‘Rights can be knocked out in a second’: older transwomen shocked by SC ruling

[RethinkingLife]

People may recognise the photograph and name of Christine Burns (Press for Change).

https://gendercriticalwoman.blog/category/christine-burns/

Christine Burns, a retired activist and internationally recognised health adviser, charts “a fairly straight line of progress” towards the passing of the Gender Recognition Act in 2004, which allowed trans people to change gender on their birth certificate, marry to reflect their chosen identity and gave them privacy around their transition. That legislation “mattered so much to people” says Burns, while acknowledging that only a minority of the community have gone on to apply for a GRC.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/27/older-trans-women-shocked-by-supreme-court-ruling

The usual hyperbole with feeling “their safety and security has suddenly been removed”. Whittle features, of course. As does Roz Kaveney who neutrally would say to young people: “”don’t be scared, just be prepared to fight for your lives”.

No “rights” have been removed from trans people.
They’ve been told they can’t continue to steal women’s rights.
Tough.

So much hyperbole. Sick of it now.

Hasn’t the Guardian managed to frame them, by word and photograph, as harmless grandparent types.

Masterful in its own way.

Remarkable claim by Whttle that is completely at odds with recent rhetoric.

Whittle likewise recalls the trans community’s solidarity with women in previous decades. “We’ve always been respectful of women’s rights. In the 80s and 90s we were out on the streets along with them and they were alongside us in this fight. And any trans person will tell you they have a lifetime’s experience of sexual assault and rape. Do [gender critical groups] not think we care about those issues?”

I would say that your care for this has, notably, been invisible. Particularly wrt ERCC and in general.

I really hope the press wakes up and frames the issue correctly.

And any trans person will tell you they have a lifetime’s experience of sexual assault and rape.

That could have been phrased better.

It was a rather blatant open goal.
My recollections of Whittle’s visits MN and solidarity with women don’t chime with this retconned fantasy of solidarity.

That legislation “mattered so much to people” says Burns, while acknowledging that only a minority of the community have gone on to apply for a GRC.

The irony being that the TRAs themselves fought against the GRC mattering They're the ones who tried to make sure that all women's things should be open to every male, regardless of GRC - as well as trying to make GRCs easier to get. Double failure.

Burns might have been able to exercise his unearned privileges much longer had he maintained significant gatekeeping, rather than going for the whole "don't challenge any men ever" thing.

Oh quelle surprise thd guardian with the first of I’ve no doubt many transperbolic hand wringing emotionally blackmailing articles

I would have thought being so womanly Christine would be totally down with all the feelings of fear and having to second guess tnings all the time. That’s what women have been having to do for ever

oh and those “rights” were never your rights, you just took them without asking because ‘meh just women’

Burns might have been able to exercise his unearned privileges much longer had he maintained significant gatekeeping, rather than going for the whole "don't challenge any men ever" thing.

The point being that he never actually had the right to women's spaces, but the lie "a GRC lets me into women's spaces, and GRCs are really hard to get" would have been far more sustainable than the lie they promulgated - "the EA lets any man who wants into women's spaces".

I recommend Tish’s (Gender Critical Woman) blog for information about most of the main characters in that piece.

It will be quite eye-opening about the disingenuous way in which they’re presenting themselves and their actions.

You can't buy rights with a dud cheque (se4e also: Brexit).

And the only rights that will be diminished here are the rights of the disabled, as all this "3rd 4th space" bollocks (a word I deliberately chose to use) slowly removes the pathetic few facilities that were won on the bloody stumps of heroes.

Remember how the moment wheelchair spaces on buses became a mandatory provision, the travel system brigade rocked up and nicked them ?

Saw this on FB the other day from 1977, not much solidarity with women although the hyperbolic victimhood is familiar.

Rights can be knocked out in a second....

or if you're women, men can just steam roll over them even though they exist in law and take bloody YEARS to force the establishment to admit to them.

They weren't rights. They were a land grab.

My word. That's like something from the Trans UK subreddit, only much more literate, which makes me wonder what's been happening to educational standards since 1977.

@Haulage that's shocking! I wonder why you don't see that narrative expressed so clearly now...

Edit - oh yes, forgot about Reddit! Keep it up, lads...

Utterly rebarbative and wholly oblivious to the lives of women.

Boo fucking hoo

Blimey, that’s a corker isn’t it?!

One to keep in the library for sure. Thanks Haulage

This Guardian article is a good illustration of what is wrong with the reaction to the UKSC ruling, and indeed with a lot of the trans debate in general: the tyranny of the anecdotal.

The concept of basing laws on facts and principles, not on how nice people or un-nice people are, seems to be completely lost.

Trans people must be allowed to use women's single-sex spaces because my [their] friend is a transwoman and he is 'lovely'.

The Supreme Court judgment is invalid because it has upset transpeople, and transpeople are 'lovely.

Transpeople will just continue to use whatever toilet they want because they've been getting away with it for years anyway. And they are 'lovely'.

My butch lesbian friend keeps getting hounded out of the women's toilets and has to be accompanied for her safety [Dawn Butler MP]. (I can't remember the exact quote, but I'm guessing her butch lesbian friend is 'lovely')

0.5% of the population are unhappy, so the law, education, the media, medicine, and language should be turned on their head because they are 'lovely'.

The examples of TRAs being anything but 'lovely' to GC women abound, but I'm not even going there - at a legal level, it doesn't matter whether trans people are lovely or horrible, just as it doesn't matter whether GC women are lovely or horrible - the law should be based on concepts like fairness, proportionality, justice, and so on, not on a personality competition.

And the debate should also be about facts and principles, not about feelings.

There are many things in society that make me feel unhappy, but if I decide to campaign against them, I'm going to come up with more cogent arguments than saying
[a] this law makes me feel unhappy
[b] I am lovely
therefore
[c] society should do everything I say to keep me happy.

On reflection though - because I'm a woman, I could come up with the most fact-based, principled, fair and justified arguments ever assembled, and I'd still be told to stop making men unhappy by not going along with whatever they want.
A woman's place is in the wrong😠

The concept of basing laws on facts and principles, not on how nice people or un-nice people are, seems to be completely lost.

If you wanted evidence based policies, you wouldn't live in a democracy.

So they interviewed the people responsible for the flawed interpretation of the act and present them as victims?

No chance. They haven't in the last 10 years, it's not likely to change.

One thing I keep coming back to is - the GRA has been with us for 20 years. I firmly believe it's bad law, but for 10 years or so it was workable. Because the numbers were tiny, it was understood there was fairly strict gatekeeping and thus the impact was small. As Helen Joyce says, it was a bit like witness protection.

If Burns & Whittle et al had been less hubristic, they could have had that settlement indefinitely.

But then self-ID became the shiny new object, and the signal went out that any man with any agenda could enter any female space, and the old dears of the trans movement were firmly behind this.

I've been hearing TRA friends saying "oh, when the GRA came in nobody really minded, I'm not sure what changed", and spinning fantasies about left wing lesbians becoming neo-nazis, or how we're all being bankrolled by JKR/Musk/Putin.

NO.

You did this to yourselves you fucking muppets. You sawed off the branch you were sitting on, and you were too stupid and arrogant to see you were doing it.

I think it’s natural and understandable for trans people and their allies to be shocked and upset by the ruling. They were convinced that they had rights relating to using opposite sex provision, and had been acting in line with this thinking, for a long time. From their perspective, there were no issues arising, or no issues of importance, from their behaviour. Being told, overnight, that their actions are and were always illegal, is a significant blow for them.

At the same time, it is natural for women to feel enraged that their legal protections have been trampled on for years and now that has been confirmed by the highest court in the land, many of the perpetrators are not only failing to apologise, but are insisting that they will go to great lengths to prevent these legal protections from being enacted.

The court ruling overrides appeals to emotion and PR. It gives GC women a firm platform to make discrimination claims as/when single sex provision isn’t upheld. Greater efforts than ever will now go into trying to make excluding males seem ridiculous, spiteful, misguided etc. This has no power when it comes to the law, nor does disagreement with law.

I think what will help is to take a leaf from the TRA’s book and simply state that women have a right in law to single sex spaces, no debate. ‘TWAW, no debate’ hit a buffer because it wasn’t true. The SC ruling is, so the same won’t happen.

This can be supplemented with - and trans people have a right to privacy and dignity too and employers and organisations need to afford them this. When asked, ‘but how?’, a good response it to point out that it’s important that trans people’s voices are at the centre of determining. It’s important to highlight how it is disrespectful to trans people to be centring the voices of women in an issue that is nothing to do with women. Trans women have, for years, pointed out that they have no platform and people listen to women and not them. The issue about privacy and dignity for trans people no longer impacts on women, the SC ruling has made that clear, and trans voices must be heard to find solutions that work for them.

I'm Sorry, Rethinking Life, but I'd disagree with your statement that you "have a lifetimes experience of sexual assault and rape". Unless you have actually been a victim of either, you cannot claim to have any experience.