Surprise surprise – Stonewall’s mission creep has crept so far it’s below the horizon.
It’s also a tiny bit odd that Simon Blake still can’t remember the protected characteristics in the Equality Act. He leaves out sex, belief, sexual orientation and gender reassignment – and yet inserts “gender”. Which is not a protected characteristic – as countless people have…
We should remember that at the heart of this judgment are, practically speaking, roughly 15,500 individuals with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). There are tens of thousands more who do not.
He’s forgotten between one sentence and the next how he has structured his argument. I think he means that the ruling could also affect tens of thousands more individuals, who “identify as” transgender, who are wwithout a GRC.
He has also forgotten that, “at the heart of the ruling,” are approximately 34.5 million women in the UK, who are discriminated against on the basis of their sex.
Trans people . . . are worried and frightened by the legal implications of the ruling, and its unknown consequences.
Trans people are “worried and frightened”?
1. Worried and frightened about what? Being misgendered? Not getting to terrorize/ogle/flash women and girls? Not getting to beat female athletes? Not being able to force everyone to “validate” them as the sex they’re not, otherwise known as lying about their sex? What?
2. Now, they just might have an inkling of how women and girls have been feeling for the last 10+ years. Why do the feelings of men matter so much more than the feelings of women?
It’s like the old saw about what men fear and what women fear from the opposite sex. Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will rape and/or kill them. Entirely different kettles of fish.
I think there is room for feminized men, like “trans women,” to reasonably fear male pattern violence against any man deemed insufficiently masculine. Gay men know this possibility all too well. However, that is a problem for the men to solve among themselves. Male on male violence has nothing to do with women. Women are not involved in whatever dynamic is going on. It’s therefore not women’s problem, and men are not entitled to drag women into the conflict between the men to serve as human shields.
If the men took the problem seriously, they could learn to live in peace together, whether they are gender-conforming or not. Among the arguments TRAs use to excuse their invasion of women’s bathrooms is that people who use the bathroom “just want to pee,” and it shouldn’t matter who else is in the bathroom; presumably, they also simply want to use the facility to take care of their personal business. Well, to the extent that constitutes an “argument,” it works just as well for transgender people in their same-sex bathroom as it does in an opposite-sex bathroom. Men who are transgender and men who are not transgender both “just want to pee,” and it shouldn’t matter whether the man next to them is transgender or not. Sauce for the gander(s). [“Gender ganders,” hah!] If trans identified males want to make it normal for men to cross-dress, then do it for real, in the men’s bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. The more men get used to the idea that there is more than one way to be a man, the safer it will be for all men. Then there will be nothing to fear.
As to being “frightened and worried” about the implications and consequences of the ruling, what implications and consequences? That men and boys are supposed to use the same male facilities they used all their lives, up until they decided they wanted to LARP as the other sex?
It is already clear that this ruling, whether you welcome it or not, raises more questions than it answers. Legal rulings are always specific – and this one from the Supreme Court relates specifically to the Equality Act. But like all landmark rulings, however carefully framed, interpretations snowball fast.
Raises more questions than it answers? Like what?
And even so, the one question it does answer is an exceedingly important one: that “sex,” for purposes of the Equalities Act 2010 means biological sex; women’s rights as the class oppressed on account of their sex, are actually protected under the EA. The “interpretation” pushed by Stonewall, for years, was incorrect. Stonewall and other TRA organizations were hell bent on destroying the right of women to have anything for women alone.
The question we must now ask our politicians, our regulators, and our legal fraternity is where do we go from here? And how can we find a solution swiftly to ensure that a marginalised group, many of whom already felt unsafe, feel protected in light of the judgment?
Where do we go from here? Back to the land of rationality, where facts remain facts. Sex is real, and it can’t be changed. What do you do now? Leave women’s spaces alone. Leave women’s sports alone. Leave women’s prisons.alone. Leave women’s shelters and counseling groups alone. Leave women’s “mothers groups” alone. Leave women’s or Lesbians’ social groups, dating apps, etc., alone. Men who call themselves women (and “lesbians”) should butt out of and quit intruding on everything women have established for themselves as a discrete interest group.
Quit falsifying public records, birth records, driver’s licenses, passports, medical records, crime reports, etc. Sex matters in all these contexts. Gender is irrelevant (except to the extent a person’s medical care includes “gender reassignment,” but even so, the patient’s true sex is the baseline of any recommended procedures).
That’s the least that it means about “where we go from here.”. If you want to know what else it may mean, read the decision. The Court gave examples of how a transgender person could make a claim under the EA for discrimination based on “gender reassignment,” and even on the basis of sex, if a transgender person were discriminated against on the basis of perceived sex.
The Equality Act (2010) was a groundbreaking piece of legislation, reflecting our national beliefs that people should be protected, among other things, because of race, religion, age, disability or gender. It seeks to deliver in law what our society, at its best, hopes for all its citizens – dignity and protection.
It’s hard to believe this is not deliberate: notably em>absent from the list of protected characteristics is “sex.” The meaning of that term, in the list of protected characteristics, was the singular purpose of the ruling. How could Stonewall CEO Simon Blake possibly overlook sex as a protected characteristic? Equally notably, Blake includes in the list of protected classes the characteristics of “gender,” when the Equality Act says no such thing. The protected characteristic is gender reassignment, NOT merely the weasel word “gender.” Always with the lies, pushing a false narrative.
And when has Stonewall, or any other T ideology purveyors, ever spared a thought for the dignity or protection of women? Or lesbians? Or gay men? Never in the last dozen years or so.
All for now. More to come. There is just SO MUCH wrong with Blake’s article.
Why do the feelings of men matter so much more than the feelings of women?
I assume this is strictly rhetorical.
I think there is room for feminized men, like “trans women,” to reasonably fear male pattern violence against any man deemed insufficiently masculine. Gay men know this possibility all too well. However, that is a problem for the men to solve among themselves.
In my husband’s school, the bullies left the gay boys alone. They bullied and terrorized boys like him who were heterosexual but not macho. Art-loving, book-reading, quiet, non-violent boys. I realize this is not always the pattern, but it does, to me, form the core of the argument maddog makes a little later:
The more men get used to the idea that there is more than one way to be a man, the safer it will be for all men. Then there will be nothing to fear.
So true. Not all bullied men are gay; not all gay men are bullied. But it is a problem that affects both of them, gay and non-gay men who are gender non-conforming or simply insufficiently masculine (by the definition of the bully).
Women are not involved in whatever dynamic is going on. It’s therefore not women’s problem, and men are not entitled to drag women into the conflict between the men to serve as human shields.
I can’t imagine anyone could possibly have said this better. Women have been expected to solve everyone’s problems (but their own) forever, and it’s time to lay off.
It [the For Women Scotland Supreme Court ruling] is purported to be ‘clarification’ of how the Equality Act should be interpreted. We now need to understand whether it is indeed clarifying, what its full impact will be, and how it can be practically applied within our intersecting laws and across our places and spaces, and communities.
Of course it “is indeed” clarifying. It needed clarification because the T brigade deliberately tried to erase sex as a protected characteristic altogether. First, they talked out of both sides of their mouths, vehemently upbraiding everyone for “conflating sex and gender,” when the two things are different and must be kept separate. In a supreme gaslighting move, T and their advocates constantly and purposely conflated gender (trans women) and sex (women) by chanting the lie that “Trans women are women!” and threatening, vilifying, ostracizing, bullying, harassing, and punishing anyone who disagreed. It was the gender critical objectors who scrupulously kept gender identity claims separate and distinct from sex. The terven were the ones who refused to conflate sex and gender.
The impact of the ruling should be to restore sanity when it comes to sex, just as things used to be 20 years ago. Where things are segregated by sex — bathrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, hospital wards, DV and rape crisis centers, sports teams, prisons, etc. — the ones for women will be occupied strictly by biological women. Once you let men into women’s spaces, they are no longer “women’s” spaces. By definition, duh. You’d have thought that would be blindingly obvious, but people have been cowed into denying what they see with their own eyes.
How can the ruling be “practically applied”? Quite easily. Where sex is a material characteristic, that takes precedence over someone’s false claim to be the sex they are not. A GRC doesn’t change your sex; it’s basically a claim about aesthetic preferences. You don’t get to falsify government records and vital statistics by lying about the sex of the person. A man’s sex will always be “M.” T and advocates might be able to campaign for an additional designation on documents such as driver’s licenses or passports for a separate “gender identity” category, but you don’t get to lie about your sex. If a man’s driver’s license says “Sex: M” and “Gender: TW,” that will go a long way to explaining why his driver’s license photo looks the way it does. “Practical application” of the ruling should be fairly simple and straightforward. Don’t lie; don’t lie about your sex.
[The Court’s] ruling directly impacts trans people who under the GRA have gone through the lengthy process of obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), which makes someone’s acquired gender their legal gender. . . . Individuals with a GRC – and indeed, without one – have likely spent years navigating difficult feelings about their bodies, navigated a series of challenging health processes and procedures to physically change their bodies, and then navigated the uncertainty of legal processes to be legally recognised. You do not have to agree, to demonstrate anything other than compassion for somebody who has been on that journey.
I think he means, “you don’t have to agree to demonstrate compassion . . . . ”
And he may be right about the sentiment, though not about its expression. I have complete compassion for people who experience body dysmorphia. Been there; done that; still do. But I recognize that, no matter how I feel about my body or my sex, I’m stuck with the one and only body I will ever have, and I’m stuck with the sex that my body is.
Some people who suffer body dysmorphia may undergo medical or surgical procedures to change their body. That is entirely elective, and those measures will do nothing to change anyone’s sex. I can have compassion for the emotional pain of the sufferer, but disapproval for medical practitioners who capitalize on the patient’s distress to steer the patient to a lifetime of medical treatment that will never achieve a change of sex. There’s no such thing as a “sex change operation.” The “gender affirming care” industry is lucrative for unscrupulous medical providers. They make healthy people into lifelong medical patients. Cross sex hormones can have deleterious effects on the body. Genital surgeries are painful, and result in frequent complications, requiring more painful surgeries. Preventing a dysphoric teenager from undergoing a perfectly natural maturation process stunts their development into functional adults. There’s only one puberty on offer — the one for your actual sex — and only a limited window to go through it. If you miss out on your puberty, it’s gone forever.
Transgender people may indeed have jumped through legal hoops to get a GRC, but getting a GRC doesn’t change your sex. Having been required to go through legal processes to get a certificate that can’t do what you want — it can’t change your sex — is something about which I can feel sympathy for the transgender person. They have been sold a bill of goods. That’s perhaps a good reason why many, if not most, transgender people have decided not to go the GRC route. I don’t blame them. No one should have to put themselves through hormonal or surgical body modification in order to express a gender preference.
The implication of the paragraph is not merely that everyone can understand and express compassion for difficulties other people have gone through: it is that “compassion” for the pain experienced by transgender people in their life’s journey must preclude all other feelings about transgenderism. You’re allowed — even required — to feel compassion for T people, and you’re forbidden from expressing any other emotion about them or what they do.
That’s not how emotions work. I can feel compassion for a murderer who was abused as a child, and still condemn his/her actions. I can still feel angry, disgusted, and appalled at what they have done. Compassion does not preclude all other feelings toward a person.
Yet, as a society, it could be argued we have channelled some of that fear and worry [over pandemics, loss of life, restrictions on freedoms during pandemic, economic uncertainty, belligerence and war] into a fixation on the perceived impact of a marginalised group, members of which many people have never knowingly met and who just want to live their lives with dignity and respect as we all do.
I *could* be argued, but not honestly. Transgender people may be a tiny group, but their advocates and allies have succeeded in infiltrating the highest echelons of the most powerful institutions. Their outsized influence is ubiquitous. Some transgender people may simply “want to live their lives with dignity and respect,” but the most vocal and most powerful elements are not content with that. No, the males and their advocates vociferously demand that they be given everything that belongs to women. They revel in rubbing women’s faces in the open violation of women’s boundaries and destruction of everything belonging to women. If it were really just about “living their lives with dignity and respect,” then they would stick to their side of the road, the side for their sex (not gender).
And that little fillip at the end, “who just want to live their lives with dignity and respect as we all do,” is a particular slap in the face to women. No dignity or respect afforded to women. Women don’t get to ” just live their lives with dignity and respect.”. Women’s boundaries mean nothing. Women’s wishes mean nothing. Profoundly disrespecting women, humiliating women, hating women, is the lion’s share of the fun of transgender doctrine. Women don’t get to have safety, privacy, dignity, respect, fairness, none of it. That’s the point for so many trans identified males.
For example, what does it mean for the future of the Equality Act? What does it mean for the Gender Recognition Act? What does it now mean to have a Gender Recognition Certificate? What does it mean for other intersecting legislation currently going through Parliament?
For the future of the Equality Act, it means that sex is a protected characteristic. It means that “gender reassignment” is different from sex. What it means for the Gender Recognition Act is probably that the GRA is pretty useless. You can get a certificate that says “trans woman,” but not one that uses the sex market, “female.” I think it renders a GRC practically meaningless. Gender reassignment doesn’t/can’t change your sex. So you don’t get to change your sex marker. You can only get a gender certificate. That means you can show you belong in men’s spaces even if you’re a man who cross-dressers. It explains why your driver’s license photo looks the way it does, when your sex is M. What it means for other intersecting legislation is that sex matters, and men can’t pretend to be a sex they are not.
We will be seeking practical answers about what this ruling means for trans people in their day-to-day lives. Like, what does it mean for a trans man with his young family in the swimming pool changing rooms? What does it mean for teenagers going on holiday abroad with their dad – or mum – who transitioned 15 years ago? What does it mean if you have a birth certificate with one gender and a passport with another? It will take time to work through, to understand and for further interpretations to come through the courts.
We will be seeking practical answers about what this ruling means for trans people in their day-to-day lives. Like, what does it mean for a trans man with his young family in the swimming pool changing rooms? What does it mean for teenagers going on holiday abroad with their dad – or mum – who transitioned 15 years ago? What does it mean if you have a birth certificate with one gender and a passport with another? It will take time to work through, to understand and for further interpretations to come through the courts.
What the ruling should mean for transgender people in their day-to-day lives is that they don’t get to lie about their sex. The trans man (ie, woman) with small children, should take them either into a single-space family bathroom, or into the women’s locker room. What it means for teenagers traveling with a transitioned parent is that the parent’s passport reflects their correct sex, no matter how long ago they “transitioned.” What it means about birth certificates and passports is that both will correctly reflect the person’s biological sex. It may mean that passports will eventually contain a separate designation for gender identity, but at the least it means that official documents will no longer have false and fraudulent sex representations on them.
As this process happens, we at Stonewall will be trying to keep the lives of trans people, who have a huge amount of support, at the heart of our questions. We will also be asking people to remember the importance of compassion and remind them of the national beliefs that drove the creation of the Equality Act.
Of course. Center the lives of trans people. Forget the people who brought you to the dance: gay men and lesbians. Who cares about them? Especially forget women. We all know that nobody cares about them. Yes, by all means ask people to remember the importance of compassion: compassion for the struggles of gay people to end criminal prohibition, compassion for women as the subordinated sex class. Not compassion for a tiny segment of society who show no compassion at all for anyone else. Perhaps, remind transgender people of the importance of compassion. The support for the Equality Act was not driven solely by transgender advocates. It was enacted to establish equality for a number of oppressed groups. Women are a large group of oppressed people for whom the Equality Act enacted protections. For actual women, not merely for men LARPing as women.
In big letters at the end:
Everyone should be protected and be able to live with dignity.
“Everyone” includes women. Women deserve to be protected and to live with dignity. Women cannot do so as long as men are allowed to infiltrate anything and everything set aside for women. Trans identifying men should leave women well alone. It’s their own excesses — claiming a change of sex rather than merely a gender identity — that brought this on.
So much wrong, so much ignorance, so much deliberate obtuseness, in Blake’s article.
He’s forgotten between one sentence and the next how he has structured his argument. I think he means that the ruling could also affect tens of thousands more individuals, who “identify as” transgender, who are wwithout a GRC.
He has also forgotten that, “at the heart of the ruling,” are approximately 34.5 million women in the UK, who are discriminated against on the basis of their sex.
Trans people are “worried and frightened”?
1. Worried and frightened about what? Being misgendered? Not getting to terrorize/ogle/flash women and girls? Not getting to beat female athletes? Not being able to force everyone to “validate” them as the sex they’re not, otherwise known as lying about their sex? What?
2. Now, they just might have an inkling of how women and girls have been feeling for the last 10+ years. Why do the feelings of men matter so much more than the feelings of women?
It’s like the old saw about what men fear and what women fear from the opposite sex. Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will rape and/or kill them. Entirely different kettles of fish.
I think there is room for feminized men, like “trans women,” to reasonably fear male pattern violence against any man deemed insufficiently masculine. Gay men know this possibility all too well. However, that is a problem for the men to solve among themselves. Male on male violence has nothing to do with women. Women are not involved in whatever dynamic is going on. It’s therefore not women’s problem, and men are not entitled to drag women into the conflict between the men to serve as human shields.
If the men took the problem seriously, they could learn to live in peace together, whether they are gender-conforming or not. Among the arguments TRAs use to excuse their invasion of women’s bathrooms is that people who use the bathroom “just want to pee,” and it shouldn’t matter who else is in the bathroom; presumably, they also simply want to use the facility to take care of their personal business. Well, to the extent that constitutes an “argument,” it works just as well for transgender people in their same-sex bathroom as it does in an opposite-sex bathroom. Men who are transgender and men who are not transgender both “just want to pee,” and it shouldn’t matter whether the man next to them is transgender or not. Sauce for the gander(s). [“Gender ganders,” hah!] If trans identified males want to make it normal for men to cross-dress, then do it for real, in the men’s bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. The more men get used to the idea that there is more than one way to be a man, the safer it will be for all men. Then there will be nothing to fear.
As to being “frightened and worried” about the implications and consequences of the ruling, what implications and consequences? That men and boys are supposed to use the same male facilities they used all their lives, up until they decided they wanted to LARP as the other sex?
Raises more questions than it answers? Like what?
And even so, the one question it does answer is an exceedingly important one: that “sex,” for purposes of the Equalities Act 2010 means biological sex; women’s rights as the class oppressed on account of their sex, are actually protected under the EA. The “interpretation” pushed by Stonewall, for years, was incorrect. Stonewall and other TRA organizations were hell bent on destroying the right of women to have anything for women alone.
Where do we go from here? Back to the land of rationality, where facts remain facts. Sex is real, and it can’t be changed. What do you do now? Leave women’s spaces alone. Leave women’s sports alone. Leave women’s prisons.alone. Leave women’s shelters and counseling groups alone. Leave women’s “mothers groups” alone. Leave women’s or Lesbians’ social groups, dating apps, etc., alone. Men who call themselves women (and “lesbians”) should butt out of and quit intruding on everything women have established for themselves as a discrete interest group.
Quit falsifying public records, birth records, driver’s licenses, passports, medical records, crime reports, etc. Sex matters in all these contexts. Gender is irrelevant (except to the extent a person’s medical care includes “gender reassignment,” but even so, the patient’s true sex is the baseline of any recommended procedures).
That’s the least that it means about “where we go from here.”. If you want to know what else it may mean, read the decision. The Court gave examples of how a transgender person could make a claim under the EA for discrimination based on “gender reassignment,” and even on the basis of sex, if a transgender person were discriminated against on the basis of perceived sex.
It’s hard to believe this is not deliberate: notably em>absent from the list of protected characteristics is “sex.” The meaning of that term, in the list of protected characteristics, was the singular purpose of the ruling. How could Stonewall CEO Simon Blake possibly overlook sex as a protected characteristic? Equally notably, Blake includes in the list of protected classes the characteristics of “gender,” when the Equality Act says no such thing. The protected characteristic is gender reassignment, NOT merely the weasel word “gender.” Always with the lies, pushing a false narrative.
And when has Stonewall, or any other T ideology purveyors, ever spared a thought for the dignity or protection of women? Or lesbians? Or gay men? Never in the last dozen years or so.
All for now. More to come. There is just SO MUCH wrong with Blake’s article.
I assume this is strictly rhetorical.
In my husband’s school, the bullies left the gay boys alone. They bullied and terrorized boys like him who were heterosexual but not macho. Art-loving, book-reading, quiet, non-violent boys. I realize this is not always the pattern, but it does, to me, form the core of the argument maddog makes a little later:
So true. Not all bullied men are gay; not all gay men are bullied. But it is a problem that affects both of them, gay and non-gay men who are gender non-conforming or simply insufficiently masculine (by the definition of the bully).
I can’t imagine anyone could possibly have said this better. Women have been expected to solve everyone’s problems (but their own) forever, and it’s time to lay off.
Of course it “is indeed” clarifying. It needed clarification because the T brigade deliberately tried to erase sex as a protected characteristic altogether. First, they talked out of both sides of their mouths, vehemently upbraiding everyone for “conflating sex and gender,” when the two things are different and must be kept separate. In a supreme gaslighting move, T and their advocates constantly and purposely conflated gender (trans women) and sex (women) by chanting the lie that “Trans women are women!” and threatening, vilifying, ostracizing, bullying, harassing, and punishing anyone who disagreed. It was the gender critical objectors who scrupulously kept gender identity claims separate and distinct from sex. The terven were the ones who refused to conflate sex and gender.
The impact of the ruling should be to restore sanity when it comes to sex, just as things used to be 20 years ago. Where things are segregated by sex — bathrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, hospital wards, DV and rape crisis centers, sports teams, prisons, etc. — the ones for women will be occupied strictly by biological women. Once you let men into women’s spaces, they are no longer “women’s” spaces. By definition, duh. You’d have thought that would be blindingly obvious, but people have been cowed into denying what they see with their own eyes.
How can the ruling be “practically applied”? Quite easily. Where sex is a material characteristic, that takes precedence over someone’s false claim to be the sex they are not. A GRC doesn’t change your sex; it’s basically a claim about aesthetic preferences. You don’t get to falsify government records and vital statistics by lying about the sex of the person. A man’s sex will always be “M.” T and advocates might be able to campaign for an additional designation on documents such as driver’s licenses or passports for a separate “gender identity” category, but you don’t get to lie about your sex. If a man’s driver’s license says “Sex: M” and “Gender: TW,” that will go a long way to explaining why his driver’s license photo looks the way it does. “Practical application” of the ruling should be fairly simple and straightforward. Don’t lie; don’t lie about your sex.
Whoops, the link seems to have gone wonky …
Ah, it’s working again now.
I think he means, “you don’t have to agree to demonstrate compassion . . . . ”
And he may be right about the sentiment, though not about its expression. I have complete compassion for people who experience body dysmorphia. Been there; done that; still do. But I recognize that, no matter how I feel about my body or my sex, I’m stuck with the one and only body I will ever have, and I’m stuck with the sex that my body is.
Some people who suffer body dysmorphia may undergo medical or surgical procedures to change their body. That is entirely elective, and those measures will do nothing to change anyone’s sex. I can have compassion for the emotional pain of the sufferer, but disapproval for medical practitioners who capitalize on the patient’s distress to steer the patient to a lifetime of medical treatment that will never achieve a change of sex. There’s no such thing as a “sex change operation.” The “gender affirming care” industry is lucrative for unscrupulous medical providers. They make healthy people into lifelong medical patients. Cross sex hormones can have deleterious effects on the body. Genital surgeries are painful, and result in frequent complications, requiring more painful surgeries. Preventing a dysphoric teenager from undergoing a perfectly natural maturation process stunts their development into functional adults. There’s only one puberty on offer — the one for your actual sex — and only a limited window to go through it. If you miss out on your puberty, it’s gone forever.
Transgender people may indeed have jumped through legal hoops to get a GRC, but getting a GRC doesn’t change your sex. Having been required to go through legal processes to get a certificate that can’t do what you want — it can’t change your sex — is something about which I can feel sympathy for the transgender person. They have been sold a bill of goods. That’s perhaps a good reason why many, if not most, transgender people have decided not to go the GRC route. I don’t blame them. No one should have to put themselves through hormonal or surgical body modification in order to express a gender preference.
The implication of the paragraph is not merely that everyone can understand and express compassion for difficulties other people have gone through: it is that “compassion” for the pain experienced by transgender people in their life’s journey must preclude all other feelings about transgenderism. You’re allowed — even required — to feel compassion for T people, and you’re forbidden from expressing any other emotion about them or what they do.
That’s not how emotions work. I can feel compassion for a murderer who was abused as a child, and still condemn his/her actions. I can still feel angry, disgusted, and appalled at what they have done. Compassion does not preclude all other feelings toward a person.
I *could* be argued, but not honestly. Transgender people may be a tiny group, but their advocates and allies have succeeded in infiltrating the highest echelons of the most powerful institutions. Their outsized influence is ubiquitous. Some transgender people may simply “want to live their lives with dignity and respect,” but the most vocal and most powerful elements are not content with that. No, the males and their advocates vociferously demand that they be given everything that belongs to women. They revel in rubbing women’s faces in the open violation of women’s boundaries and destruction of everything belonging to women. If it were really just about “living their lives with dignity and respect,” then they would stick to their side of the road, the side for their sex (not gender).
And that little fillip at the end, “who just want to live their lives with dignity and respect as we all do,” is a particular slap in the face to women. No dignity or respect afforded to women. Women don’t get to ” just live their lives with dignity and respect.”. Women’s boundaries mean nothing. Women’s wishes mean nothing. Profoundly disrespecting women, humiliating women, hating women, is the lion’s share of the fun of transgender doctrine. Women don’t get to have safety, privacy, dignity, respect, fairness, none of it. That’s the point for so many trans identified males.
For the future of the Equality Act, it means that sex is a protected characteristic. It means that “gender reassignment” is different from sex. What it means for the Gender Recognition Act is probably that the GRA is pretty useless. You can get a certificate that says “trans woman,” but not one that uses the sex market, “female.” I think it renders a GRC practically meaningless. Gender reassignment doesn’t/can’t change your sex. So you don’t get to change your sex marker. You can only get a gender certificate. That means you can show you belong in men’s spaces even if you’re a man who cross-dressers. It explains why your driver’s license photo looks the way it does, when your sex is M. What it means for other intersecting legislation is that sex matters, and men can’t pretend to be a sex they are not.
We will be seeking practical answers about what this ruling means for trans people in their day-to-day lives. Like, what does it mean for a trans man with his young family in the swimming pool changing rooms? What does it mean for teenagers going on holiday abroad with their dad – or mum – who transitioned 15 years ago? What does it mean if you have a birth certificate with one gender and a passport with another? It will take time to work through, to understand and for further interpretations to come through the courts.
What the ruling should mean for transgender people in their day-to-day lives is that they don’t get to lie about their sex. The trans man (ie, woman) with small children, should take them either into a single-space family bathroom, or into the women’s locker room. What it means for teenagers traveling with a transitioned parent is that the parent’s passport reflects their correct sex, no matter how long ago they “transitioned.” What it means about birth certificates and passports is that both will correctly reflect the person’s biological sex. It may mean that passports will eventually contain a separate designation for gender identity, but at the least it means that official documents will no longer have false and fraudulent sex representations on them.
As this process happens, we at Stonewall will be trying to keep the lives of trans people, who have a huge amount of support, at the heart of our questions. We will also be asking people to remember the importance of compassion and remind them of the national beliefs that drove the creation of the Equality Act.
Of course. Center the lives of trans people. Forget the people who brought you to the dance: gay men and lesbians. Who cares about them? Especially forget women. We all know that nobody cares about them. Yes, by all means ask people to remember the importance of compassion: compassion for the struggles of gay people to end criminal prohibition, compassion for women as the subordinated sex class. Not compassion for a tiny segment of society who show no compassion at all for anyone else. Perhaps, remind transgender people of the importance of compassion. The support for the Equality Act was not driven solely by transgender advocates. It was enacted to establish equality for a number of oppressed groups. Women are a large group of oppressed people for whom the Equality Act enacted protections. For actual women, not merely for men LARPing as women.
In big letters at the end:
Everyone should be protected and be able to live with dignity.
“Everyone” includes women. Women deserve to be protected and to live with dignity. Women cannot do so as long as men are allowed to infiltrate anything and everything set aside for women. Trans identifying men should leave women well alone. It’s their own excesses — claiming a change of sex rather than merely a gender identity — that brought this on.
So much wrong, so much ignorance, so much deliberate obtuseness, in Blake’s article.