OK, so there are 38 signatories to that letter. I would not call that a sizeable number. I have Googled them all and found all but two of them. Two of them appear not to have any online presence, which is a bit sus.
Of those 38:
- At least 19, i.e. at least half of them, are not British. A handful are non-Brits currently working in the UK, but many of them are Americans and Canadians who may never have even set foot on British soil, for all we know. Why are they interfering in British democracy?
- About half of them, as far as I can tell, are men. Some of the ones with female names are TIMs. So none of them have any particular skin in the game with regard to the protection of women's safety, privacy and dignity, and some of them have a personal vested interest in being allowed to cross women's boundaries.
- In a couple of cases I was not able to identify what their academic specialism is at all. There seem to be quite a few Andrew Macks with PhDs so no idea whether this is the British microbiologist, the American physicist or the one researching avian window strikes.
- Many of the people on this list do not appear to have any medical qualifications at all. There are a couple of mathematicians and more sexologists and gender studies PhDs than you can shake a stick at though.
- Of the ones who are medical doctors, many of them seem to be in a completely unrelated discipline. I'm a lawyer, I don't know anything about mergers and acquisitions, and I wouldn't get a conveyancing lawyer to handle my divorce. So I'm not sure that the signatures of doctors working in virology, orthopaedic surgery or tropical medicine really lend much weight to a letter which mostly seems to focus on disorders of sexual development. I don't seem to see any doctors who specialise in reproductive medicine or endocrinology on this list, for example.
- Two of the signatories are trans identifying and work for GIDS.
- Of the female signatories, almost none of them are British. The female signatories seem to be made up almost exclusively of flying monkeys from the US and Canada with PhDs in gender studies.
I don't like to play the player rather than the ball, but this really isn't a very serious list. If the statements being made in the letter were correct, surely the list of signatories would be much longer and include more people with the right credentials, i.e. people actually working in a relevant area of medicine.
It's also not a very long list. The UK has a population of 67 million people, including over 188,000 doctors, and I could count the ones who signed this letter on my fingers. It appears to be seven at the most, including a couple of unconfirmed possibles. Two of those seven are trans identifying males and a couple of others practise in a completely irrelevant specialism.
The letter itself is less than 1000 words long and can broadly be divided into three sections.
The first section focuses on disorders of sexual development in an attempt to argue that sex is not binary and that therefore biological sex is an unsafe basis on which to make public policy. As far as I can tell none of the signatories are specialists in disorders of sexual development. The letter completely ignores the fact that for close to 100% of the population sex is completely and unambiguously binary, and that for the very tiny minority of people who actually have a disorder of sexual development, the Supreme Court judgment changes absolutely nothing. It neither creates nor resolves any problems for them.
The second section focuses on trans people and how they may alter their bodies with cross sex hormones and surgery. It goes into some detail about how this has an impact on their medical needs. This is true, but none of what is said in this part of the letter is in any way relevant to the Supreme Court judgment.
The third section claims that biological sex is only relevant in the context of fertility and therefore has little impact on daily life and should not be used as a basis for governing access to single sex spaces. This is, put plainly, wrong. It completely ignores the lived experience of women whose lives have been impacted in a great many ways by their biological sex. It is notable that almost all of the British signatories to the letter are men who have absolutely no frame of reference for what it is like to live as a woman, and almost all the female signatories are American or Canadian and have absolutely no frame of reference for what it is like to live in a country where women actually have equal rights and are allowed to say no to men. It's absolutely laughable for this hodge-podge of no-marks to make statements such as, "We are concerned that the recent ruling, and the government’s adoption of the EHRC’s interim update does not advance women’s rights, but introduces new risks for many members of our society, including cisgender women" when almost half of them are men who quite plainly don't give a shit about women's rights, and about a quarter of them live in a country where women don't have reliable access to abortions or the right to paid maternity leave.
They finish the letter by demanding that the government takes action "to restore the rights of trans & non-binary people to access toilets and other spaces that are essential to daily life". Well, first of all, no rights can be restored because no rights have been lost. Secondly, non binary people have exactly the same access to toilets and other spaces as they always did. Non-binary people are either male or female, like every other bugger. Non-binary people were not recognised in UK law prior to the Supreme Court judgment and they are still not recognised in UK law after it. If what they are actually demanding is for the government to legislate to erase female people as a distinct category in law, they need to make it clear that that is what they are demanding.
Anyway, that was far more attention than this pratfall of clowns deserved and frankly they can all fucking piss off.