Category: GRA Reform

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COVID-19 GRA Reform Personal Testimony

Bringing Trans People Together

As Covid-19 spread across every continent, the world changed in ways that we could not have anticipated as recently as Christmas. “Self-isolation” and “social distancing” have entered the lexicon and taken root in my mind to such an extent that video clips of people breaking the two-metre rule seem to belong to another age, like old silent movies. These are – to use an overworked expression – unprecedented times.

But trans people have been living in unprecedented times that go back further than Christmas. While previously we were largely ignored by politicians and the media – apart from occasional salacious and often unwelcome feature articles – trans issues have been high in the news agenda for the past three years. That has not always been a blessing.

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COVID-19 GRA Reform

It’s time to pause the transgender debate

As the United Kingdom plunges into an unprecedented crisis, the time has surely come to halt the reforms to self-identification of gender. Schools are closing; London could be locked down; even The Archers has an uncertain future – this really is a crisis. At such times, we can no longer afford the luxury of devoting time and resources to the foolish idea that biology matters less than feelings, when we divide humanity into male and female.

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Free Speech GRA Reform Labour Party Trans Health

What Labour gets wrong about transwomen

The transgender crisis that has engulfed the Labour Party has now lurched into a new and previously unimaginable phase. When the hitherto unknown group, the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) launched its egregious manifesto last week, peak-lunacy seemed to have been reached.

Following demands for compliance — including “pledge 4: Accept that trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary people are non-binary” — they condemned what they considered to be transphobic organisations, naming Woman’s Place UK and the LGB Alliance and calling for transphobes to be expelled from the party.

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Free Speech GRA Reform Labour Party

As a trans Labour party supporter I’m exasperated

It has been a trying week for the Labour Party. The leadership contenders are falling over each other in an astonishing bid to make themselves equally unelectable by a membership who are becoming exasperated with what many now view as transgender nonsense. I say that as a trans woman who is a member of the Labour Party.

Have they not learned from Jo Swinson? In December, the former Lib Dem leader’s election campaign went up in smoke on the altar of transgender ideology. Her inability to define the word “woman” is a masterclass in how not to do live radio.

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Free Speech GRA Reform Labour Party

Do Rebecca Long-Bailey and Angela Rayner have a problem with trans people like me?

Jo Swinson’s dismal election campaign was unlikely to have been helped by her inability to define the word woman. But if there are any lessons from Swinson’s ability to alienate people on the subject of gender, it seems Labour is determined not to learn them.

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GRA Reform Sex and Gender

The Inconvenient Truth About Transwomen

The butterfly effect describes how the flapping of tiny wings in China may cause a hurricane in the Caribbean a couple of weeks later. The hurricane tearing through social policy in Scotland at the moment also had small beginnings: not in China 14 days ago but in Yogyakarta, Indonesia 14 years ago. This, however, was no accident of chaos — it was deliberate and planned.

Future historians may marvel how that meeting of human rights groups in Yogyakarta established gender identity as an innate human quality and decided that it must be protected in law. At the time, in 2006, political commentators at home were more concerned with the so-called Granita Pact, and whether Tony Blair would ever resign in Gordon Brown’s favour. But Yogyakarta triggered a chain of events that would eventually challenge the use of biological sex to divide humanity. While the definition of gender identity was vague — how can you define what is in essence a feeling in our heads? — the vision was grand.

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Español GRA Reform

Un llamado urgente a la cautela en el debate parlamentario sobre posibles cambios en la legislación de los derechos de las personas trans

Este texto es una traducción del artículo publicado por Debbie Hayton en su blog el 29 de noviembre de 2016. Es necesario contextualizar la preocupación de Debbie como presona trans ante la posibilidad de que se modificaran las leyes del Reino Unido para favorecer la llamada “identidad de género” como criterio jurídico suficiente para reconocer a una persona como transexual. Para ello, recomiendo la lectura de la entrada de Wikipedia sobre la situación de los derechos de las personas trans en el Reino Unido.

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GRA Reform

Lib Dems’ policy on gender self-identity

Sir,

As a transwoman I second the offer by Janice Turner (“Swinson chose wokeness over women’s rights”, comment, Dec 7) to send a bunch of flowers to Jo Swinson. By exposing Lib Dem plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) as incoherent and inexplicable Turner has alerted the electorate to concerns that I have been raising for three years.

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Free Speech GRA Reform

Aggressive protests like that in Brighton mean the real causes of transphobia go unaddressed

“We had women arriving through the crush in tears. One woman had liquid thrown at her as she tried to enter. Even the men who attended were shocked at the scale of the harassment because they’re not normally subject to this.”

Those were the words of a WPUK spokeswoman, reported in this newspaper [The Morning Star]. Shockingly, the context was a meeting to discuss women’s rights on the fringe of the Labour Party conference.

How on earth did we get here: to a place where women meeting to discuss sex-based rights and the trafficking of women and girls are accused of hate speech and denounced as “TERFs?” TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” but it has become a dreadful slur — akin to bitch or whore.

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Data Collection GRA Reform

Transgender people need reliable census data to inform future planning for our needs.

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While transgender people have become much more visible in recent years, our numbers are harder to quantify. In 2011 GIRES reported that:

1% of […] employees and service users may be experiencing some degree of gender variance. At some stage, about 0.2% may undergo transition.

However, those figures were based on samples and estimates, and the GIRES research was completed eight years ago. Society has since moved on, and reliable data is needed, not least to inform the future needs of transgender people for specialist healthcare services.

Continue reading “Transgender people need reliable census data to inform future planning for our needs.”