I think we need to keep scrutinising EVERYTHING and not rest on our laurels but I’m not really worried about parliamentary changes - even if there is a bit of a future adaption it’ll never go as far as ‘Stonewall Law’ tried to - most people now know that a transwoman is a man and politicians will look stupid as fuck if they try and legislate males into being females now that people are looking out for it.
The climate of fearful silence has been made far less oppressive by Maya’s win (and all the other tribunals and reviews) publications are willing to risk IPSO fines in order tell the truth, the craziest characters (eg Little Owen Jones) have been pushed to the sidelines and even Novara Media have started to seed the notion that trans activism has gone too far.
The trans rights protestors have less and less credibility every time one of the speaks to camera (and some of them are far too narcissistic to stick to the ‘No Debate’ rules.
I do think an ECHR case is probably inevitable but with Jolly-On and Bundlejuice at the helm I think we’ve got a better chance of them unintentionally reinstating sanity across all of Europe rather than achieving a roll back on our progress here.
There is little point in a court-awarded ‘right to privacy’ when technology has already rendered such things impossible - eg as happened with anonymous gamete donors and the advent of commercial DNA genealogy websites. The GRA was written when transsexuals were rare and the public narrative around transsexualism almost always included starting a new life in a new geographical location where no one knew their actual sex (aka the April Ashley/Hayley Cropper experience) and that living entirely in that new identity was an integral part of the treatment for Gender Identity Disorder, therefore anything that ‘outed’ them would be counterproductive to the treatment pathway and thus unnecessarily cruel (especially if that ‘outing’ came about via the medium of tabloid journalism). Jan Morris was a notable exception to that narrative (and perhaps the OG beneficiary of the ‘stunning and brave’ concept decades before the phrase was coined? Morris was already famous and associated with stereotypically manly pursuits so had a social status that could theoretically be lost by transitioning, which in hindsight obvs did not happen as the patriarchy richly rewarded Morris for being exactly the same as before but now sporting a twinset and pearls… but I digress!)
Now that millions of people habitually document their entire lives via social media and gender transition begins with ‘coming out’ rather than after a lengthy psychiatric assessment resulting in a formal diagnosis, it’s surely very difficult to continue to justify the falsification of sex on one’s identity documents via the ‘right to privacy’ (especially as that supposed right to privacy has since been utilised by sex offenders to avoid registration and parents have argued it should come with the right to gaslight their own children by recording the child’s mother as the child’s father on the child’s birth registration document)?
The various corporate policy changes re: censorship/discussing trans encroachment on women’s rights and gay rights (and everyones right to reality) on social media mean we’re unlikely to be restricted to a handful of older style chat forums again any time soon (shout out to MN, obvs, but also to the owners/operators of PistonHeads, Lipstick Alley & Datalounge, along with Josh at the Farms, who kept the spirit of free speech alive for blokes, black Americans, gay men and disgruntled gamers/internet gossip lovers respectively, just as Justine did for us).
We’re yet to reach the point where the police will reliably step in and stop men-with-special-genders from hammering on the doors and windows of a community centre full of terves but a) we don’t really need those sorts of meetings anymore and b) we have all got far more savvy at video documenting & disseminating the footage so bring it on, it might just be the final nail in the coffin of
Gender WooWoo.
All of the big TRA wins are well in the rearview mirror and were achieved, as Christine Burns of Press For Change so memorably described it, ‘in the shadows’.
Now that we’ve all got our metaphorical high beams on the chances of transactivists finding any new shadows to operate in seems pretty small - especially as so many of their once-powerful orgs have either been mothballed, beclowned themselves or are close to bankruptcy (income has fallen while EDI/HR/staff spending has gone up). Who even knows what Mermaids, Stonewall et al think about the Supreme Court ruling? I’ve not seen any press coverage that included them, they have seemingly overreached themselves into irrelevancy.
Still chuckling to myself at the memory of Bundlejuice on telly last week, telling Richard Madeley that it was now time for both sides to get around a table and work out a compromise! Ha! ‘No Debate’ from the TRAs is well and truly dead in the water, now it’s ’Sorry Mate! You are way too Late to come looking for a Debate now (we’re far too busy repairing all our stuff that you smashed up and stomped on when you thought you could get away with it)’
We now need to ensure that we continue to support all the new GC/pro statutory safeguarding orgs that women, lesbians and gay men, parents and people working in various professions and sectors have been forced to found, as there are going to be an awful lot of updated policy documents to scrutinise over the next 12 months.
Just imagining how many Equality Impact Assessments are going to need a do over between now and Xmas is making me reach for the metaphorical smelling salts - lucky we all have plenty of practice this shit now, eh? 😬😆😂