Legal or otherwise, you think it’s perfectly normal to accept (let’s just call him a man) to dress up as a woman for 3 months, with no requirement for any medical diagnosis, and just waltz into the local swimming baths or gym and get undressed right next to your missus?
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What is the concern about male-bodied persons being able to legally demand access to a rape crisis shelter? Seems fairly obvious.
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There is no reason for medical diagnosis because the World Health Organisation no longer identify it as a mental health issue as such. This is why Theresa May originally proposed the change. I believe the WHO signatories are meant to have altered their health systems by 2022.
What the Scottish bill does is actually a small subset of what May originally proposed and generally covers admin - so essentially what goes on in the GROS building in Edinburgh.
It explicitly doesn’t make any change to the rights or privileges enjoyed by transgender people.
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It’s reducing the current 2 year waiting list to 3 months.
I think that you will find that most transgender people will have been aware of their condition for life.
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The number of people facing criminal charges or sentencing that announce their previously unknown condition suggests that either that is not true, or that some percentage of those who announce it are doing so without a legitimate basis. I am not sure that two years resolves that any more effectively than three months, I am not sure that imposing any legal burden on the legitimate population is reasonable - but I am also not willing to brush aside reasonable concerns with a straw man argument.
There is a conflict of rights here, and those are always very difficult to resolve. Denying that there is any tension does nothing except build anger. What is starting to look like an ugly backlash in the UK is in part due to deliberate efforts to stoke a ‘culture war’, but it is also a function of reasonable voices trying to discuss the conflict of rights in a moderate fashion having been demonized.
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It is perfectly legal to have a rape crisis center where only females are allowed, and it will remain legal after this piece of legislation.
My question is how are you checking if someone was born a male or female?
Let’s say they ban transgender people from female spaces… You’re a woman trying to escape from an abusive relationship and need to stay at a crisis centre. The staff at the centre say they don’t believe you are a biological woman. Now what?
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I’d probably prefer if they gave her a bit of space. Getting changed right next to a stranger is weird no matter what gender they are.
But nothing about this law makes the above scenario any more or less likely.
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I’ve often said that the trans debate is really hard because there are some areas where the rights of trans women and women are put in direct conflict.
But that does not mean, as is happening in the UK, we use those small areas of conflict to throw shade across the whole concept of trans rights. Whatever blurriness there is around ‘the line’ is no reason to dismiss issues nowhere near it.
I don’t know what we end up doing around access to female refuges. But I do think the problem is hugely overstated. As for women fearing attack in female toilets or changing rooms, I think we’re a bit guilty of trivialising and infantilising assaults on women - potential rapists and sexual perverts are not waiting patiently until they can cross dress and get free access to unprotected women. There is a tenacity and willingness to transgress boundaries that sort of goes with the territory of being a sexual predator.
I did ask my partner about this a while ago. Her reply was that if I thought a predatory man would go through an intrusive and embarrassing process of transition just get in the position of attacking a women I was deluding myself. They’d just join the Met. In all serious, in her opinion, women have a lot more to fear from the police than they do a random cross dresser in the bogs.
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I didn’t think that mattered anymore?
I’d laugh at the just join the Met comment, but the emoji would not quite get it right.
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I agree, it doesn’t. I’m not the one saying transwomen shouldn’t be allowed in female spaces.
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Agreed. Personal space invaders are the worst.
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Personally I Miss Pac-man…….
I’ve always wondered why these aren’t more common?
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they’re becoming moreso here on new builds but bathrooms are inherently very expensive to re-work in existing builds and thus not all that common.
No-ones saying they shouldn’t be allowed, not sure why you twisted it to suggest that.
This a from a recent written response to a parliamentary question from the Ministry of Justice regarding sex offenders in jail at the moment.
Comparisons of official MOJ statistics from March / April 2019 (most recent official count of transgender prisoners):
76 sex offenders out of 129 transwomen = 58.9%
125 sex offenders out of 3812 women in prison = 3.3%
13234 sex offenders out of 78781 men in prison = 16.8%
I’d be a little cautious in interpreting those numbers. How many of those transwomen were sexually abused before? If I’m not wrong, a history of being sexually abused is a predictor of committing sexual abuse, and transsexuals tend to get more sexually abused than the population at large.