Posted by A Twitter thread by @radicalhag
I’m really tired of the knee-jerk assumption that women standing up for our rights is “anti-trans”. We analyse gender identity ideology as being harmful to women, and where it impacts on our rights, we take action to preserve boundaries.
We don’t set out to harm trans people or prevent them from having representation; in fact we support the expansion of their rights.
We do expect the clear competing rights issue caused by the conflict of gender identity and sex as means of legally categorising people to be taken into account. We insist on retaining rights and recognition as a sex class because that is where the rubber hits the road.
We do not attempt to define trans people’s reality for them. We do assert that trans women are not identical to us and that our priorities and requirements do not always coincide. If they disagree, then it is they who are attempting to define our reality.
Tbh, it’s really difficult to resolve a boundary fence dispute with your neighbour if he keeps insisting that he’s really your identical twin who lives in your house and wants to repaint your kitchen. Pink, naturally.
Given the various accusations from TRAs, wokebeards and assorted allies that fighting to retain sex-based protections is “trying to remove trans rights”, I think it also needs to be stated that women’s groups should have been consulted about the GRA. We were not.
We should have been consulted during Maria Miller’s farce of an enquiry. We were not. It’s only a massive grassroots effort that has gotten us heard over the proposals to extend GRA protections to any male who wants them on the basis of self-id.
So, far from women attacking trans rights, what has actually been happening is that women’s rights and protections have been being quietly and systematically stripped away behind our backs. The fucking boys’ club again.
Trans lobby groups like Stonewall et al have claimed to govt bodies that only trans people need to give input on this, because no-one else could possibly understand their experience. But you’re demanding to be treated as us legally, you’re demanding our language, spaces, sports,
..based on a new and improved definition of ‘woman’ which is completely unrecognisable to us. That’s our business, and you may as well get used to every last paragraph of every last bit of policy being put under the microscope, because you clearly can’t be trusted to include us.
The same lobby groups have been systematically lying about the Equalities Act to bodies like the police, schools, councils etc, with the result that women’s groups are now having to go back to these bodies and point out that they are misrepresenting the law.
The fact that you think you don’t need to ask women whether we object to being defined as a gender instead of a sex screams that you aren’t us, you don’t understand us, you have no clue what it is like being us. But you expect us to shut up. We won’t.
The absolute fucking nerve of basically staging a coup d’etat over everything women have fought for – and then telling us *we’re* trying to roll back *your* ‘rights’ when we wise up and object. No, we’re taking OUR rights back. You weren’t entitled to them in the first place.
Here’s @mbmpolicy ‘s excellent analysis of the level of policy capture which has been allowed to happen in the Scottish case :
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/scot.2019.0284
And here is evidence of the deliberate campaigning on the part of transactivists to have women’s sex-based exemptions removed from law :
https://womansplaceuk.org/references-to-removal-of-single-sex-exemptions/
Who is removing whose rights, indeed.