More on respectIf you want a discussion, it needs to be respectful or I won’t be there.
But it an be argued (and I would indeed argue) that none of what you’re doing, what anyone involved in GRA reform etc is doing, is respectful to women.
You disrespect us by the very act of - as a biologically male person - appropriating the material reality of biologically female people and claiming it as an identity for you to use as you please. In the context of age old male oppression of female people, where males have traditionally extracted whatever resources they want from female people without concerning themselves with the issue of consent, this is just another assault on our human rights. As always, we are objects to be used by male people; not subjects with full agency.
When you make use of facilities designated for female people, and campaign for ever wider access to those facilities for more and more male people - which is the net result of GRR in tandem with self ID in general - you are again disrespecting us.
Biologically male people who respect biologically female people, and acknowledge the ways female people have been systematically hurt and disadvantaged by male rule across the generations, respect our boundaries.
I for one see no reason at all why I should respect biologically male people who don’t respect me, or biologically female people in general.
more
I think the point for me is that any man who claims to be a woman is demonstrating loud and clear that he has incredibly disordered views about women.
That’s not against the law or anything. I’ve worked with plenty of men with pretty weird views on women and, of necessity, muddled along OK.
but if those men get a say in women’s lives, it will not go well for women. As we’ve seen demonstrated in that interview by Robin clearly believing that women have no right to single sex spaces and are in fact ‘mad’ for even wanting such things...
I think we’ve all been reluctant to say that by definition trans people have disordered views about sex because it feels like a sweeping generalisation and we get told they are bad
but insisting that you are a member of the opposite sex, something that is literally impossible, does of course reveal disordered thinking.
how could it not?
There are many different types of trans activists. There are the ones who hold signs saying “decapitate terfs”. There are the ones who wear black masks and hoods and physically and verbally attack women speaking. There are the ones online who post abuse. There are the ones that scream at babies (that one is unique I grant you). Then there’s the ones like Robin.
Robin is the walking embodiment of the Dentons document. Robin shares all the same views as the black masked violent activists - that women don’t deserve single sex spaces, that women are witches, that children should be sterilised in order to validate Robin’s beliefs - but does it through a veneer of respectability. Robin ties those beliefs to the legitimacy of being a barrister, uses the gravitas of age and experience to perpetuate the very same ideas that mask-wearing teenagers do. This is what the Dentons document advises to do.
And Robin has had years to consider all this. This is not an impulsive jumping on the activist bandwagon. Robin has knowledge, experience and intelligence and isn’t doing to be part of a group, to be seen as inclusive, as part of peer pressure, or social contagion, or the misplaced anger of youth like so many of the mask-wearing, abusive sign-carrying activists. Robin is doing it as part of a calculated campaign.
I find people like this a great deal more dangerous to the rights of women and children that those impressionable young people who stand at the front of it all.
Robin spoke at the end about the awfulness of puberty for trans people and how stopping puberty would have enabled Robin to have a feminised voice. This is a classic example of why trans activists should never be allowed to influence health care and treatment of children. Like so many activists, Robin sees this from a personal perspective. They have no insight / knowledge of children and adolescence and think that some children avoiding puberty is a good thing.
This is why the NHS / the DfE are so dangerous having allowed trans activists to influence practice. It's why safeguarding children is being systematically eroded - the special trans treatment in the DBS, drag queens for children, the focus on porn in SRE etc. Not saying RMW has advocated for the latter - just pointing out how adults with an agenda have been given an influence that works against the needs of children.
A Narcissist's Prayer of the decapitation signAlways keep receipts.
Britain is becoming sick over the trans debate – Nick Timothy Imagine the outrage if, after the discovery that yet another rapist had been found amid the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, the Commissioner had told women to calm down. “The vast majority of officers,” he might have told protesters, “are likely to be safe.”
The thought is preposterous. Yet it is the very argument made by those defending Scottish legislation that would allow people to change their gender in law without existing safeguards. Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor under Tony Blair, dismissed the complaints of those concerned about the privacy and safety of women, saying, “The vast majority of [applicants] are likely to be genuine.”
Trans self-ID since 2015 — and no horror storiesRight off the bat I would consider all the women terrified by rapists in their prisons to be horror stories, all the women who have lost their jobs and endured death and rape threats for not believing in self-ID and having the temerity to say so to be horror stories, the sexually assaulted woman harassed and then refused a female-only life-saving operation of which she’d been assured — endangering her life — to be a horror story.
The rape victim in Brighton forced to share a therapy group with a seemingly prurient male is a horror story. The police door stepping women for putting up mild factual stickers is a horror story. A guillotine on a placard is a horror story. Spitting at women is a horror story. Punching women at Speaker’s Corner is a horror story. Shutting down feminist talks at multiple universities is a horror story. Males taking medals from sportswomen and women writers alike is a horror story. Adolescent males being roomed with females on Girl Guide sleep-aways is a horror story. Calling all powerful female icons “non-females” in our theatres is even a horror story.
We are living in a horror story.
The Labour Party has a woman problem –
Rosie DuffieldThey think the transgender debate is nothing more than a culture-war issue. A weapon used by the Tories to whip up division. It is a smokescreen that has nothing to do with women’s rights. Ordinary people don’t care about mixed-sex changing rooms. Or the prospect of men entering women’s refuges. Or the erasure of the word “cervix”. What this debate is
really about, women are told, is bigotry and prejudice.
‘It might never happen, love’ is no basis for law – Janice TurnerThen there are the angry men who can’t even bear to hear women’s voices. No debate. Shut up, bitch. Sit down, bigot. We’ll ban your meeting, ignore your legal submissions.
Women have had years of this now. “Keep Mumsnet out of politics,” said a placard at a demonstration where Russell-Moyle shared a platform with the trans woman Sarah Jane Baker, who served 30 years in prison for kidnap and attempted murder. Boring old mums, pesky women seeing through the GRR’s outrageous misogyny and sophistry to say: this is our business.
Gender reform bill has betrayed lesbians – Sally WainwrightWe have been betrayed by ideologically captured groups and individuals who should have spoken for us. Scottish politicians too have mainly closed their eyes, ears and minds to what is happening; blinded by the inexplicably attractive ideology of “gender identity” and deafened by the shrill shrieks* of outraged male entitlement. Politicians who simply don’t care about women, especially lesbians, at all.
* Most of these guys do strike me as hysterical, just not ha ha hysterical.[AIBU] To find media discussion about trans issues far overstated compared to the actual seriousness of the issue?There's very little point replying to this obviously goady thread but I will anyway, for the lurkers. And I will explain this as a woman, living in Scotland.
There's a reason that the GRR Bill is being referred to as the 'Rapist's Charter' here in Scotland.
www.nationalreview.com/news/transgender-sex-offenders-placed-in-womens-jails-in-scotland/
archive.ph/2022.10.04-232359/www.thetimes.co.uk/article/half-of-scottish-trans-prisoners-changed-gender-after-convictions-pftqbbhg6
www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/anger-trans-inmates-revert-males-25840252
The reforms to the GRC will make it even easier for predators to take advantage of self id. The SNP, Scottish Greens, Lib Dems and Scottish Labour voted against suggested amendments being put in place to restrict sex offenders from changing their gender, including -
an amendment to pause an application for a GRC for those charged with rape or sexual assault which was defeated by the casting vote of the Presiding Officer.
An amendment which sought to prevent convicted sex offenders being allowed to change their gender.
There were over 150 amendments, discussed over a ridiculously short 2 days, with the majority voted down, including a suggestion to yearly monitor the effects of the GRR Bill on women and girls rights.
The Scottish Government's hand was forced at the 11th hour to hold an additional evidence session because they had refused to hear from experts on VAWG. The 'feminist' groups in support of the bill are all majority funded by the Scottish Government (as reported in various news sources yesterday). Funding from the Scottish Government is contingent on being 'inclusive' which is why there are currently no single sex rape crisis services in the Lothians. The one which is in the process of being set up and has used the single sex exemptions allowed in the EQA2010 is being threatened with challenges for 'discrimination' - this is far from the only example - organisations are being informed (falsely) by lobby groups and others are facing the silencing effect.
The Scottish Government was warned repeatedly that the legislation was poor and conflicted with reserved legislation. They ignored it in their zeal to push it through and now section 35 has had to be invoked.
The SNP had to whip its members into voting for the Bill and even then, faced the biggest revolt by SNP MSP's since they came to power.
The Scottish electorate do not support this bill. There's been a hell of a lot of sunlight on this issue. There's real anger and dismay at the Scottish Government now.
The 'anti-TERF' misogyny that has contaminated the SNP – Kevin McKennaAnd so in Scotland an entire political class has been captured by a lie. And what a convenient lie. It frees them from having to do anything truly radical, or life-changing. And it masks their own abject failures in achieving anything substantive for Scotland’s most marginalised communities whom they’ve abandoned in favour of a middle-class caprice.
The Grooming of Holyrood