I am appalled by the dramatic nonsense being bandied around over this week’s judicial review about the Equality Act. It’s not just the gender ideology cultists, although they are out there spouting turbo-charged nonsense. It’s those MPs, journos and high-profile commentators who still, incredibly, write, speak and tweet on this topic with no regard for what the law actually says.
Some said trans people have lost ‘all their rights’. That’s nonsense, and does nothing but inflame the wrong-headed outrage of those who are determined to enforce illogical beliefs. Worse, it stokes the fears of trans people, when the media bash on about ‘a tide of transphobia’.
Others said trans people ‘still’ have the right to inhabit single-sex spaces at will. That is not, and never was, true.
A very brief history
There have always been people who change their names and dress in clothes typical of the opposite sex and, for over a century, a few of them (a very few) attempt some form of physical and/or hormonal ‘transition’. That was going on long before there was any legislation about it — but there is now, and has been since the GRA. Trans people have been, and are, a darned sight safer here than they were in the US (where trans campaigners mostly get their scare-tactic violence-and-murder stats from). That was so before Trump’s maniacs came along, and is still so now.
The UK Gender Recognition Act created certificates of ‘gender reassignment’ in 2004. It never required any kind of medical ‘transition’. During the debate on the act, MPs asked each other whether they were creating a risk to women. They concluded that they were, but there weren’t many trans people so it didn’t matter (I don’t think they said how many women need to be put in danger before it matters). Some of them are the same MPs who are now insisting that compromising sex-based rights for women is not at all dangerous.
The GRA basically made a nonsense of women’s rights and of sex-discrimination law and so, after a lot of lobbying by women’s groups, the Equality Act was passed in 2010, to provide legal protection for a range of vulnerable groups, including women and trans people. Unfortunately, it too contained some shoddy language, used the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in different ways in different places, and left scope for confusion over definitions. That confusion is what fueled most of the battles that followed.
It was generally assumed though, that the exceptions in the act to allow for single-sex spaces and services for men and for women, applied to male and female people respectively. If they didn’t, it would be hard to see what purpose they served.
And when discussing issues of gender-reassignment, most people assumed (wrongly) that they were talking about people who were ‘committed’ to living as the opposite sex and had, or were in the process of undergoing, a medical transition. That’s why most women willingly accepted and protected trans people.
A few years later, Maria Miller MP headed a parliamentary committee to consider, amongst other things, bringing the notion of ‘gender identity’ into law, despite the fact that the concept was (and still is) innocent of any evidenced definition. The committee received a submission from Stonewall recommending that the parts of the Equality Act referring to sex be scrapped and replaced by provisions according to gender identity, in order to give an ‘access all spaces’ pass to trans people.
That’s how we know that everyone, including Stonewall, thought the 2010 Act was intended to refer to sex, not gender.
Why would the trans lobby want to remove the sex exception if it didn’t mean sex? That’s why there’s no reason for all the shouting this week, when a judicial review finally looked at the confusion around those definitions, and sorted it out.
So, the sex scams:
Having failed to gain ‘access all areas’ via parliament, those who are determined to side-line sex-based rights and exceptions, turned back to the various scams and deceptions that had been going on less visibly for some time, with the aim of persuading people that sex was ‘complicated’ or not significant. There were three biggies:
1. The ‘intersex’ trick
It is unbelievable that people with DSDs still get dragged into this argument. Please, please go talk to some qualified medical people. ‘Intersex’ is an old-fashioned (and inappropriate) name for people with DSD conditions. There are not hordes of people going around whose sex sits somewhere mysteriously between male and female. There are, quite simply, variations within the categories of male and female respectively, many of which come with quite serious co-morbidities. They are physiological conditions, and have absolutely no place in the trans ‘debate’.
Terms like ‘sex assigned at birth’ and ‘AFAB’ have traditionally been used when discussing DSD cases, but have been appropriated by trans activists trying to cast smoke and mirrors into debates about ‘sexual identity’. Forget it. Sex is not an identity. It is just how mammals work – they are male or female, and they stay that way. And please forget about sea horses, clownfish, mushrooms etc. They are not mammals, and their sex categories do not work like ours.
Here’s a piece I put together when transactivists, journalists and MPs were busy talking crap about the last Olympic Games….
2. The toilets trick
Does this person believe what they’re saying…..?
This is another one no MP should be ignorant enough to fall for.
There is not, and has never been, any law about who uses which toilets. No-one ever went to jail for using ‘the wrong’ toilet. The only law there is about toilets is that councils and government organizations must provide male and female toilets. There is no legal enforcement over who uses them, just social norms that people build or break down according to the mood of society generally. On private property, and in pubs, restaurants and so on, owners are free to make whatever rules they like – again, that has always been so – and I assure you, business owners will seek to do what their customers want. They always have. And in extremis, we all use any loo we can find — we always have and we always will.
If you really want more on toilets…..!
Click here for a toilets article from 2023
Click here for a toilets article from 2022
As for people mistaking butch lesbians for men — well, that’s always happened, so no change there. What’s more troublesome these days is those people who yell ‘oi, you look like a bloke. When you going to transition?’ That’s how sexist gender-ideology is.
Oh, and there is no law on this earth that says you can’t invite males into your women’s club if you want to. All that is required of you is that you let women know that’s what you’re doing, so they don’t join thinking they’re entering a single-sex environment.
3. The distressed girls trick
It is well documented that girls often find adolescence traumatic and that some, especially if they’ve been abused, or sexualized before they’re ready, go into denial. Some figure out that if they starve themselves, they can stave off breast-growth, prevent those attention-grabbing curves developing, and stop their periods.
That behaviour looked different in different centuries. In medieval times, they often presented as religious phenomena (starvation is great for inducing religious visions); in the Victorian era, psychic effects and poltergeist activity were popular; then in the 20th century, diet pills and eating disorders. Nowadays, trauma and denial of impending womanhood are read as ‘gender dysphoria’, and irreversible hormone treatments and surgeries have been offered. All those reactions could be lethal for girls. The lucky ones, perhaps those who had supportive families or friends, would grow up through it, and make peace with themselves somewhere around their mid-twenties. They have been a bit safer since the Cass Report was released. The notion that those girls are endangered by this extensive and well-researched Report is based on the nonsense put about by MPs, journos and commentators when it was published.
The only criticism I personally have with the report, and with the way things are going now, is that the government is willing to put another thousand or more youngsters through the mincer of a clinical trial, despite the build up of ‘detranstitioners’ we’ve heard from, many of whom say that puberty blockers did not make them feel any better, and in fact can make a future transition more difficult, and that girls taking testosterone risk lifelong health problems as a result. Still, I guess the trials will make a nice pot of money for Wes Streeting’s corporate healthcare chums.
Sauce for the goose
There is another reason why I find it utterly infuriating that so much of the wailing is around women’s toilets. Do you remember Eddie Izzard’s ‘brave’ coming out story? All about how a couple of young teens laughed at him in a women’s toilet, but he courageously faced them down and they ran off? Well that’s how he told it, and how gender-ideologists received it, and a good example of how the media tend to spin stories to the detriment of women and girls.
Many women heard Izzard’s story differently. They heard a story about a famous, wealthy, confident man who likes attention doing battle with a couple of girls for possession of the female toilets, and winning.
Oh, hooray.
Let’s just think shall we, about the amount of the fuss in this campaign has been aimed at breaking down WOMEN’S boundaries so that MEN can do exactly as they like. For the first few years of the self-ID campaign, their slogan was always TRANSWOMEN ARE WOMEN. They didn’t give a flying fart what was happening to transmen (that is, females). They added them to the campaign when they realized we’d sussed out theirs was entirely a ‘men’s rights’ campaign, and women were the targets, then added non-binary when they saw which way the wind was blowing.
By the by, congratulations to those probably-lesbian youngsters who dodged the trans press gang by declaring themselves non-binary. I sincerely hope it works out for you.
The whole great, stinking gender ideology scam
The intersex trick has, for decades, allowed men into women’s sports. Women have nothing to gain by tricking their way into men’s sports.
The toilets trick sought male access to women’s toilets. Trans men (that is, females) often opt for women’s toilets (and prisons, and refuges) anyway, because – as we all know, it’s men who can be dangerous; not all men, but enough for the risk to be significant. And they don’t stop being dangerous just because some poor girl says she’s a man.
The distressed girls trick has used traumatized teenage girls as cover for the real forces in the gender ideology movement. How is it that the line for men transitioning has always been that they’re women the minute they say they are, but for girls, it’s ‘oh, she’s a boy really – she must have surgery and hormones andandand…’ etc?
Because the girls are the guinea pigs and the men are the beneficiaries of the sympathy those troubled girls get, that’s why. Males do what they want, women get told to ‘be kind’ and move over, and the private health industry makes a fortune out of all the resulting misery and confusion.
Be kind
So for heaven’s sake, let’s be kind. Stop scaring the living daylights out of trans people by writing scaremongering articles and going on about ‘a tide of transphobia’. Stop abusing women who have honestly been campaigning for child-safeguarding and fair dos for women. Just remember that people who want to dress/live/act ‘as the opposite sex’ were doing so long before gender ideology raised its head and started a war. We can and will keep our own boundaries, and live together.
All that has changed is that a much-needed judicial review has ironed out some vaguaries in the Equality Act that had been causing a clash between it and the provisions of the GRA. That clash was what was causing most of the rows over women’s rights. Now, the law is clear.
Sure, go out and show your support for trans people. I daresay they’ll be glad of it, while all this noise is going on but it’d be nice to see the same passionate levels of support for lesbians, for immigrant women, for women in prisons and hostels, and for women and girls who are victims of male violence, all of whom have had an equally anxious time, and been victims of a heck of a lot more serious violence during the last decade, while the sex-based rights and services that were meant to help them have been compromised by all this confusion, and mired in battles against ideological defunding, government threats and corporate take-overs.
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Kay Green 