The Tories aren't serious about protecting biological sex - Spectator article.

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https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-tories-arent-serious-about-protecting-biological-sex/

Article by Kellie-Jay Keen

Everybody with half a brain, male or female, can see the Tories’ move for exactly what it is: opportunistic grandstanding. Many of them will also know that all the fine talk from Kemi about biological sex and common sense is worthless without full repeal of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA), and the removal of gender reassignment as a protected characteristic.

Quite pleased to see this published. ❤️
It's about time we are able to get to the heart of the issue when it comes to protecting women's rights. The idea that some men are allowed to insert themselves into women's spaces because a piece of government paper says they can, means women cannot have single-sex spaces and services.

A man who is discriminated against for wearing a dress could surely make a claim on the basis of sex discrimination if a woman would not have faced discrimination for wearing the same dress

Exactly. Trying to make such a claim on the basis of "gender reassignment" is regressive.

Here's one of my favourite Magdalen Berns videos responding to a woman trying to make the argument for wearing "men's" clothes on the basis of "trans". Same thing would apply with the sexes reversed.

And it works better because the rule based on sex discrimination is "would you let a woman dress like that"?

A test which quite a few men would fail, such as the Canadian woodwork teacher. The "trans" justification blocks such a sensible approach.

The GRA definitely needs to be repealed. It's nothing to do with whether a man should or should not be allowed to wear a dress.

The GRA needs to be repealed because it is a bad law. It mandates that society accepts a lie as truth, a fallacy as fact.

Yeah, we know.

What are labour doing about it?

messed up my asterisks/bolding there

It seems FWR has had an influx of 'observers' of late as there seems to be an increase in deletions on topics that have usually been discussed robustly but amicably enough in the past 🤷‍♀️

the removal of gender reassignment as a protected characteristic

I disagree strongly with this. However much I disagree with their belief system, discrimination against trans people in housing, employment and the provision of goods and services is totally wrong.

Equality and non-discrimination for trans people can still specifically define that being transgender does not give access to single-sex facilities for the opposite sex because sex and gender are different characteristics.

If you don’t support removal, do you consider the definition of the protected characteristic in EA 2010 as overly broad and that it could bear re-drafting to reduce it’s usefulness to men with less than admirable intentions/behaviour? I would prefer it to be more of a shield than a sword.

The GRA needs to be repealed because it is a bad law. It mandates that society accepts a lie as truth, a fallacy as fact.

Agreed, but surely the truth is, that's not even on the horizon? Nobody is going to commit to repealing the GRA anytime soon, least of all the next Labour government.

It's really amazing how transvestism has disappeared as a concept. Ten years ago it would not have been controversial to say some men cross-dress for erotic thrills. It's one of the more common male fetishes. Now the very idea seems to be seen as Hitler level bigotry.

I'm not sure that repealing the GRA is within the sphere of what's politically possible - right now, I'd say it isn't. But it's a bad law with lots of unforeseen consequences, and it's helpful to have a few people out there making the argument.

Surely it's best not to set too much store by the actions of 'celebs'? Perry, Izzard, even Beckham, don't have much to do with ordinary people's lives. Even 'ordinary' transsexuals/transvestites. They live in a charmed world where they not subject to the kind of social restrictions ordinary folk are.

it looks like we're going to have to revert to some sort of 'gendered' dress code in order to keep out the men who want to make us unwilling participants in their kink.

Or make clothing so un-gendered that no clothes are sufficiently coded Woman to support it.

I don't mean everyone wears a grey overall BTW, I mean everyone can wear grey overalls today and sequins tomorrow if they fancy it.

TBH given how many blokes seem to want to wear them, it won't be long before suspenders and stockings is read as menswear anyway 😂

I'm in the "dress however you want" camp with an added dose of "and damn well wear it fabulously!" - but I want to see the GRA repealed because it accepts without question that something in a man's mind or in how he lives makes him more like a woman than he is a man (or vice versa) which is a sexist and regressive understanding of men and woman based on the belief we naturally just have different minds and social preferences, not someting we should enshrine in law.

Celebs, in our society, set a cultural standard in some ways and have the cultural capital to influence society in lots of other ways, otherwise they wouldn’t be constantly asked to promote products and charities or to give their opinions on matters of the day.

What Perry, Beckham and Izzard get away with in their rarified milieu will be encouraging for those who want to copy or promote such behaviour in wider society. It becomes something to point to in terms of 'If he’s allowed to do it without anyone complaining, then why can’t I do it too?'

It’s clever that she is taking aim at the Tories. I didn’t see that coming.

I don't disagree at all, @UtopiaPlanitia . We shouldn't set so much store by them, but in the current social climate, more people will be encouraged. People used to think, oh, it's just 'Planet Hollywood', they live by different rules there. Nowadays, not so much.

Yes, absolutely!

Maybe, in the past e.g. the Hollywood Golden Age, people watched celebrity lives as though they were characters in a soap opera and saw them as entertainment. Nowadays, Sleb Culture promotes famous people as role models, and their lifestyle as being something to aspire to, and that is not good for society as a whole because the type of people who become famous and rich are not always worthy of emulation.

I thought the Canadian guy with massive fake breasts was doing it to prove a point? That " dressing like a woman" is unquantifiable and problematic.

I think he was enjoying seeing what he could get away with.

This is unrealistic. Men's and women's clothing, even when quite similar, looks different because we have different bodies.

You also can't get away from the fact that we have culture, and a cultural history, and that "gendered" clothing is essentially a material culture reflection of a) the fact that we have different bodies, and b) the fact that we are pretty interested in people with different bodies.

Even if you could hit some Utopia button and wipe out all of our present material culture, you can bet that in 100 years, or probably a lot less, there would be a new one.

Here is the thing about the "some men just really want to wear dresses to express themselves" idea. They aren't wearing men's dresses. They could - there are dress like garments conventionally worn by men around the world. There is a man in my church congregation from west Africa who quite often wears a sort of dress-like robe which is very clearly meant for a man. No one thinks he is dressing as a woman, or gives him any trouble. Even though it's unusual where I live, he is clearly a rather fashionable and professional looking elderly male.

That is not what you see with men who wear women's dresses. They don't really care about the dress. They care about dressing like women.

There was some thought that he was trying to get off work with his pension intact.

The GRA is a piece of legislation with no purpose. It doesn't have anything with whether it is ok to discriminate against men in dresses, or people with a transgender identity, or anything else.

It's totally about creating a fiction of legal sex that is different from biological sex. Which is useless and dangerous.

I doubt that we are near a point that it's serious to talk about repealing it, but it's good to have that glove thrown in the ring now imo.

I think K-JK is underestimating the impact this can and will have actually.

It what the EHRC recommended.

It does mean that legal sex, so GRA certified sex, in effect becomes toothless as it will confirm in law that the exemptions can be used for biological only and exclude men with their certificates.

Men have always manipulated this the other way round to say because sex can be changed by a certificate, sex in the Equality Act includes both, and no proof needed from men.

Well it no longer can be fudged like that with the word biological and the proof issue is turned back around, services don't need to prove a man is not a woman as men can't go to court anymore saying that sex means anything a man wants it to mean.

I know legal sex is a ridiculous idea, and this change actually makes it more ridiculous effectively, as their certificates become not worth the paper they are printed on.

That's why men are online slagging off this as requiring birth certificates to use the loo, they still haven't realised that the onus of proof is reversed.

Probably because they can't actually hear women when they talk and so Kemi's words didn't register and got drowned out in their mansplaining.

She was quite clear to anyone that's followed the to and fro between EHRC and government over the recent years since Baroness Kishwar took over. Most talking heads in the media haven't as they like to call this a culture war as if the privacy and dignity of women wasn't just normal decent culture.

Men like Ed Balls who talked shite at Kemi acts like he's in a war he has to win, he wants to win culture. The culture these men want to obtain is a culture where men have pushed around and belittled women until they submit. That's when they could say the culture war is over, when they have won a culture that has belittled the normal decent privacy and dignity of women. They want that win badly.

I can't tell you how much contempt I have for so many men mostly on the left now. Their ugliness and disrespect has been staggering. If Labour are elected the backlash against women will be vicious.

No I don't think it is overly broad at all. If anything it's a bit narrow. Who is it that you want to be allowed to discriminate against?

I do think it needs to clarify that "failing to believe what you want me to believe" and "saying 'no' to you if you want a thing that is reserved for people with a protected characteristic that you do not have" is not discrimination. And that it should tidy up the wording where sex and gender are used interchangeably.

I agree with your opinion that compelled belief is wrong, and I very much agree that the legislation desperately needs clarifying with regards to terminology.

It's late so I'm going to do my best to answer your question but please allow for inelegances owing to tiredness. In UK legislation governing employment, and the provision of goods and services, discrimination is considered either lawful or unlawful. Discrimination in itself is not considered inherently wrong. I would like the EA 2010 to allow for lawful discrimination to prevent males from accessing female-only spaces; to prevent males from taking advantage of legal/educational/employment/governmental provisions for the redressal of disadvantage suffered by female persons because of their sex; to prevent males from participating in female-only sports; to prevent males from encroaching on events and associations for females, and to prevent males from claiming female rights, exceptions, protections and legal status.

The EA 2010 defines the protected characteristic of gender reassignment as 'proposing to undergo, undergoing or having undergone a process to reassign your sex'. My view is that the definition is unsuitable because it describes a process as 'reassigning sex', something which is physically literally impossible, and I think it effectively allows for self-ID when it includes 'proposing to undergo'.

Also, EHRC guidance for the Act states that, 'There are some circumstances when being treated differently due to being trans is lawful', but then battens down these circumstances by use of limiting and unhelpful examples which leaves nobody any the wiser about the legality of applying lawful exceptions and which leaves organisations afraid of being sued if they try to implement any of the exceptions. The law was very much written with the aim of protecting transexuals from unlawful discrimination but is so widely drafted as to also give cover to fetishistic transvestites to take their paraphilia into the public sphere of employment and education etc, which then makes life difficult for the women who encounter them and the disadvantages thereof.

I'm not surprised at all.