electronic registration, we missed a step of being biometrically registered, which still needs doing before the electronic registration. Which requires travelling to a different city for an appointment which cost £200 to make and requires us first uploading everyone pay slip he has ever had whilst in this country, which of course we do not have.

I’d say getting a GRC was fairly simple already, to be honest.

100% correct, @ArabellaScott - I couldn't have put it better.

I feel politically homeless - I can't see any party standing up for the rights, safety and dignity of women. For the first time ever, I am considering spoiling my ballot. 😢😡

I self identify as diabetic. I don't want any tests to prove that I am, I just want the insulin.
When you insert any other condition as being able to self ID as it just shows how ridiculous the whole concept is. They want self ID, insist they need "life saving medical care" yet ignore that for any other condition there are standard diagnostic criteria that need to be met.

Why are convicted sex offenders allowed to change their legal identity at all? There used to be some gatekeeping in place, that seems to have been abandoned.

As ArabellaScott said upthread, it's about performative victimhood.
I don't think it will matter how 'easy' it will be to self-id, there'll always be another hurdle that makes it 'onerous'.
Even if you could just do it instantly online for free, then there would be complaints that you had to put your sex on the form and thats triggering. Or then it would be that its too easy and everyone is doing it and making it less valid because no one believes it.
There'd always be something because it's not about making it easier. It's about power plays and seeking capitulation. The goalposts will always move.

i also very much agree that under the transman's case (getting a GRC then having a baby) the GRC conditions are not being met and it should have been recinded. As the refrain goes: they know who women are when it comes to having babies.

i think part of the old (or is it current?) GRC process that irks is the long time it takes (you have to "live as the acquired sex for 2 years") and the requirement for doctors to agree. (same as for an abortion, lolz - except not lolz because it isn't fucking funny) and the fact that it is considered a mental rather than physical health issue (at least prior any surgical interventions)

One of the cleverest stunts that has been pulled is the insistence that the words are separated - so not transwoman and not transman (something i have recently desisted with) - and the creeping use of "cis" (something which i always challenge) and conflating sex with gender (yes, all those 70s jokes of "tick the box marked 'sex' and i wrote 'yes please'" have come back to bite us on the bum with that one). Added to the fact that people who don't know what the actual numbers are, honestly believe that no transwoman has a penis because they have all had bottom surgery.

Don't get me wrong, i would never ever in a billion years insist that part of a GRC would be that surgery of any description is mandatory. How it has taken hold of otherwise sturdy and reliable institutions (no, Labour party - zero percent of women have a penis, zero percent of men have a cervix) and the NHS & police being so on board (the fucking police!) Not to mention the green party who barely speak about ecology any more.

I could weep. hot angry floods of tears.

This isn’t quite true though is it? Male prisoners with a GRC are still placed primarily in the female estate in England and Wales unless their conviction is for violence against women.

Apologies that’s no longer the case in England since 2023. Scotland have it worse though. I think the problem is that what effects a GRC has relies on the government of the day and whether or not they are prepared to implement the SSEs

https://kpssinfo.org/prisons-in-england/

I have wondered this too.

Annoyingly the Tories were about to make a law change on this according to the BBC but it was dropped when the election was announced…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd11d37rpw9o.amp

My point (and that of the PP I replied to) is that bad things happen even without a GRC.

I feel, and I know many disagree, that we shouldn't waste energy debating how rigorous the GRC process is, because it just sidetracks us into talking about things like surgery and criminal records. When the bottom line is that they are men who should be recorded as men and kept out of women's spaces purely because they are men.

I have no problem with them being certified as trans and therefore socially feminine. I don't want them bullied. If I got my wishes on data integrity and women's spaces I might even be willing to use their preferred pronouns.

There is though a problem that men with GRCs are legally female and this will make any court cases involving them more circuitous, because the court is only allowed to accept things for which there is evidence, or which are already agreed between the parties. I am quite looking forward to seeing this play out....

(My lord, the claimants submit that they are suffering sex discrimination by being forced to change in the presence of a woman who is six foot tall and has a penis, causing the witnesses to form the WORIADS belief that she is a man, and arousing feelings of fear, disgust and embarrassment, to the claimants' detriment).

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/27/gender-self-id-in-spain-has-been-a-disaster-for-women/

Barely a year in and selfID in Spain is going well, not. What a shitty terrible mess. If it becomes easier here how many men are likely to take advantage. Once they have this certificate can it ever be taken away? I guess not as how do you prove someone's inner desires? Once they get the certificate they then get a shiny new birth certificate registered Female if they so wish and no further mention of the fact they were born male. The whole mess is a disaster.

There was a High Court case in Ireland recently where a family who are in the witness protection process cannot get new birth certs. The irony of the State arguing and the judge agreeing about how important birth certs are to the historical record in a country that allows self-id

"He said a birth certificate is a “historical record, not an identity document” although it is clear that having an accurate record is fundamental to one’s identity and personhood. The Does have birth certificates that accurately record the circumstances of their birth but they are asserting an entitlement to an inaccurate record, he said." https://archive.ph/ZI9o0

Isn't it just gobsmacking. So birth certificates are a historical record and not to be altered except in the case where on a whim and a few euro someone decides they don't want to be male or female and then historical record goes out the window. And they get to change back and forth as often as they want! Righteo! How do these judges and law makers keep such a straight face I don't know.

The GRC is another of those things where TRAs have us focusing on the details of How it's implemented instead of Why it should exist at all.

Take a step back, and the GRA is a law that a man can be a woman despite his body (and vice versa) because of how he thinks. In other words it enshrines in law the "fact" that women's and men's minds differ from each other so much that that mental difference is more significant than body sex in determining who is who.

That is a huge huge statement. To set it in law as a "truth" doesn't just affect trans people, it redefines every single one of us along sexist stereotypes.

It's an outdated concept that would better fit the Middle Ages than a modern society.

Completely agree

The GRA is a mistake. It’s brought about harmful outcomes for women and children

We tried but the people who brought it in lacked foresight. Best to just stop falsifying sex with a certificate