Trans sibling in law

[Primrose86]

DH's sibling has just come out as a man. She is 26 and autistic, lives at home with mum, spends life on the Internet, got kicked out of school at 16 etc etc She has plans to go overseas and transition in germany where apparently you can get surgeries on the public health system while living with her grandpa. Her mum is fully supportive of this.

How should I react to all this. Should I start referring to him as my brother in law? What usually happens after people come out. I assume they progress to hormones and surgery but honestly based on what I read, Germany is quite resistant to health tourists who never paid in even if they are citizens. Are people really happy identifying as another gender when they wouldn't look like the other gender?

But some sex based rights are still not protected.
Crime and offending statistics are being skewed because the crimes of trans identified men are being recorded as female crimes.

It is not fair. It's not ok. And it is a misrepresentation of actual reality.

Because the Supreme Court judgment is not everything.

Because rights can be taken away.

Because members of the current Labour government are making noises about how the Equality Act should be amended to recognise trans women are women.

Because the International Olympic Committee said "everyone agrees that trans women are women" to justify its decision to let men compete in women's categories.

Because Lisa Nandy said "trans women are women" in order to justify male rapists being housed in women's prisons.

Because most rape crisis organisations have said "trans women are women" in order to justify not letting female rape survivors have the female only support they need and deserve.

Because not everyone lives in the UK and feminists right for women's rights worldwide.

Because governments can be voted into and out of power and laws can be made and unmade.

The Supreme Court confirmed that women's rights have been infringed for the last fifteen years, but it can't prevent those rights from being removed through the correct channels.

"Constant vigilance", as Mad Eye Moody would say.

So how does the wolf’s biology change into the sheep’s biology? A wolf doesn’t become a sheep just by wearing the sheep’s skin - it is still a wolf underneath.

There is no medical and/or surgical treatment that can make a man into a woman, or a woman into a man. They can’t even make a functional penis or vagina, and attach it to a person of the opposite sex. Human biology involves so much more - human males have different skeletal structure to human females, a different endocrine system, different chromosomes, different musculature - and there is no medical or surgical treatment that can change these.

And the only way to know what it feels like to be a woman is to be born female. A man can try to imagine what it feels like to be female, but has no lived experience to use as his frame of reference. It’s exactly the same as me saying I am a cat. I have no lived experience of being a cat, and can only base my feelings on my observations of cats, and my own imagination.

These are facts, and facts are not hate.

Hate is telling lesbians that they do not have the right to say they don’t want sex with a penis-Hager, just because he identifies as female.

Hate is telling females that they are not allowed to have anything that is solely female - no all female rape crisis groups, or prison cells, or domestic violence shelters, lesbian dating groups - not even any meeting of any kind can be just for female people.

Hate is telling girls that they have to be exposed to a naked penis in their changing room because a boy identifies as a girl, his feelings are the only ones that matter, and they have to be happy to see his penis and to get naked in front of him.

Hate is telling women and girls that they have to accept bigger, stronger, faster males in their single sex sports, beating them with ease, taking their medals, their opportunities, their scholarships, their competition places.

No, because they also might not, and who knows how long the future is.

But I think we’d be very naive to not assume that it’s a consideration, for the reasons above.

A former colleague of mine had 2 babies in 2 years. If I recall correctly, she had baby 1, a year out, came back already pregnant, left again approx 6 months later, and then came back another year later.

There’s obviously absolutely no question that how and when we have children isn’t up for question from employers, but there’s also obviously a real impact. Which if we’re honest, we all know and understand.

All absolutely correct.

Trans women aren't affected by any of that, are they?

In fact, they directly benefit from diversity initiatives designed to facilitate the inclusion of people who are at some sort of disadvantage, such as women and disabled people. Because, by hiring or promoting a trans woman, an employer can claim diversity brownie points without needing to do anything other than a bit of virtue signalling, unlike hiring or promoting a disabled person or a woman, which might actually require a little effort on their part.

But perhaps that will change now, if trans women require separate toilet provision.

But - if sex is the determining factor, which we’ve agreed it is, because it’s the legal definition, you already can’t hire a trans woman and say they’re female. Because they’re not.

I also don’t know fully if this is what you meant, but I really resent the idea that we are a diversity quota. We should get the jobs we deserve, not to tick a box.

I wouldn’t want to get a job in the police force for example, because they’re hitting female quota. I want a job on merit alone, not because of my biological status. That doesn’t earn anyone anything.

It took years of legal cases to confirm that these rights are protected, (I think For Women Scotland met via this board) and the SC gave their judgement just 2 months ago. This probably isn’t the best place to argue that women can be complacent.

It’s quite clear that many people strongly disagree with the judgement and are taking action to minimise its impact/change the law. I can direct you to the fund raisers if you want.

Going back to the question of the OP, I think 2 things are relevant.

1. Are any beliefs being enforced on the OP? The OP can judge how important that is to them. For comparison, if a relative became a born again Christian, it might be polite to participate in grace, but it could also be rude for the relative to enforce it on other people or to start telling the OP’s children they would go to hell without being saved. It’s up to the OP to decide how to navigate this.

2). Health care. I think this was actually the OP’s main concern. How far to endorse a course of action that might be harmful, given what has been revealed by the Cass report. I think when dealing with adults, probably best to recognise their autonomy and let them get on with it - if there is concern that the relative is particularly vulnerable discuss that with the spouse and let them take the lead.

I am not arguing for or against diversity quotas.

The point is that if they exist, they should be used to facilitate the inclusion of people who are underrepresented.

Not trans women, who are for the most part heterosexual white males, and only constitute a minority group by virtue of the fact that they have created a minority group and identified into it. Neither are they oppressed or disadvantaged in any meaningful way.

Until April, many organisations understood the opposite.

It was pretty much the whole point of the court case.

Not complacent, but surely there’s a new or different issue. Within the same category, if need be.

I would assume that the judgement was a tick in the right box for the people that fought that fight. New fight, surely?

As I mentioned above, the vulnerability of an individual with autism (as OP mentions in her post) isn’t lost on me, and I can well believe that it’s the responsibility of those around them to safeguard them and ensure they actually have the capacity and understanding to make those choices.

Despite being an alleged virtue signaller, I don’t think they should exist at all, which nullifies the argument for me.

Best people for the job, diverse or otherwise. You shouldn’t get a round of applause for employing any minority employee, they’re either right for the job or they’re not.

This is of course the individualist view, and very much the one taken by those who tend to be on the political right.

To put it another way, I could argue that “disabled” vs “able-bodied” wasn’t as important a classification as how individuals perceive their own identity. After all, some people with disabilities might be advantaged in other ways; some might not perceive themselves to be badly off at all, or have been in any way disadvantaged; disabilities vary so widely by individual person, and every person’s lived experience is so varied and socially mediated that their lived experience is far more important than anything they share (after all, what does a partially sighted from birth person have in common with someone who had their foot amputated after a heroin overdose, and what do they have in common with someone with mild Parkinson’s disease — or, indeed, autism?) Treating them all the same is reducing them to their disability! Saying they are “disabled people” is encouraging them to feel victimised by their biology!

And what if that happened to fit right into the agenda of other people who don’t really think disabled people should have any rights anyway?

We could run the same thought experiment on a variety of different protected characteristics. For some reason, though, biological sex seems to have become the fashionable one to disavow…

You might be unfamiliar with how we reached this point. The law has not changed, but Stonewall and other organisations campaigned for over a decade for organisations to ‘get ahead of the law’.

That is why there are high profile tribunals this year involving the NHS, The law that relates to the Darlington and Fife cases was confirmed in 2022, but this did not ensure that it was subsequently followed.

It’s one thing for the law to be confirmed. Another to ensure that it is observed.

I would want to be called the name I chose if I had changed it. My trans cousin knows he's not a man. But he sees himself as a transman and lives as one so I wouldn't go against that. I don't think any men who know him find it offensive that he's trans?

But that's what you're doing by saying that TWAW because woman is a "gender identity".

You're forcing biological women into what is now a completely meaningless category of "woman", which used to mean "adult female human" but now means "either sex, as long as they believe they are a woman, so basically any human".

I do not want to be forced into a category with people whom I have absolutely nothing in common with, not even my biological sex.

That’s not the person who says that @IpsyUpsyDaisyDoos- @MissScarletInTheBallroom agrees with you.

Agree - if somebody is a right wing libertarian this argument makes sense.

However it seems to have become oddly popular amongst people whose claimed goal is to defend human rights. UN women and Amnesty for example.

For some reason, though, biological sex seems to have become the fashionable one to disavow

That's the thing that I get stuck on.

You could do all the same word games for anything.

Every single thing waffle about "not reducing X" or "no common Y" works for every single word.

So why just "man" and "woman"? What's so special about men and women that we should pretend the words don't mean what they mean?

I can't see any rational reason for it - only the motivated reasoning that men want to be women.

And why stop there? The TRAs do extend the same logic to "male" and "female". Thinking that you can stop the games at "man" and "woman" is a very 2015 sort of view. (A kind of "this is fine" cope coming from inside women/gender studies view").

Exactly @NecessaryScene

Regarding the Supreme Court judgment, there's something else that is worth noting.

It was already common ground between the parties that a trans woman without a gender recognition certificate is a man for the purposes of the Equality Act. So the question put to the court was technically limited to whether a trans woman with a gender recognition certificate is a woman for the purposes of the Equality Act.

The reason this question was settled in court in the context of something as obscure as representation of women on boards is because, in everyday life where it really matters, most decision makers in society were already treating gender recognition certificates as an irrelevance.

In reality, trans women without gender recognition certificates were already using women's toilets and changing rooms, sometimes with express permission (e.g. the Darlington nurses' NHS trust), already had access to the full range of services for vulnerable and traumatised women (with the explicit blessing of the rape crisis and domestic violence sectors, if not the consent of the women themselves), were already being housed in women's prisons even after being convicted of sexual offences against women, and were already competing in women's sports.

Self ID in practice, if not in law.

The Supreme Court threw a curve ball by answering a narrow question more widely, and making it clear that where something is designated as being for women, it must be for real women only. De facto self ID is not in fact legal.

I bet the Scottish government are wishing they had picked their battles more wisely.

Meanwhile, entire sectors of our society need to accept the Supreme Court judgment and abide by it, and many of them are resisting in the strongest possible terms. If women don't stand up in support of the law and demand that our existing rights are upheld and maintained, the resisters will win. We cannot afford to be complacent.

But the position of the non-“GC” side, the gender identity community (if you will), is precisely that you should be able to hire a trans woman and say they are female.

That’s the very scenario that eg. Jolyon Maugham and other objectors to the Supreme Court judgment want. That’s why they want gender identity to trump biological sex.

You can’t decide to be “anti-GC” but at the same time want to retain biological sex as a legal category when it suits. The “anti-GC” position is very definitely to get rid of biological sex as a legal category for the purposes of discrimination, etc., and substitute gender identity.

Everyone wants to have their job because of their unique abilities. But what about when it comes to discrimination? How do you ensure you get your job on the basis of your ability if lots of people see you as a stereotype? The answer isn’t to elevate stereotypes into “identities”.

That's how it should be.

It's not how it is.

Life isn't some ideal place that follows all the rules to treat everyone equally. We, as women, have had to fight hard for that and still are fighting for a lot of it. Because for a long time, women were treated as less than men.

Why should we now be accommodating to men just because they also now want to be women? You can say "everyone should be treated equally regardless of their identity" as much as you like but the reality is that we are not.

You're right.

Sorry @MissScarletInTheBallroom I somehow saw your username as Sleepless. Maybe I need more sleep!

It was news to many trans rights activists, who’d been given a biased, inaccurate interpretation of the law by TRA orgs. They weren’t impressed by the lawyer for the Scottish government’s line of argument about “trans women” without GRCs being men, and “trans lesbians” without GRCs being heterosexual men.

Yes, well, a banana, with or without an apple recognition certificate, is in fact a banana.