This is the second of the occasional ‘timesavers’ series I promised I’d write because after the Supreme Court ruling clarifying the categories of protected characteristics in the 2010 Equality Act, all the old myths were going around again and, like many women I know, I didn’t really want have to constantly repeat all the same (should be) obvious rebuttals.

Yesterday, I was treated once again to that old brush-off, suggesting that the women’s rights campaign is not worthy of attention because transwomen are such a tiny proportion of the population. So (sigh) here’s the answer to that, (again)…

That’s only true if you’ve swallowed the idea that the women’s rights campaign is ‘anti-trans’.

In fact, the campaign is ‘anti-self-ID’.

Most people still don’t have a very clear idea of what is meant by ‘transwomen’. If they’re thinking of those mature males who make an informed decision to undergo extensive surgery and a lifetime of hormone treatments, combined with donning what they perceive as feminine clothes and make up, and learning a new way of walking and talking, in order to appear more like women, sure they’re a very small proportion of the population and, if the women’s rights campaign was all about them, it might be understandable if people think it’s a storm in a teacup.

The MPs who passed the original Gender Recognition Act (2004) are on record as believing they were setting something up for that tiny proportion of the population. When the question was raised about whether they were creating a risk to women, they answered themselves that that didn’t matter because transwomen were such a tiny number of people.

But they also conceded along the way that not everyone would or could do all those things I describe above, so they didn’t make surgical or chemical transition a condition for receipt of a Gender Recognition Certificate (nor did they do anything to prevent registered sex offenders picking one up). We were left with a situation where there was absolutely no basis for the safeguarding that had been there specifically to protect women and girls.

That’s why the sex exemption in the 2010 Equality Act was a necessary follow-up, and that’s why when Stonewall et al started touting self-ID, we needed a Judicial Review to clarify that sex means sex, and cannot automatically be cancelled out merely by a man announcing that he’s a woman.

 So, the women’s campaign is not addressing transwomen in particular, but the government and the many organisations that decided to accept that an obviously male person was a woman purely on their say-so. As a result, there was a whole set of tiny proportions of the population that immediately became a serious problem for women and girls. Here are some of them:

Tiny group one: Sex offenders who suddenly discover they’re women after they see they’re heading for prison, where they’ll be recognised as ‘nonces’

Did you know that most of the notorious individuals who made the headlines for finding their way into women’s prisons, ‘Isla Bryson’, for example, come into this category? How many in-tact male rapists do you think should get away with being locked up with women before our campaign against self-ID is justified?

In fact, a disproportionately large number of transwomen who are in jail are sex offenders. That’s not a fact that’s often stated, because it invariably leads to ‘progressive’ activists accusing women of calling transwomen predators so, please consider this: do you think it’s likely that a larger than average proportion of transwomen are sex offenders, or do you think the kind of men who find themselves heading for a jail term for sexual violence decide it’s worth claiming to be a woman to avoid getting nonces’ desserts in a male institution?

Personally, I think it’s the latter which means that, as well as the problem of self-ID messing up male violence statistics for women trying to address that problem, it also messes up the statistics for transwomen, by making it appear they’re likely to be sex-offenders.

Tiny group two: Mediocre male athletes in their 40s who decide to get another bite at the cherry by entering women’s competitions

They have become a problem for two reasons – firstly, in team sports such as rugby, their presence immediately and exponentially increases the risk of injury to women players, and secondly, despite all the parallel myths that have been put about to mask cheating, men have a significantly different musculoskeletal framework to women, and are more robust as a result. There is no significant overlap, and the presence of even a few of them in athletics, for example, makes it highly unlikely women and girls will be able to win the big competitions.

In this video, the Sex Matters team go over the history and consequences of males in female sports…

Tiny group three: Male ‘women’ going into schools representing trans lobby groups

Such people are immediately a safeguarding risk because schools and parents tend to be less vigilant when they believe a woman is going into their school than when they know it’s a man, but also because they tend to be there to sell children the idea that ‘sex change’ might be the best answer to a host of adolescent miseries. The recent Cass Report adds evidence to what women have long suspected, that this strategy has led autistic and nascent lesbian girls to think they are ‘boys really’, and led many young abuse victims to attempt sex-change as a (sadly ineffective) way to escape the symptoms of PTSD.

In the video below, the late Magdalen Berns (“I’d rather be rude than be a liar”) addresses the dodgy ideas one such school visitor (a rep on behalf of Stonewall) was peddling.

And yes, they manage to capture boys as well as girls – here’s Richie Herron, talking about the consequences of that…

Many a mickle makes a muckle

Those are just a few examples of tiny proportions of the population who, combined, have caused an ocean of problems, mostly for women and girls. The point is, of course, if you make it possible for a man to be treated as a woman just on his say-so, ruthless men will make use of that when they see an opportunity. There does not have to be very many of them to create a significant problem for all of us.

This was ‘timesavers’ article number two.

The first one was in response to the horribly common argument that inflicting safeguarding checks on self-declared trans people is ‘exclusionary’…

…there will be more, as and when I come across the old arguments. Please feel free to share them wherever you see those conversations surfacing yet again, and feel free to drop me a message if you see any other spurious arguments against the women’s rights campaign doing the rounds.

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