Guest post: They ought to be able to think it through anyway
Originally a comment by Sastra on Lord Falconer.
Whenever I’m accused of fear mongering and creating a problem out of nothing because transwomen are no more violent than other women I always try to point out that they’re tacitly admitting that if transwomen WERE more violent than natal women, then they must believe that there’d be cause for alarm. So — what’s the figure and remedy?
If their level of violence were — oh, let’s say it’s hypothetically the same as men — would that be enough to put safeguards in place? What would those safeguards consist of? What if transwomen were more likely to be violent than males in general? In their view of things, is there a particular percentage increase where some solution is proposed? Would transwomen at any point cease to be women?
They don’t answer, and explain it’s because I’m asking hypotheticals that haven’t and won’t happen. But that shouldn’t matter. They ought to be able to think it through anyway. They can’t think it through because “transwomen are just like other women” isn’t and can’t be a conclusion. Conclusions can be falsified. Instead it’s a fundamental assumption which can’t be falsified with any evidence— and they don’t want to see that.
The real tragedy is that those aren’t hypotheticals. Men claiming to be women, according to the UK government’s own figures, are more violent and more likely to be sex offenders than men who don’t claim to be women – and if they suggest that the 50% of incarcerated male sex offenders who claim to be women are lying, then that also contradicts their assertion that predatory men wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity to claim to be of the opposite sex for nefarious purposes. Either way, allowing the fiction that changing gender presentation has changed the person’s sex inevitably leads, because it has led, to abuse.
I believe that this whole mess came about because the government were persuaded that by not giving married cross-dressing men a GRC, they’d be bringing in same-sex marriage by default, and they didn’t want to (I’ve never been able to see the logic there, myself). Marriage equality has had a massively beneficial effect for people who are homosexual, and absolutely no deleterious effects on people who are heterosexual. The legal fiction that people can change, and have changed, sex, however, is causing massive, ongoing, harm to women and children.
Huh?
GW, in order for a man to change his sex marker in his documents, he had to get a GRC. In order for a heterosexual married man to get a GRC, he had to get divorced, but a gay man with a GRC could marry his lover, as if he were a woman. Still doesn’t make sense to me.