Hello Clever Clogs giving it the 'the GC are being dicks because they don't accept x'.
I do not agree with self-ID and I think that a completed transition should be required to get a GC. By that I mostly mean a completed hormonal and social transition. Doesn't have to be surgery.
Well it's tough shit what you think on this, because courts have ruled that you can't make a distinction like this - you can't make transition dependant on medicalisation so that argument there is stone cold dead. It's irrelevant. It's regarded as a human rights related issue. So instead of complaining that GC women are the problem, actually know and understand why we are at where we are.
The GC lobby won't have it, but the hormone treatment turns men effectively into women for all practical purposes like safety.
The GC lobby won't have made up nonsense that has no scientific basis. 'All practical purposes' my arse. That's a definition that's doing some heavy lifting. It's not what the data says. Who says what 'all practical purposes' means anyway. Frankly it's not going to change shit relating to dignity and privacy related issues for starters. Now one of the practical reasons I've wanted to have access to single sex provision has been related to outdoor sport. As part of this there was a group I was interested in which focused on the barriers women faced and what was putting them off.
They had a talk and it was about how the socialisation of men in outdoor sport was so off-putting. They are more macho and want to take more risks whereas women are more cooperative and collaborative and like to learn at a different pace. One of the reasons for this isn't to do with aggression. It's to do with physical size and strength - for example, women have to learn skills much more than rely on brute strength. Taking hormones doesn't stop a man still being 6'1 and all the equipment being designed for them nor does it stop their reach and ability to paddle in a different way to women. It doesn't make it harder to carry a boat by yourself...
Then there's the other issues. Child care and periods and menopause. All of which create unique barriers that women have that men don't. The talk went on at length about the impact of this and how women didn't feel comfortable talking about these issues around men and how it affected confidence. There's a lot of elements regarding bodily dignity and privacy here as the subject is highly personal to many women in terms of their lives experience of this. No hormones change your inner biology and make men have periods or go through menopause and how this affects muscle strength and bone strength in women. Frankly a man in this conversation is an intruder and an observer with the best will and the most amazing drugs on offer.
And of course at the end of this talk along came a man to demonstrate how he'd completely missed the point of the majority of points covered in the previous 30 mins by declaring "can transwomen join", which killed off all other questions and made everyone listening disappear at speed. It was fascinating to watch.
So in terms of 'all practical reasons' the fact that this is being defined by individuals who place no value on any of this, and dismiss it as not a practical reason for the purposes of their argument really says a lot about who is making those judgements. It's not women.
What you see in these conversations is the repeated pivot by trans activists to safety together with a blackmail element.
So we talk about toilets and TRAs throw a hissy fit about how very dare you talk about safety because that's not fair to my gentle mate, who wouldn't hurt a fly. Thus a) dismissing the lived experience of any women with trauma around men and lived experience of any woman who has had a negative experience with a transwoman relating to safety (which we know is happening and we know isn't being reported for various reasons) and b) choses to ignore the dignity and privacy elements for women.
TRAs DO NOT want to talk about b. They have the argument that it breeches the privacy and dignity of transwomen to force them to use the mens, but they do not want to reflect on the impact to privacy and dignity of women caused by males entering their spaces. It's a one sided conversation in a debate which is about equality and how everyone has a right to privacy and dignity.
In these conversations, you see it time and again. Whenever this is pointed out and women start talking about the importance of b, you see a deliberate pivot by TRAs to return to 'how very dare you talk about how transwomen are a threat to safety', because it shifts the conversation. It's a deflection and distraction technique.
Women should be making decisions about what is important to them and what the weasel phrase 'all practical reasons' means, because it's reflective of their lives experience and how it differs from what males see and value.
Every single time I have the conversation about 'well why do women need single sex stuff' and I talk about how it's been useful and really beneficial to me, every single person who has gruffly and indignantly tried to trip me up with it, has gone "you know what you actually have a point there, that's fair and worthwhile" and this is what pisses me off. They don't think about it and it's not something they'd us but it's something of value to others and they get benefits from it. Once they know and have visibility of this, they shift in opinion. But they are happy to throw away stuff they don't know about because it's not on their radar. Worst still they often don't want to have conversations that reveal this type of women's stakeholder position because those conversations in themselves they've already prejudged to be 'transphobic' rather than merely woman centric, because they are a bunch of dicks - often literally a bunch of dicks.
So perhaps for once, get off the pot and actually LISTEN to women rather than trying to blame women for legal issues that are nothing to do with them and to reasons why 'for all practical reasons' is a weasel phrase defined by men for men and not reflective of the world of lived experiences that women have.