Tom Harris, former MP, apologises for voting for Gender Recognition Act 2004

[fromorbit]

Very interesting article.

Tom Harris served as Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Glasgow South, formerly Glasgow Cathcart, from 2001 to 2015. He was a junior minister for Transport 2006-8. Since 2021 he has been lead non-executive director of the Office of the Secretary of State for Scotland and Advocate General for Scotland.

Mea culpa: my part in the rise of the trans cult
The Gender Recognition Bill looked harmless enough. If only I'd known. . .
https://tomharris2.substack.com/p/mea-culpa-my-part-in-the-rise-of?triedRedirect=true

A very enjoyable read, thank you. It helps us understand a bit about how things got so out of hand but not completely. However, it is interesting to consider what personality types more generally insist on re-writing history and controlling the conversation. Why were these not seen, and still aren't seen, as the red flags that they are?

An excellent piece. Thanks for posting.

Fantastic read. Particularly enjoyed the explanation that the GRA went through "because no one at the time imagined that the country would go quite that fucking insane in such a relatively short period of time."

Very interesting. And I started off getting annoyed

Even then, I had no particularly strong feelings about the subject, mainly because I did not possess a time machine and was therefore unable to foresee the chaos and damage – particularly to women’s rights

Some people didn't need a time machine, just experience of certain men.

However

no one at the time imagined that the country would go quite that fucking insane in such a relatively short period of time.

He does recognise it as complete insanity.

which, in all fairness, it really, really is.

I wonder if it makes men like Tom Harris realise that women are up against this constantly, everywhere. This isn't a one off.

And what does the knowledge of exactly how many people went along with it, and still are, make him think?

I'd love to know what he thinks of the rank misogyny that allows this to continue and realises that it's the exact same misogyny that allowed it to happen in the first place.

This is telling:

I happened to have dinner with the government chief whip at the time, Hilary (now Baroness) Armstrong, on the evening before the vote and raised the issues addressed by Lord Tebbit, informing her of my reservations about the legislation. Her only advice was not to endanger a future ministerial career by voting against the government on such a trivial subject.

It was seen as trivial. Even though he had misgivings because: "Parliament was about to legislate, for the first time in its history, to allow people to lie."

That alone should have put the brakes on this. He recognised that any law whose aim was to allow people to lie should never have been passed and they should have found another way to accommodate people who were unhappy about their sex. It doesn't matter how 'trivial' you view the subject (and of course this isn't trivial at all), any law which includes the right to lie should never have been passed. And this one also includes a clause in which someone disclosing the truth can be criminalised.

It was a good read. It showed just how most people really could not have imagined how this would play out. How being ‘kind’ would cause so much harm.

The 'trivial' comment reminded me of this from the Goodwin vs UK judgment in the ECtHR in 2002 which led to the GRA.

"the Court considers that society may reasonably be expected to tolerate a certain inconvenience to enable individuals to live in dignity and worth in accordance with the sexual identity chosen by them at great personal cost."

"A certain inconvenience" makes it sound so trivial, when it is something which potentially has a negative effect on all women and girls.

I agree, it's telling. Of course, this is the TRAs' big thing about self-ID, isn't it? It's just a "bit of admin", a "piece of paper", "administrative tidying up" etc. Though of course it's also life-saving and they'll all kill themselves if they don't have it.

It's always depressing the way that people become MPs presumably because they have a set of principles they believe in, and then before too long they're voting for the exact opposite because they have to do what the whips tell them to do.

Good article.

I wonder if he'll get death threats for it?

It really boils my blood to see the word ‘trivial’ and the complete ignorance/dismissal of the great personal cost to many women and girls that this ruling has caused.

"Mea culpa"
Mea fucking culpa?! Is that all he's got?!
There are children in this country who have been given puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, teenagers with their breasts removed. An entire generation lied to. Schools teaching this shit. Women attacked and viciously bullied.
All just a "trivial matter"?!
I'm so fucking angry.

If I were going to be charitable about Tom - and I've encountered Tom in the past, and he's a smart guy - he's really just saying that he bought the government's rational for the GRA. Which was written for the government by Press For Change.

The whole premise of the GRA was, there are a few thousand transsexuals out there living under the radar, they just want a private life, and this will get them out of having to out themselves every time they need to produce ID.

Which, as Helen Joyce says, was a bit like witness protection - even if it's bad in principle to lie on official documents, you can get away with that if the numbers are tiny and the process strictly gatekept and everyone understands that.

It's really interesting to revisit Hansard from the GRA debates. Not so much the Commons debates, because the responsible minister obviously didn't understand the bill he was piloting (hello David Lammy) and most of the debate was a bunch of Labour MPs virtue signalling. It gets more interesting in the Lords, when Lord Tebbit was doggedly opposing the bill and various peers got into arguments over the detail.

So on that basis, since Tom didn't make it a high priority issue, it makes sense that he accepted the government's rationale. It's not that nobody foresaw the consequences, some did but most took time. What people should have picked up on was not only that the GRA was the thin end of the wedge but that its sponsors designed it that way.

Very good point.

Thanks for the article. It’s dismaying and illuminating to see how an MP might have misgivings but will vote a bill through rather than risk damaging their career.

But given that I barely registered the GRA at the time and that, even when I did, my reaction was a shrug and a ‘Where’s the harm?’ I think it would be a bit hypocritical of me to be too hard on Tom Harris. I appreciate his holding up his hands now and I believe it’s never too late to do the right thing.

I think it’s interesting that the bill was whipped. Wouldn’t it be more normal to allow a free vote on an issue such as this or am I reading too much into it?

It's interesting to wonder how, in the past, people could fall for this. I've yet to see a transactivist that doesn't come across as entitled and unable to think of anyone but themselves.

I can just about see how you might fall for it, if it was all in theory, and on paper. But in real life?

And was it a given that men with a GRC would use women's facilities?

Because, it only takes a couple of questions.

So some men will use women's facilities? But there's no criteria to look like a woman?

What if women don't want it...?

I know, exactly @Datun! “Be kind to who, exactly?”

Yes, I can understand him thinking it's insane, but the ease with which it's all been accomplished should make him grasp that the desire to screw women over is ever present. You don't need a bloody time machine. You need constant vigilance.

Plus ca change. How much shit has been foisted on the British public so that a ministerial career isn't derailed? How many times have we had strongly worded pieces to camera on the news just before a big vote and then it all disappears like smoke when they troop through the lobby and vote like good little sheep, or worse, abstain, because that's really principled.

As with most things the Government does, there are rarely two opposing views put forward to be thrashed out. There is generally only one and then it becomes a fait accompli. MPs get behind something without ever really understanding it because an opposing report (in as much detail as the one with the agenda) that laid out the pitfalls and consequences was never commissioned.

(Bit like immigration when they had a report that said we'd be looking at 30k max coming over per annum from Eastern Europe.) Our politicians, for the most part, are thick and desperate to be seen as progressive. The things they view as progressive are nearly always issues affecting minorities winning out over the rights of the majority. And they wonder why Farage is popular.

Not that many people put their hands up and admit when they get it wrong.

good for him. Let’s not knock that.

also he has been publicly arguing the case to roll it back for some years now.

I'm quoting myself here because actually the only question you need is 'what if women don't want it?'

We've seen, time after time, conversations on here with transactivists where we're telling them why we don't want it, and they are countering our point with points of their own (albeit bollocks points).

But the quickest way to the heart of the matter is to just say no. No, we don't want it.

Because you, straightaway, get to the crux of the issue, which is, who fucking cares.

And then history almost repeated itself with the Scottish Government's self ID Bill. Again, objections were just brushed aside. How on earth did so many people get convinced that the needs of a small group of (mainly) men needed to be so prioritised? Why did no one just say no?!

Of course, this is the TRAs' big thing about self-ID, isn't it? It's just a "bit of admin", a "piece of paper", "administrative tidying up" etc. Though of course it's also life-saving and they'll all kill themselves if they don't have it

Yes, and the entirely administrative business of changing driving licence names, birth certificate, utility bills is mysteriously somehow 'onerous' and 'hugely oppressive'. Funny how that’s not 'just a bit of admin'.

It's good that Tom Harris has written this, I think, but as with Robert Wintemute, pretty bloody devastating to have it shown yet again how totally blinkered these men were about the basic human rights of women. Never in a million years would I have imagined myself applauding Norman Tebbit 😳

I totally get the anger from some posters, especially anyone who has been following this for a more than a few years. But I'm trying to console myself that at least this piece, and Wintermute's articles/interviews are out there in the wild now. They all add to the mountains of evidence that we have used time and time again to prove our case in tribunals, court cases, interviews, articles, podcasts, letters, FOIs, social media etc.

My former self would never have predicted me saying this either, but Norman Tebbit's interventions in the GRA debates 20 years ago are not only prescient but often a pleasure to read:

"My Lords, I do not support the Bill in principle, in any way, up hill or down dale. This is a bad Bill. It is a most offensive Bill. It is certainly offensive to the followers of more than one religion, but I do not intend to make those criticisms today. In the speech of the right reverend Prelate, we heard of some of his telling concerns.

Sex cannot be changed. It is no good the Minister shaking his head. Sex is decided by the chromosomes of a human being. If we have XX chromosomes, we are women; if we have XY chromosomes, we are men. I might perhaps accept the Bill if an additional requirement for registering changes of gender were that it had been discovered that those concerned had inappropriate chromosomes for the sex in which they had been registered. That is the only way in which the Bill could avoid telling a lie. So far as I know, there is no law nor any known medical procedure that can change the sex of a human being. The Bill purports to do so. It is therefore an objectionable farce.

Moral and constitutional issues are also involved. The Bill requires members of a gender recognition panel, on the production of certain evidence, in broad terms to certify that a person who was born a woman, lived as a woman, married as a woman and has borne children is, despite all that, entitled to be issued with a birth certificate falsely professing that she was born as a male child. That cannot be anything other than a lie. It is a lie that the state would require its servants, such as the Registrar General, to certify as a truth.

Under this Government, we have become accustomed to a certain lack of precision and distinction between what is true and what is untrue, but this is going a long way beyond that. It is of a different order. Not only does it provide that an untruth can be made a truth, that a legitimately and properly attested document may be altered to purport something different, but it provides for the punishment of anyone who dares to speak the truth about the matter.

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, properly referred to some of the problems in sport. When a six foot eight inch, 22 stone lady turns up to join the hockey club and denies that she has changed gender, who can attest to the contrary? Her birth certificate will have been altered and it will be a criminal offence for anyone to reveal that fact. Just how do we proceed in that matter? It is no good saying that we can leave it to people in the sporting associations. We cannot. That is impossible.

Even worse, it is not quite an offence for anyone to reveal the truth about the matter because, properly, under Clause 21, the Secretary of State or Scottish Minister is to have by order power to make provisions prescribing circumstances in which disclosure of the truth would not be an offence. We have read in the papers during the past day or two some of the background to the Soham murders and about the real difficulty caused by the clash between data confidentiality and the need of the police to be able to identify people who have not been convicted of any crime.

Let us consider the Bill in relation to that. Suppose the suspected person had changed gender. That would be difficult to track back, because he would be a different person with a different birth certificate. If this wretched legislation is passed, I hope that the Attorney-General has thought his way through that one before we have another problem on the scale of the Soham affair.

Mind you, all that is somewhat small beer compared to the power given to the Secretary of State in Clause 22 to modify,
"the operation of any enactment or subordinate legislation in relation to… persons whose gender has become the acquired gender under this Act, or… any description of such persons".
So there is the potential to deal with what we may call the Soham problem but, as I said, I hope that the Attorney-General will tell us exactly how that will operate. He must have thought it through. The Bill has not suddenly emerged; it has been thought about for a long time.

As I read it, the Bill would also purport that a marriage lawfully undertaken and consummated would be annulled where one of those false certificates had been issued in respect of one of those who had been lawfully joined together in an indissoluble union in the presence of God. We have heard the right reverend Prelate's reservations about that. I wonder what His Holiness the Pope thinks about it.

Clause 16 provides that if an Earl re-registers himself as a woman, he fortunately does not have to become a Countess. That is a most liberal part of the Bill; for such small mercies we should be grateful. I therefore presume that if a King should undertake gender reassignment, he could rule as a woman, but he would still be a King. I must say that that would raise some curious thoughts."

Thank you for that @SionnachRuadh - I agree, that was a pleasure to read (and I also can’t imagine my younger self predicting me saying that). What an opening! And it just storms on from there!

“My Lords, I do not support the Bill in principle, in any way, up hill or down dale. This is a bad Bill. It is a most offensive Bill.”