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

"the Court considers that society women may reasonably be expected to tolerate a certain inconvenience to enable individuals men to live in dignity and worth in accordance with the sexual identity chosen by them at great no personal cost."

Fixed it for them.

Back in the days when Norman Tebbit was the worst person in the world! I'm still no fan, but he was spot-on and perceptive about this. But back in 2004 there was no Isla Graham in the TV news.

What did I think about the GRA in 2004? Honestly, I doubt I was even aware of it. I don't recall a massive fuss in the press. Nobody (or hardly anybody) thought it was a big deal at the time. And of course that was very much the gloss that was put on it.

I very much doubt we’d have the number or type of ‘trans’ people, and by that I mean the lesbians with beards and heterosexual cross dressers, that we have today without the GRA, it has emboldened boundary pushers and loophole seekers and people who otherwise would find other ways to make women uncomfortable.

It has always been a shocking piece of law and that anyone ever thought that legislating lying was acceptable is truely bizarre.

I imagine the big selling point was: it's low cost, it will have a negligible impact on society, it will have a big positive impact on the 5000 stealth transsexuals out there who will thank you forever, and you'll make a statement that you're on the right side of history.

The sort of bill a centrist dad type of Labour MP loves, and by the time the negative impacts become clear, most of them have left politics.

I worry that there are similar dynamics in play with the assisted dying bill. I don't think the psychological profile of MPs has changed that much.

I think it would be possible if you were thinking this was only going to be about people who were really engaged in undergoing the whole SRS process. The fact that we can now see all the red flags with the “doesn’t need to have started the process” business could go past you easily enough if you were literally only thinking about genuine patients. Especially if it had already been established that it was against human rights to put a requirement for surgery in place. The system made it relatively easy for TRAs to say they were only saying that as that was the only legal option, whereas it’s now obvious the opposite was true.

Yes - even in the Equality Act, there isn't a requirement to undergo full SRS (and that was part of the original 2004 debates on the GRA), but the wording of the PC of gender reassignment - "the person is proposing to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone a process (or part of a process) for the purpose of reassigning the person's sex by changing physiological or other attributes of sex" - clearly implies that MPs thought they were protecting people who were on a pathway to SRS.

It was only backwoodsmen in the Lords like Norman Tebbit who raised objections along the lines of "what if some big hairy arsed bloke wants to join a lesbian group", and that was all handwaved away by Labour ministers who said those things would never happen.

Old Norm seems to have got there before most of us did.

In retrospect, "physiological or other attributes of sex" turns out to be the enormous loophole that enabled the big push for self-ID - because "other attributes of sex" might just mean putting on a wig and a miniskirt - but then ended up undermining the whole thing.

Wow, that Tebbit speech. An intelligent man. And I used to regard him as one of the bad actors.
But this thread has me thinking about the nomenclature of men's attitudes to women. We refer to misogyny a lot, but it covers several things which are not the same.

At base level there are men who have swallowed the idea of equality, quite properly, and lumped males and females together for legislation and so on, assuming that the two should be treated the same. Like a woman not needing a guarantor when buying a house. Which sounds fine, until something like trans comes up, and it take time for them to realise that in some cases the two need different responses for equity to be achieved. They don't dislike women, don't need to "keep them in their place", but may get a bit peeved when the women step out of what they expect. They don't need a word as strong as misogyny, but they do need something.

Then there are the ones who do deserve the word, the ones who don't appoint well qualified women when there is a less qualified man, who ask what the victim of assault was wearing, or why she was crossing Hungerford bridge at night, or expect their wives to have dinner ready at 6 as in the fifties, who are basically back in the 50s and simply can't accept that women have their own lives. There are a lot of them about and we all know it when we meet it. They want women in their place and blame feminism for all the wrongs in society, but mostly do not think about what they are expecting from us.

Then there are the ones for whom misogyny is too weak, who see nothing wrong in shouting out their hatred in public, like the TRAs. I propose we call them gynophobic, by comparison with the other phobic words we now have, which refer to hatred, not fear, though any woman is quite right to fear the TRAs. Those who call for death for women, of course, do have a hatred driven by fear, though why they fear women I can't imagine. They fear our laughter while we fear their violence. A bit extreme of course. But a much worse thing than misogyny.

Old Norm seems to have got there before most of us did.
That's because in the 1970s it was common knowledge that some men liked to dress as women for pleasure. Some men stole underwear from washing lines. Some men were flashers. It's only today that these men are seen as poor and vulnerable, in need of help.

It's amazing how transvestism has been thoroughly memory wiped from the culture - except for drag shows, which seem to have been grandfathered in.

Even ten years ago it was common knowledge that a significant number of men cross dressed for erotic purposes. Nowadays that's counted as Hitler level bigotry.

Yes exactly.

This was a good read. He comes across as decent.

But.

As a woman but also as a socialist I want the misogyny naming explicitly. Especially of the individuals and organisations who continue to reject the supreme court ruling.

Unlike many MPs these days, Norm had a life before parliament, he was an airline pilot. So presumably had seen a lot of the world.

My dad was an engineer in the merchant navy in the 50s. The stewards on board the ships were transvestites. They would dress up when the ship docked in whatever foreign port and go into town. They didn't dress as women on the ship in front of the crew, only when going ashore, but everyone knew about it and were generally accepting.

It was well known that this was accepted in the merchant navy and so transvestites flocked there.

Interestingly, gay men often joined airlines as stewards, though this didn't really take off til the 70s.

Both groups were looking for a safe route to act out lifestyles that weren't always tolerated in their communities.

Trying to understand the mindset of MPs passing the original GRA.

Was MP's perception of transition set by documentaries like the BBC's 'A change of sex'?

A Change of Sex - 1. George - The Big Decision - BBC iPlayer

Were there other documentaries that covered the subject around the same time frame?

It's nice to have the truth acknowledged but he not only threw women under the buses but he threw the truth and parliaments integrity too, and he did so knowingly, trying to excuse himself now by claiming he didn't have a time machine, is at best pathetic. Lord Tebbit didn't have a time machine either, he didn't need one to know the bill was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I’m not being funny but I used to go drinking with my friends in the local gay bars when we were 14/15 because it was easier to get served and that’s where I first came across men dressed in women’s clothing, I didn’t need to have seen a lot of the world to know it was a fetish!

That reminded me of this, from a police officer in the US, on how attitudes to crossdressing men have changed in the last 20-odd years.
Thread by @sappholives83 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

It makes me wonder about those women MPs sitting on the Women & Equalities Committee, who seem to have reached adulthood without ever encountering a fetishist or a voyeur or a flasher.

What sheltered lives must they have had? We don't exactly have to seek in strange places to find them.

If only he'd known? If only he'd listened! Virtually every negative thing that has happened as a result of the GRA was predicted, was argued about. And all those MPs who supported legislating dishonesty and punishing integrity, all the proponents of this appalling law, responded "It will never happen."

Well, no shit, Tom, it has happened. Now that women and children have been harmed, do you think perhaps you should actually listen to women?

Well to be fair, he did listen to a woman. He listened to Hilary (Baroness) Armstrong, the government chief whip. According to that article, she’s the one who advised him it was ‘a trivial subject’.

I can see no point in getting angry with Tom Harris given that at the time it was my belief that women’s rights had largely been won in the UK and that we certainly had nothing to learn from Norman on-your-bike Tebbit. And as far as I can remember, and with a few honourable exceptions, that was a widely held view among women.

Tom Harris wasn’t the only one caught napping here. Most women were.

Listening to women would be ideal, but short of that, not taking David Lammy's assurances on trust would also be good.

I was just re-reading Voldemorts twitter thread on the 2004 HOL Hansard debate. In questions, Tebbit focused hard on the fact that the bill was enabling same sex marriage. The responses were often incoherent tbh in terms of refusing to discuss sex and gender as separate issues, even in answers to questions where they had been separately identified. It seemed to me that Tebbit didn't really hold back from being put in a 'homophobe' box, and that allowed the government response to become tactical in a 'stop Tebbit getting traction in this debate' way, rather than allowing any of his arguments to be refined out as less or more valid, by others if not by the government.

Thank goodness someone has said this. There are plenty of people on this thread using a time machine to go back to 2004 and berate MPs for not all being as prescient as Norman Tebbit. I was in my early 40s then and I don't even remember hearing that the GRA had passed. If I had known, I'd have been a bit sceptical, but I wouldn't have expected it to lead to what has since happened.

I now know (I didn't then, and I think hardly anybody did) that the NHS had not long before this established an adult gender clinic at Charing Cross Hospital which treated mostly males. I don't know if there were others. Then they set up a clinic for under-18s at the Tavistock (GIDS) and saw under 100 children a year, of whom around 70 were boys. Watchful waiting was the standard treatment for minors. For adults, it was understood in adult gender services that they fell into two groups, gay men who were struggling to accept their sexuality and saw adopting a female identity as a way out, and cross-dressers, whose motivation was sexual and who were not usually gay. The second group were not referred for surgery. Not sure if they were put on hormones. The former group might be, but only after years of psychotherapy.

When the UK Parliament was asked to pass the GRA, they were assured by experts that only about 5000 people in the UK would be eligible to apply, so it looked like a niche issue. They were also told that they had to pass it because of a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. A UK citizen (a trans-identified male, I think) had taken a case all the way there to demand the right to marry his male partner. His case was that his right to a family life was being denied. The UK could have addressed this by introducing same-sex marriage, but in spite of having a huge majority in the House of Commons at the time the Blair government didn't think this would pass (I suppose it would have been a conscience vote so not whipped), so went for the GRA instead. The litigant would have got a GRA, applied for a female birth certificate and then been able to marry.

(It does seem very odd to me that the government was so sure that same-sex marriage wasn't the solution, but they were very keen on focus groups and must have thought they had their finger on the pulse there. In spite of this, as we know, we got civil partnerships and then gay marriage within a few years, so I think that was a missed opportunity. Stonewall was then a gay rights campaign group and once they had decided to lobby for gay marriage their campaigning probably made a big difference.)

It's a bit rich to criticise one of the very few MPs from that time who has now admitted it was a mistake to pass the GRA. What about criticising all the people who voted for it and have never accepted that? Harriet Harman comes to mind, but there are plenty more.

And let's not forget that one of the key movers and shakers trying to get more legal recognition for trans people was Stephen Whittle, through the organisation Press for Change, which I think Whittle ran with Christine Burns. It wasn't all trans-identified males pushing this. There were very few trans-identified females at the time but Whittle was very vocal and persistent, had become a law academic in pursuit of legal change and may have been more convincing then than now.

Also, in 2004 the internet was still pretty new to most of us and social media was in its infancy. Nobody knew then how that was going to dominate the lives of many young people, especially socially isolated people already struggling with their mental health. Nobody could have foreseen that within a few short years from the passing of the GRA gender ideology would have become so popular and prominent on social media, and most people had no idea that the GRA and similar measures in other parts of the world were the foot in the door to push for more legal rights for trans-identified people.

I remember when this was first being discussed on MN people were still talking about this as if only males were identifying as trans. It took time for the statistics coming out of GIDS to sink in and for it to be understood that not only were the numbers of patients at GIDS rocketing but there had been a very sudden switch from 2:1 boys/girls to the other way round. Even now transactivists are resistant to the obvious answer to this, namely that it's a social contagion.

Nobody saw this coming. The people to criticise are the people who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make it happen.

Agreed. I think that's spot-on.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g, thank you for that - really clear as to the history of all this. And good advice not to take any statements (even ones that seem to support one’s cause) out of context.