Good Law Practice launch a EHCR/Supreme Court challenge over toilets

[fromorbit]

After raising over 418K it turns out the GLP's amazing legal case is all about toilets. Details:

https://archive.is/TWRTl

No doubt it will fail like most of their previous legal cases.

Previous thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5336208-good-law-project-suing-the-ehrc-and-bridget-phillipson-letter-before-action?page=1

Sex isn't "sensitive medical information”. It is personal data just like your name, address or DOB.

A lot of the former “case by case” scenarios were predicated on the idea that the male people were “indistinguishable” from women. Which is bad enough, but most of the legal brains involved, however thoughtless they were about women’s privacy and dignity, didn’t envisage obvious clockable cross dressing men accessing women only spaces.

Well no, but that’s what TRAs have often successfully managed to claim. It was a major point in the Roz Adams tribunal, for eg.

Its an odd judgement to say that if a person has attempted to change sex, they can expect more privacy than someone who hasn't. And that its everyone else's responsibility, ether knowingly or unknowingly to maintain that privacy.

I think it may be tied up with medical confidentiality. And assuming that only those who truly pass would need or expect this privacy.

I think it’s inextricably tied to the idea that being trans is shameful - and that isn’t a sustainable position to take if you genuinely want to protect trans people from discrimination.

And/or the idea that if you knew the person was in fact deceiving you about their sex, you would make different decisions. This is often used in the attempts to remove sex by deception as a crime against others, immediately followed by blaming the deceived person as a bigot for minding anyway. But it is deception that benefits one person by removing the other person's informed consent. It is again positing that there are more important people who are entitled to use and abuse lesser people.

It's time is done. As pp says, being trans is not a shameful thing, but deceiving others or attempting to in order to gain access to resources and people that could not be achieved honestly? That is. And we're not now talking about a tiny rare number of people any more. Or exclusively about those who have undergone an extreme amount of surgery.

I completely agree.

Single sex services and associations are, in the long run, incompatible with the idea that biological sex is private information. One or the other will have to give.

Lying is shameful. I think that's the dynamic underneath it all. No matter how much on a conscious level they may feel the lie is justified, it still creates a gap, and uneven power dynamic where one person knows something that the other does not. Having that come to light can't be comfortable.

The rationale needs revisiting if society is expected to celebrate trans visibility and trans privacy simultaneously.

Also gender non conformity in men is viewed as taboo and shameful.

Which is precisely its attraction to AGPs

IMO deceiving your sex from potential romantic partners is exactly like rape or knowingly having sex with someone when you have an STD. That is NOT informed consent. No one can give consent when they don’t have are the facts.

Yes, of course it is. But I thought that was a crime. Am I wrong?

It is a crime, but TRAs have long been campaigning to be exempted from it being treated as sex by deception.

And that comes down to the “privacy” “my sex is sensitive personal information which no one has the right to know” claim.

And that even if a man has got his penis out and attempted to coerce sex by deception with a woman, the police should be solely interested in his best interests and nothing else. Which absolutely includes no responsibility or consequences or even embarrassment for what he has done. And, incidentally, silencing his victim, so she can't embarrass him or bring any negative experiences down on him either. Wouldn't that be lovely for any sexual offender?

It's quite interesting to look at all of this through the lens of 'I wish to do whatever I want without consequence, limits or anyone making me feel bad about it'. The rest is just fuddling about with word salad and exploiting the 'most vulnerable' bit to try and make it excuseable.

I don't see biological sex as being private information at all...or else it wouldn't be recorded on offiicial documents.

Well exactly - if it's private, why is anyone being asked to reveal it?

In 99% of cases sex is obvious to the casual observer along with other personal characteristics like height, weight, hair style, colour of eyes etc It's not a secret.

There have been a few cases involving women pretending to be men to have sex with women.
All sentenced to jail terms for assault, some of it suspended.

There was some discussion at the time about what 'pretending to be a man' actually means - would a transman be considered guilty of the same offence because she is permanently pretending to be a man as a statement of gender identity... that kind of thing.

A bit like the 'true transwoman' thing, are they truly pretending to be a woman, or just pretending to pretend to be a woman to be put in a women's jail...?

Yes, admitting to lying is undignified, that why we have to go along with the access to single spaces to protect people’s dignity, because it is undignified to admit you are pretending to be something you are not.

Why we must all collude in this and join in the pretence I don’t know. I’m happy to pretend some things as a white lie of kindness, but that’s my prerogative, to decide as and when I see fit. Not to be enforced on me.

I suppose it comes down to intent, doesn't it?

I'm used to two types of transman. The majority being those who hook up with other transmen and who I see as basically lesbians who don't want to be women. And the minority of yaoi-addled straight women who believe they were meant to be gay men and try without much success to pull gay men.

But in this scenario...

I think a lesbian impersonating a man to have sex with straight women would probably be convicted because she has the mens rea of deception.

But a transman who demonstrates a strong belief that she really is a straight man - that would be an interesting problem question for law exams. I wonder if it would come down to a mental capacity defence.

I'm simply not prepared to do it. Not even a courtesy "she" any more.

I'm not prepared to do it because condoning these lies, even just to be polite, signals that I accept as legitimate or at least worthy of respect a construction of "woman" that belittles me and undermines my own voice and my own rights.

Expecting women to pretend trans women are women and trans men are men out of courtesy to the trans person is no different to expecting women to pretend to agree with someone who says that women's minds aren't as capable at maths as men's because it would embarass or offend the sexist person to be called out on it.

That goes far beyond what is reasonable to expect someone to do out of courtesy, politness and respect.

I don't want to cause pain to anyone. I'm even softhearted enough to feel genuine sympathy for the people who are so emotionally committed to this sexist worldview that women's disgreement feels like an existential attack. But even their genuine and heartfelt distress at facing the fact that not everyone sees them as a woman is not a good enough reason to accept and legitimise the damage this movement does to women.

I am not a woman because of something in my mind.

Men who project their own prejudices about what is socially allowed for men and for women onto society and through that conclude they must be "women" are not in reality any closer to being a woman than any other man is.

Pretending that trans women are in anyway meaningfully a "woman", a "she", is an act of social self harm to women and we should never be compelled, whether legally or socially, to do it.

I'm all for finding a solution that supports trans people's feelings of difference to others of their sex. But a feeling of difference to your own sex is not the same as being somewhere closer to the other sex. There is no "half way" place where we accept that some men really are a bit more like women than other men that is not grossly demeaning and reductive of women.

So the solution has to be somewhere else, somewhere where the social and if necessary even linguistic and legal understanding of a trans woman is as different to other men as they need it to be, but still not one single milimeter closer to woman than any other man.

I'm fairly sure I remember at least one if not two incidences of women in court for seeking sex with a minor in the guise of a teenaged boy?

Try that one with "race" and see how far you get