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

Thanks for the link. Interesting reading but also realise that given he now rights for the Telegraph and has opted out of Labour all sorts of people who should take note will just not read it.

And to be fair, back then nobody thought that there would be the huge growth in "identities", gender bending etc., which were all the result of crafty Stonewall expanding its campaign base.

And thinking asking women back then that the GRA was a danger to women, many would have as said in the article well it will only ever be a tiny group.

The real damage was Labour sneaking it into the Equality Act.

If they hadn't done that it would just be an act that to date less than 10,000 people have used.

The damage is not the GRA itself althought to quote Tebbit (shock, horror) it is a law that legalises a lie, in itself it would have no power.

It is, and this was a deliberate act of social engineering, making having a GRC a protected characteristic. (which doesn't cover self id, or gender bending or asexual etc.)

So as has been said over and over again, this was a deliberate act of sabotage on sex based rights.

That was at the political level.

And this was then deliberately mis represented by Stonewall etc., to say that self iding etc., was a legal right.

Plenty of people are STILL saying it's a tiny minority....they are organising and campaigning even while they know the impact on women, the impact on young people. No one can say "they don't understand" now.

The speech from Tebbit quoted above is amazing, and very on point. Strange how you can end up agreeing with someone, when you thought you disagreed with everything they stood for.

As for the Tom Harris article, well yes, he voted for the GRA (under pressure), but at least he now admits he was wrong. There's a lot of good stuff in the article - Parliament was about to legislate, for the first time in its history, to allow people to lie.

You are missing the point.

Those protected by a legal status are a tiny minority. ie less than 10,000.

Everyone else who are asserting they have rights dont have legal rights.

But society has given in to their demands.

If you are worried about that you need to work out how women could ever have the same influence on society that this Stonewall lead campaign has.

And it wasn't because they misrepresented it as a legal right.

They have won the arguement that it is a human right irrespective that it is at the cost of women's human rights.

That's what we as women have been made to face.

The women just dont not matter to the vast majority of the population.

@PilotFish wrong thread?

Interesting response. I get why people are angry, but look at what happened.

On the 23rd February 2004 MPs voted on the on the general principle of the Gender Recognition Bill at its Second Reading. MPs voted for the Bill by 337 votes to 28.On the 25th May 2004 MPs again voted on the general principle of the Gender Recognition Bill at its Third Reading. MPs voted by 357 to 48 for the Bill.
Conservative MPs had liberty to vote according to their conscience. Labour and the Liberal Democrats whipped their MPs to support the Bill. No Labour or Liberal Democrat MPs voted against the Bill.

Labour had 412 seats in Commons [95 women] 166 Tories [14 women] 52 Lib Dems [5 women]
There were 118 Women in total. Only three women MPs voted against the bill in its final reading: Lady Hermon - Ulster Unionist Party, Ann Winterton -Tory, Anne McIntosh - Tory.

Here are links to all the debates
https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2021/09/14/gender-recognition-act-2004-hansard/

How many of those 357 MPs have ever expressed doubt in public about what they did, let alone apologise for it? Most Tories just abstained.

Tom Harris maybe flawed, but he is unusual amongst MPs especially Labour to have actually come back to the issue, discuss honestly how he felt and acted and show how he changed his mind. Remember there was nothing stopping him from painting himself in a MUCH better light.

I agree with that @fromorbit

Yeah, me too. Especially contrasted with the silence from everyone else.

I don't think I've seen any other MP or peer who voted for the GRA come out and say they were wrong, or even that, while they still support the principle, they now see there were undesirable consequences that should be fixed.

Not even Lord Winston, though I'd be fascinated if anyone asked him. He's become a lot more GC over the years, for which I'm grateful, but his Lords speech on the GRA was very much "as a biologist, let me tell you that sex is incredibly complicated and nobody really knows what it is or how to define it". He definitely doesn't say that now.

Thanks for the link @fromorbit and to everyone for the interesting discussion.

I do remember the passage of the Act and think @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
(and Tom Harris) are absolutely right that very few people predicted how the legislation could be used. In particular, opposition to the Act was seen as mainly restricted to those who opposed gay marriage.

I naively assumed that it would help a small number of transgender people. With hindsight, the real problem arose when self ID was given the same status as having a GRC. What I think very few of us are aware of are the links between MPs, the judiciary and pressure groups when it comes to legislation of this sort that was not driven by one particular political party or wider movement among the general public.

This is such an interesting thread, thank you.

The thinking of it as "trivial" really struck a chord.

In 2011/2012(?) I overheard a friend and a friendly acquaintance (both woke v lefty men, all in our 20s) discussing whether trans women should be allowed in women's spaces.

I had protested alongside these men against austerity, cuts to public services and state benefits, particularly disability benefit changes. We lived in a poor area with high unemployment.

When I overheard their conversation, I inwardly eyerolled, as it seemed such a trivial, fringe issue. I remembered the conversation as my reaction was the seeds of my later opinion that the Left had deserted ordinary working class people. My internal reaction was along the lines of "Why the fuck are you wasting time talking about such an obscure issue? What kind of intellectual wankery is this, when there are people facing real problems, and you have practically convinced me thousands of people are going to starve to death living in tent cities and workhouses within the next few years?!!"

Oh, how I regret not knowing what I know now and joining the conversation! I never believed one could change sex but thought it was a vanishingly rare incidence of a few gentle effeminate men who were no harm.

Both men discussing this were full on TWAW within a few years. (I was GC by 2015 thanks to this board). I guess whoever was arguing against males in women's spaces found it easier to join the crowd than apply the critical thought they'd displayed earlier...

Anyway. I can see how it might have seemed trivial. Then again, where objections were actually spelled out - surely then you would actually take the time to think?

In particular, opposition to the Act was seen as mainly restricted to those who opposed gay marriage.

This is very true. Tebbit's speeches in the Lords debates are amazing to read now, because he predicted many of the issues that would arise in later years. But it would be a mistake to think he was a champion of the LGB - I'm sure he'd admit to being an old man with old fashioned attitudes - and this made him easy to dismiss.

It's interesting, though, that he immediately saw the issues for women's sports, while feminist Labour MPs did not.

I put some of this down to it being a proxy for gay marriage. The Blair government wasn't ready to legislate for gay marriage, so for lots of Labour and Lib Dem MPs (and Tory wets, who weren't whipped) it was a cheap and easy way of signalling that they were on the right side of history.

And the small number of opponents were largely people who would oppose gay marriage when it came up later. If there were any closet terfs on the Labour benches, they were absolutely silent at the time and none have identified themselves since. Tom Harris is the only MP to my knowledge who voted in favour and has since owned up to having doubts.

Interesting that Lady Hermon voted against. I don't know her reasons for doing so, but she's always been basically a good egg.

The gay marriage aspect of the GRA is a weird thing, to me. Why not just allow gay marriage, instead? Why was falsifying legal documentation seen as preferable? And what about any gay couples involved? If two men wanted to marry, what would they do? Draw straws as to who should be the woman?

Totally agree (esp about Sylvia Herman - always had a soft spot for her). It seems incredible now (& actually seemed a bit odd at the time, though I was not as focused on the issues and was generically “be kind” then) that they did not try to solve the problem by legislating for equal marriage. That would have been far more sensible.

I think the UK government was presented with a conundrum. The ECHR had said there was no reason to stop people marrying same-sex partners, even though back in the early 2000s hardly any European countries permitted it. The age of consent for gay men had only just been reduced to 16, the same as for heterosexual sex. Gay rights was still a very live issue, in a way that is probably difficult for anyone under 40 to grasp now. I think the GRA gave the government a way out that didn't seem to rock the boat in the way that legislating for same-sex marriage would have done.

the real problem arose when self ID was given the same status as having a GRC.

But never in law.

This is just another example of how Stonewall misinformation has been more powerful than fact.

And that what is nothing more than a social trend has been elevated to the status of a law.

Which leads to asking why so many politicians continue to talk as though the Supreme Court ruling has impacted all those people who are making a life style choice as oppose to the less than 10,000 who meet the criteria of protected characteristic of gender re-assignment.

But the PC of GR doesn't just cover those 10000 with a GRC. You can argue it was only meant to, but the vagueness of 'intending to undergo' and 'other attributes ' means the PC covers way more people. It's so vague it allows self ID, there's no requirement for meds, surgery, anything other than intentions, which are not measurable or quantifiable.

Press for Change were working hard behind the scenes. Their plan (you can see it on old versions of their website) was to influence policymakers.

MPs have to rely on briefings and information from others - they don’t have huge offices and staff, and have to vote on many different issues. There aren’t nearly enough hours in the day for them to do all their own research on every issue discussed in the House.

So if a trusted lobby group and/or the House of Commons library briefing and/or the briefing from the relevant Government Department and/or Select Committee report and/or a colleague they trust all say ‘this is trivial, few people will be impacted’, then I can see why an MP wouldn’t investigate further. No quick or easy way for them to know if this has all come from one influential lobby group, and is very one sided.

The PC doesn’t, but the Supreme Court case was about people with GRCs and whether the protected characteristic of sex was biological or “certificated” (although men without GRCs were using them to claim self ID by the back door).

Very interesting article thank you @fromorbit and refreshingly clear.

There will be others here much better informed, who've read Hansard from the time, but my hunch would be that at the time it simply never crossed anybody's mind that more than a few thousand people would claim to be transgender and claim any special status as result. Most people knew about cross-dressing and transvestites, but I think that was regarded as a facet of gay culture and something people very much did behind closed doors in clubs or with friends, not at work or school or anywhere much in public. The idea that people (almost all male) who were clearly doing it as a fetish would claim that this was gender reassignment in the same way as the people who'd been attending gender clinics for years, gone through psychotherapy and were often having medical treatment would have seemed unthinkable. Even more unthinkable that the rest of the world would go along with it. And yet here we are.

(FWIW, I don't think the people from the gender clinics should have been allowed to change their birth certificates or other documentation either. But at least they'd been subject to some official gatekeeping.)

Yeah, I haven't been through Hansard for the Equality Act, but the debates on the GRA are all about "the 5000 transsexuals in the country". One of the European court cases (I don't think it was Goodwin, but I mix them up sometimes) had said surgery couldn't be a precondition of legal recognition, but MPs and peers debating the issue clearly believed this was a provision for transsexuals who had either had SRS or who were on a pathway to SRS.

I think that's consistent with the wording of the PC of GR in the Equality Act, where the mention of changing physiological attributes of sex seems to assume people who have had/are on a pathway to SRS, but the wording is ambiguous so as not to require SRS, and that ambiguity is the little loophole that self-ID climbed through.

I don't believe MPs at the time were unaware that fetishistic transvestism existed - it's never exactly been esoteric knowledge - but only dinosaurs like Norman Tebbit were rude enough to mention transvestism, and I've no doubt the briefings from Press for Change would have stressed that this had nothing to do with fetishism, it was a special carve out for lovely gentle transsexuals just trying to live a quiet life and it would be strongly gatekept.

Now it's my firm belief that PfC were being disingenuous all along, but that wouldn't be obvious to an MP with limited time and resources being presented with what they were told was a trivial issue, but one that would put them on the right side of history, and if they needed more encouragement, Hilary Armstrong would tell them the PM wanted this, and weren't they ambitious to have a future career?

It is very bizarre though, it was only ever going to work for a few homosexual relationships since most don't involve anyone transitioning.

I suspect that the Haley Cropper effect may be an element, that's the kind of person they were imagining would be prevented from marrying and it just seemed mean.

If they wanted a middle way some kind of registered partnership would have made a lot more sense.

Bookmarked to read in the morning but "if only I'd known" annoys me.