u/lilpij

trans women’s hypervisibility coming at the expense of trans men once again, sigh

Free speech is for the Linehans of the world, not for people like you.

I’ve made similar posts a few times, but it’s never a bad time to shout about this!

The recently approved EHRC guidance tells service providers (e.g. a restaurant, a library, a swimming pool) that they need to segregate trans people to be compliant with the Equality Act. It does not tell service users to do anything.

If you’re wondering where you stand, as a user of services, after this guidance is commenced - don’t. That’s not your job to figure out. Continue doing exactly what you’re doing, as you always have done, until you’re made aware of policy changes by service providers. Whether you comply from that point is up to you, but until you are made aware of a change in policy - you are completely fine. Even after being made aware, you’re probably fine, but you carry the risk of being removed from the revenue, and having the police called if you don’t comply with that.

You don’t need to comply in advance.

I’m in the midst of achieving bottom surgery and part of that, in the UK, is obtaining two letters from professionals confirming that you meet the criteria.

While speaking to one of the “professionals”, I was asked how I identify - and I said “female”. She did not like this, going off on a condescending rant about how “female is the term for sex and I must’ve meant woman”. Thankfully, I have a background in biomedical science, so was able to hold my own in countering that nonsense - we change our sex.

Sex is a social construct. It’s based on real, observable biological characteristics - but the decision to group these characteristics into two discrete boxes is entirely sociological, rather than rooted in some holy science. Biologically, sex is a spectrum and we move further along that spectrum every time we make changes to our body. My hormone profile (which accounts for a huge part of how the body behaves) is more aligned with the female sex, my secondary sex characteristics are more aligned with the female sex, and clearly there’s something going on with my brain that is more aligned with the female sex. Soon, my primary sex characteristics will align with the female sex.

The decision to label me as “biologically male”: based entirely on immutable, unobserved characteristics (like chromosomes) is ideological. It’s worked backwards from the question “how do we define sex in a way that doesn’t include trans people?” and it would change overnight if we invented a surgery that modified chromosomes.

With this in mind, I was shocked to see bottom surgery referred to as “Gender Confirmation Surgery” on this letter. Even more shocked to see that this has been the official term for it for a while now. What does that even mean? I’m not getting this surgery to “confirm” or to “affirm” my gender, I’m doing it to further the process of changing my sex!!

The title is provocative. Of course “sex change” is grossly simplistic and implies that trans people who don’t undergo it aren’t changing their sex in any way. There’s a similar issue with “sex reassignment surgery”. But I’d take the flaws of those over the current status quo, which seems to be a way of manufacturing consent for the idea that we don’t change sex - which is so important for modern day transphobes to pull unscientific “you’re biological males” crap.

I was assigned male at birth and have transitioned into a woman. However, I really resonate with the AFAB experience. Is it okay for me to call myself an AFAB trans woman?

Just in case anybody needed a reminder that The Guardian are still scum.

“Leo goes to work and is admonished for being annoyed by pronouns by one of his transgender staff, Zee (Iz Hesketh), who turns out to be being threatened by **his** Polish housemates.”

The author of the article has been transphobic in the past, so it’s unlikely to be a typo.

As a side note, the show itself (Tip Toe) is a shit representation of trans people that portrays TERFs as sympathetic, reasonable people who are simply concerned at pervy males (to be specific to the show, a refugee) using self-ID to access women’s spaces. Would not recommend.

Labour and Conservative MSPs are very upset at the Scottish Parliament’s decision to remove “sex” as a filter category on their MSP listings - presumably so that they don’t have to list the two newly elected trans MSPs under their sex assigned at birth (thanks to FWS v Scottish Ministers).

In case we needed any more proof that this isn’t about anything more than simply trying to publicly humiliate trans people.

A lot of people on here have been stressing about the potential of the transphobe Streeting manoeuvring his way into becoming PM, but the latest YouGov polling suggests that’s very, very unlikely to happen.

In a contest between Streeting and Starmer, Starmer wins 65-15.

Between Streeting and Burnham, Burnham wins 80-10.

Between Streeting and Rayner, Rayner wins 70-19.

Between Streeting and Miliband, Miliband wins 58-28.

The pro-trans credentials of Burnham, Rayner, and Miliband are questionable - none of them particularly seem willing to reverse the attacks on us - but none of them have the same level of hatred towards us as Streeting has shown.

The comments:

“What about us trans people who were born in the winter? Do you not care about us, OP?”

“This is just going to perpetuate the myth that all trans people are born in the summer. You shouldn’t have shared this, OP.”

“This legal loophole isn’t going to help people who live outside of the country, is it? Weird how nobody thinks about them…”

“So you’re saying we should only campaign for trans people born in the summer? That sounds like it will set the movement back quite a bit.”

/uj Holy shit, I’m so sick of people responding to practical advice with “well, this doesn’t apply to everyone so fuck you”

I want to preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Equality Act 2010 and where we stand with regard to toilet access post-FWS, especially in the workplace. It is clear that the Supreme Court has effectively gutted the Gender Reassignment protections under the act, by using cis men as a comparator for trans women and cis women as a comparator for trans men. If you try to claim that being banned from the women’s toilets is discrimination under Gender Reassignment - it can easily be hand-waved away by saying that “biological males” without that protected characteristic are also forbidden from using those facilities.

Obviously, that’s wrong and ignores the realities of living as a trans person. It’s near certain that under Article 8 of the ECHR, we should have this legal protection. But that doesn’t help us in the short term.

I’ve been hypothesising for a little while that we might have more luck claiming discrimination under disability, specifically the disability of gender dysphoria. Now, I understand that this isn’t really politically correct and that it likely falls under transmedicalism, but I firmly believe that gender dysphoria would be classed as a disability under the Equality Act. It’s a recognised condition that has a significant day-to-day impact on an individual, potentially impacting their ability to function as effectively as an individual without the condition.

Ergo, what stops me from requesting a reasonable adjustment of “continuing to use the correct facilities”, if asked by an employer to use a third space? Using this third space would cause severe emotional distress, that other colleagues (who don’t have this specific disability) won’t have - putting me at a disadvantage because of my disability. The cost of this adjustment is zero, it requires no building work, and it alleviates the disadvantage entirely.

Post-FWS, there’s seemingly no longer a case-by-case “proportional means of achieving a legitimate aim” test for excluding trans people from the correct spaces - it can be assumed that “this space is single-sex for privacy reasons” is a legitimate aim. My wondering is if requesting a reasonable adjustment under these grounds would essentially force a case-by-case assessment. If they can’t find “good” reason to exclude you (such as the fact that you’ve been using those facilities for a while without any incident), then it would be unreasonable to deny this adjustment and, therefore, likely discriminatory.

I’m wondering what people think of this. I think it gets a lot murkier for those who work with TERFs that actively make complaints - but for people with a supportive, but weak-willed, workplace environment that may feel they have no other choice when the EHRC guidance is released: this feels like something that may be worth testing.

I don’t know why nobody has ever thought of this before, but… why don’t we try compromising with transphobes? We’ve gone too extreme and that’s clearly driven people away. We should try to find a middle ground where they’ll accept us! Gee golly, I can’t believe what a bad job you were all doing before I came to fix this!

People who complained to BBC Sport about their use of "transwomen" received this response:

>Thanks for contacting us about an article on our BBC Sport website headlined Charity drops choir from marathon over founder's gender-critical views.

>The term 'transwomen' was used in the initial version of this piece without intent to cause any offence.

>We amended the piece to instead refer to 'transgender women', which is in keeping with our style guide.

>We'd like to thank you for taking the time to flag this with us, and we've shared your concerns with the team at BBC Sport. This helps to inform decisions about our ongoing work.