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Epiphanies 2022: Attorney General endorses transphobia
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/teachers-should-not-pander-to-trans-pupils-says-suella-braverman-2qfgj70rv
What is the likely impact of this on the ground if schools follow this advice?
Sorry about the paywall for the full content but you can probably see enough on the opening paragraphs
What is the likely impact of this on the ground if schools follow this advice?
Sorry about the paywall for the full content but you can probably see enough on the opening paragraphs
Comments
I'm sure Birbalsingh will be right on board.
Trans status is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010.
Either way, I doubt if today's Criminals will worry about it...
Well, no, but it might give parents leverage against any school that does discriminate. Of course, you need money for legal advice.
I know - ever the Optimist, me...
My worry is that the AG is expressing a legal view that the trans status of people who haven't legally transitioned doesn't qualify under the protected status legislation. This throws a lot of people under the bus in order to screw over trans kids.
The really worrying thing is the number of otherwise progressive inclusive people who will be totally on board with this. I notice she name-checks You Know Who
I see - I hadn't fully appreciated the point.
I do but speculate, but that seemed the logical thrust.
The "culture war" is already there. Schools already contain trans pupils, and pupils with different opinions on gender.
And yes, like @KarlLB, the "you don't have a gender recognition certificate, so you're not a trans girl, you're a boy" thing rather leaped out at me.
I think there's a difference between the common occurrence of schools containing both a stigmatised group and those who stigmatise them and then that plus the extra layer of a government piggy-backing onto a frightening and powerful media-driven moral panic against that stigmatised group and reaching into schools to add heft to those who stigmatise them.
I think it's a very sinister development and that this is not the only group something like this is happening to.
Utterly no words
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2022/05/28/coalition-loss-the-transphobe-thing-was-absolute-disaster
Australian posters will know more about this but a key quote from the article from a Liberal MP is quite salty about it!
By the way, any guidelines they come up with will affect England only - Scotland and Wales are not on board with this sort of thing, and as Doublethink says this stuff is probably illegal anyway but it will still have bad effects in emboldening people to try to make schools more trans hostile and to stop people getting help.
There is no such thing as 'legally transitioned' because being recognised as trans doesn't require a single specific legal process - there are different legal processes for different things. A GRC essentially legally erases your previous identity and allows you to get a new birth certificate - it's not to affirm your current identity because that doesn't legally need affirming, legally you just need to....be a trans person to be recognised as trans. The law surrounding GRCs is all about who can know about your *past*. That's why self ID panic is so silly, because legally trans people can and do already do all the things TERFs warn about unravelling the space-time continuum. Trans people already do them with zero negative impact - self ID just simplifies the process of getting a GRC but doesn't change the content of a GRC. Many trans people don't even feel the need for one - mostly only if they want to get married (in England and Wales for non-Quakers anyway since legally wedding vows must be gender specific here - not the case in Scotland or if Quaker), or want to make sure their death certificate lists the gender they want. You only need a doctor's letter to change your passport's gender marker for instance.
There have been a couple of cases in the law reports involving trans children. Ask around and you may be able to trace the solicitors or legal aid office involved.
The thing about single-sex spaces is that some organisations are exempt from being prevented from knowing your trans status, which includes places like women's shelters - but also includes eg religions with all-male clergy. It's never been about 'protecting women' because it has never applied to only women's spaces, and toilets and changing rooms were never part of that because it's primarily concerning employment in a single-sex space more than anything else. Also afaik no UK women's shelter has chosen to exclude trans women - legally exempt single-sex spaces can choose to exclude trans people but do not have to, and women's shelters in the UK have chosen not to. The RCC in the UK however DOES enforce this and will not ordain trans men - so actually in practice it becomes about protecting cis men anyway. Self ID wouldn't change any of this since it doesn't change the content of a GRC, just the process of getting one.
Thanks - good idea.
I should say, perhaps, that I have no horse in this race personally, but, given the poverty of Our Place's parish, there may well be local families affected by this issue, who would be unable to afford legal advice. Many of them can't afford food...
Do you not have a legal aid office where people can go for advice (and perhaps representation)?
Unfortunately successive Tory governments have slashed the legal aid budgets and have also changed the rules so many people no longer qualify. Certainly nothing like this would count, generally it's domestic abuse cases and a few others.
If you're really lucky you might find a pro bono legal clinic, but generally those are going to be run off their feet trying to stop people being illegally evicted and other immediate matters.
As far as I know any liability insurance is entirely between the insurers and the trader - it's not like third party motor liability insurance.
People being in the position I describe is not unusual - a regular in the press. We were doubly lucky in that the guy who did us had just dissolved one company and was registering a new one but inadvertently contracted with us as a private individual. Dissolving companies and registering new ones is a common way these shysters avoid owing money to anyone.
Cheers
L
Epiphanies Host
Unfortunately yes. Some MP (forget who) was advocating that people have to be 18 to access puberty blockers, which is obviously effectively banning them because they simply delay puberty starting rather than reverse puberty that has already started. That's the whole point of them.
I hope there will be legal action taken because the sports associations go against all the scientifically accepted data on trans people taking cross-sex hormones, and against the IOC's guidelines. Trans people on HRT have been competing against cis people of their gender for years, and nobody cared before trans people became a weapon in the culture wars after the right realised it had lost the gay marriage argument. If trans women had a significant advantage over cis women, they would already be dominating basically all sports where strength and speed matter (so like...every sport aside from equestrian and motor sports I guess?). I wonder if it could be fought on the grounds of sex discrimination, ironically, given that they are only targeting trans women and not trans men.
The crux of such a claim would centre on whether it is a "proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim". I think so long as you have sports divided into men's and women's events you are going to have to decide how to define the categories. I suspect, however, if one were to get into that in detail you would find that many apparently cis-female athletes actually have a mix of typically female and typically male characteristics (which is why sporting bodies gave up on chromosome testing, because it turned out a great many swimmers in particular had a Y chromosome).
Well this is where it gets funny. They've talked about creating a category for trans competitors - which implies that their solution to their perceived unfairness of people who've been through male puberty having an advantage over those who haven't isn't a problem if the people who haven't are trans men.
I read that sports are usually divided into women's and *open* events. The exceptions are usually the few sports remaining that only women compete in.
Ironically the focus on testosterone ends up hurting cis women like Caster Semenya* who have naturally high testosterone - Semenya is forced to take HRT in order to compete. In reality, many athletes have a natural advantage because at the elite level most athletes are physically unusual compared to the norm. Nobody made Michael Phelps take hormones to get rid of his lack of lactic acid production. Nobody banned Usain Bolt for running too fast. It's all just misogyny punishing women - cis and trans - for being too talented. You can see the ways Black women athletes are particularly targeted, such as Semenya and the Williams sisters (cf the appalling misogynoir accusing them of being 'manly' and that horrible racist newspaper cartoon).
*cis means that somebody's gender is the same as the gender assigned to them at birth - Caster Semenya is intersex, but was assigned female at birth and identifies as a woman and therefore is both cis and intersex
Trans people are a small minority, and obviously nobody transitions because they want a shot at winning a sporting medal. Elite athletes are also a very small minority of the human race - the number of people who are both trans and elite athletes is rather small.
US swimmer Lia Thomas has been making headlines recently. She swam, as a man, in high school and at the start of her college career, and performed on a par with a fairly ordinary US college male swimmer. She transitioned during the pandemic, and returned to competition as a woman.
Several things are true:
1. She reduced her testosterone level to well under the threshold set by the sporting authorities (as is normal for trans women taking hormone therapy)
2. She swam slower after the hormone treatment than she had swum before she started the hormones
3. Competing as a man, she was nothing particularly special. Competing as a woman, she won a NCAA Division I championship. I think it's clear that her performance relative to the ensemble of women college swimmers was much better than her performance had been when she was competing in the men's competition.
The evidence is clear - she has an advantage over her hypothetical cis-female twin sister.
What is not clear is what we should do with that information.
Is dividing sporting competition on gender lines the "correct" division? Maybe, maybe not, but it's the one we've had. And sure - there might be a time where a trans woman is dominating some particular sport, but it that really different from being, say, a cis female tennis player during the heyday of the Williams sisters, or Martina Navratilova? (All cis women, all significantly better than their closest competition.)
Are the ensemble of trans women athletes different enough from the ensemble of cis women athletes to make it silly including them in the same competition (in the way that having men sprint against women would be silly?) I don't think the answer is obvious. There aren't many trans athletes, and trying to draw statistical conclusions based on the performance of a handful of people is "difficult".
I actually don't think that women need their own competitions given that the existence of women's categories is purely down to sexism anyway. They only exist because men wouldn't let women compete with them. It should be based on weight, strength etc categories where those things matter, and open where those things don't matter. Also the sports that only let women compete (synchronised swimming, rhythmic gymnastics, and I think netball?) should be open to everyone.
It's usually said that a woman playing football or other contact sport with men, will get crunched, because of weight, strength, muscular, advantages. But I don't know what happens if you equalize things more. If a 15 stone woman bashed into a 15 st man, does she get crushed?
But my point is that sport is meant be unfair. Usain Bolt had advantages over other runners, so he won. The giant at my school ran past me.
We know how she was performing pre-transition when competing against the men. We know how she has performed since she transitioned.
She slowed down, when compared to her pre-transition self, but shot up the rankings when compared to the ensemble of women swimmers rather than the ensemble of men swimmers.
That contains all the information you need.
And an advantage in the area of swimming faster, for longer. Which is what we're talking about.
I suspect that your opinion is not shared by most women involved in high level competitive sport.
I suspect that defining what things "matter" is much more difficult than you're suggesting here. It is easy to identify which people run faster than which other people, or play tennis better than which other people, and so on - you have a load of competitions and see who wins. It is very much harder to generate a priori rank categories based on size, strength and so on, and have them be at all meaningful.
They do, of course, form (fairly coarse) categories like this for the Paralympics, with plenty of arguments about whether a particular athlete is impaired enough to compete in a particular category.
Consider, for example, the Williams sisters, who have been a dominant force in women's tennis for two decades. The challenge you pose here is how to generate a mixed sex field that would have provided good competition for them at their peak, and you're wanting to do it based on some sort of physical measurements of the players rather than on their ranking at tennis.
So which measurements matter? Height? Taller players have a longer reach, which is an advantage. Sprint speed? That matters, but it's not a physical measurement. Arm / shoulder strength feeds in to serve speed, which clearly matters - do you allocate each player a score according to how much they can bench press?
So once you have generated a suitable field for the Williams sisters to compete in, which would probably have a few other world-leading women, plus a bunch of second-rate men, would anyone ever care who won?
I think a comparison with boxing might be instructive. I think it's reasonably clear that the headline boxers are those in the super heavyweight category, but that doesn't mean folk with an interest in the sport don't care about who wins the light welterweight title.
I'm also not sure you can compare pre- and post- transition performance on an equal basis. Top level sport is psychological as well as physical. For all we know the relief of transitioning may be a far bigger effect than any physiological differences as a result of male puberty.