In order to be granted full rights

More demands for more more more gender reform:

More than 100 LGBT organisations and celebrities are urging the government to reform UK gender identity laws, the BBC has learned.

But what if “gender identity” doesn’t actually mean anything?

But, in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, LGBT groups said the UK was “lagging behind” other countries “in terms of legal equality for trans and non-binary people”.

Is it? How? In what way do trans and non-binary people not have legal equality? What does “legal equality” in that sentence mean?

Ashleigh Talbot, a transgender woman, says the current process to get legal recognition is too negative.

“It’s an extremely bureaucratic process,” said Ms Talbot.

Ms Talbot added that for any other community to be required to prove something to a panel in order to be granted full rights would be an “absolute outrage”.

But that’s nonsense. Talbot is using “full rights” to mean something it doesn’t mean. People don’t have “full rights” to get government recognition for whatever “identity” they choose – helicopter, grapefruit, shark, Vesuvius, the War of the Spanish Succession. Talbot already has the same “full rights” everyone else has.

She continued: “I know people who have had their application turned down because of a perceived fault with the evidence – they were so humiliated.

“The stress and the emotional toll that it takes on members of the community, simply to have legal recognition, is all extremely damaging.”

In other words Talbot deployed the usual emotional blackmail. Talbot talks like an abuser – “Give me what I want or I’ll burn the house down with us in it.”

The Gender Recognition Act (GRA) sets out the legal process by which a person can change their gender.

It was last updated in 2004, and was the first piece of legislation that officially recognised transgender people but, since then, the way people identify has come a long way.

That is, since then the list of demands and threats has ballooned grotesquely.

The BBC does allow one dissenting voice through.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of Fair Play For Women – which campaigns for the sex-based rights of women and girls – said GRA reform would mean any male could change their birth certificate to say they were born female.

“Women have a lawful right to exclude males from female-only spaces when it’s necessary for privacy, safety and fairness,” she said.

It would make women’s existing legal rights “unworkable”, she added, and that advancing rights for one group “at the expense of another vulnerable group” is wrong.

But now let’s hear from the More Special Than That community.

Jamie Windust, an LGBT and non-binary activist who does not identify as a man or woman, says things need to change.

“Non-binary people like myself are not even given the option to change our gender identity through the GRA,” they said.

“This is not only invalidating, but having your own government not allow you to just exist is really painful.”

Except of course that the government is not “not allowing you to exist.” Windust is allowed to exist, and judging by the fact that the government quotes Them, Windust does in fact exist. It’s not “invalidating” for the government to reject an invented category for birth certificates.

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