A British Transport Police spokesperson said: “Under previous policy, we had advised that someone with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) may be searched in accordance with their acquired sex, however as an interim position while we digest yesterday’s judgement, we have advised our officers that any same sex searches in custody are to be undertaken in accordance with the biological birth sex of the detainee.
“We are in the process of reviewing the implications of the ruling and will consider any necessary updates to our policies and practices in line with the law and national guidance.”
The BTP jumped on this almost instantly as they’d been under fire because trans women on the force could strip search those AFAB.
I’m waiting for next shoe to drop when someone AFAB complains because they get strip searched by a big hairy bloke because he was also AFAB. At no point does anyone seem to have considered the effect this law will have on trans men now having to go into women-only spaces. I don’t think JK Rowling cares about the messy fallout from her War on Trans Women.
What continues to amaze me is the animosity towards trans people by the TERFs. They’re like religious zealots. It’s depressing to see such spite empowered by law.
jk rowling funding a lawsuit to make it legal for the police to sexually assault women - including cis women - is yet another reason why she’s a terrible human
But hey, trans people have totally not lost any protections because of this ruling. The Supreme Court can only interpret the law, which is, as we know, an apolitical, amorphic force of nature and not a deeply political process informed just as much by a person’s perspective and bigotries as any other.
In an immediate, visceral experiential sense they’ve lost protections, but in a legal sense those protections never existed, and the first legal challenge showed they were like smoke in air. hopefully this will shake things up and get some proper substantial protections into law.
And yet the people who wrote the legislation say this ruling is at odds with their intentions:
[Melanie Field] said that treating trans women with GRCs as women in relation to sex discrimination protections was “the clear premise” of the policy and legal instructions to the officials who drafted the bill.
The supreme court’s ruling on Wednesday that the legal definition of “woman” referred only to biological women was “a very significant” reinterpretation of parliament’s intentions when it passed the Equality Act 2010 and the Gender Recognition Act 2004, she said.
“There are likely to be unintended consequences of this very significant change of interpretation from the basis on which the legislation was drafted and considered by parliament,” Field said in a post on the social media site LinkedIn.
“We all need to understand what this change means for how the law provides for the appropriate treatment of natal and trans women and men in a whole range of contexts.”
Then it sounds like that Equality Act 2010, and the Gender Recognition Act 2004 need urgent and immediate revisions to remove all doubt, room for error, and wiggle room for bigots and clearly state what was intended.
While the government have shown that they can indeed act quickly when they want to (recent events regarding steel works), I’d bet folding money it takes decades to make the amendments above.
They should have drafted better laws.
Possibly, but the point of the Supreme Court in the UK is to figure out what the law means when laws aren’t clear, and that’s allowed to include asking the people who wrote it.
So now, if you’re a woman and some pervert cop takes a fancy to you all he has to do is say “I reckoned she looked trans so I did the search myself” and he can touch you up as much as he feels he can get away with
Even better, he can demand her to strip naked for him. Purely theoretical of course, the bobbies would never abuse their power.
Goodness no, perish the very thought. This fucking country…
The damage these people are doing is unimaginable.
God, I’m tired
Me fuckin’ too.
Just existing has been exhausting lately.
The UK keeps circling the same drain the US fell through
As an American Transwoman I’m worried America is looking at the UK and taking notes.
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OK, so if a group is small enough, it’s OK to abuse them and deny them their rights?
What’s your threshold? 1%? 10%?
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You’re 1 out of 8 billion. Why should anyone respect your rights as an individual?
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Therefore, you shouldn’t be this invested in random strangers’ genitals.
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Who is “they”? What “scientific fact” is being changed? Why shouldn’t children learn about the existence of trans, intersex, and nonbinary people? Who is “we” and what does your “stepping in” involve?
The utilitarian approach would be to throw out all this nonsense.
Maintaining a cult of binary and immutable sex is expensive because it requires work to force people to fit in the available boxes and prevent them from moving between them. The utilitarian answer is to stop wasting time and money enforcing sex segregation.
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You’re misinformed. Go learn some actual, factual knowledge about biology.
Also:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-human-sex-is-not-binary/
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Did you not read the article?
The central point of the argument you shared is that the natural variation in sex among humans doesn’t count because anything that doesn’t fall into a rigid binary is an exception to the rule.
That’s tautological, “my dogma is correct because anything that contradicts me doesn’t count.” This isn’t science, it’s ideology.
Science is built upon the fact that the existence of exceptions to a rule means that the rule doesn’t describe reality. If your system of categorization requires exceptions, then there are categories you failed to describe.
Except if you compare these two sources, one is from an organisation that relies on the scientific method, and the other is from a lobbying organisation that exists to promote conservative ideologies.
These things are not the same.
Sex is both variable and mutable. Both in our species and beyond it. Humans are not special.
I think you’re weird for caring so much about sex segregated spaces. If women (cis or trans) don’t feel safe in co-ed changing rooms with older men then there are much bigger problems with society that need to be addressed.
Mandating that trans men like the boxer below are required to use the womens’ room is obviously not going to make anybody feel safer.
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Thankfully society agrees with me and not the online bubble world.
Show me a society that wants to require guys to use women’s spaces like you do, lol.
I don’t care what someone does with their body, the pronouns they pick it what they believe they are.
But do you care when someone that looks like a man uses the women’s room?
The women/man in the photo you attached can identify as what they like.
That’s not the question. The question is who gets to decide which bathroom people use. I think the government doesn’t need be involved in that decision, you seem to be of the “papers, please” persuasion.
Someone just identifying as a male or female with no changes to their physical characteristics is also allowed in the opposite change room though? It’s always the extreme with you lot.
You’re calling me extreme, when you’re here saying that people who have made changes to their physical characteristics should be required to use a restroom that doesn’t match them.
except there have been plenty of cases where masculine presenting cis women get accused of being trans and either assaulted or abused verbally or otherwise
Counterpoint: if it negatively affects one person it’s bad. You actually don’t need to “well actually” this, especially when your “well actually” amounts to “it won’t be as bad as it could be”
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Leaving aside that you’re treating “women” as separate from “trans women”, which women? Who has been negatively affected by letting trans women pee in peace? And now this is going to negatively affect cis women as well as trans women. And this hysteria over trans women is already doing harm to cis women even before the supreme court ruling. Literally all of this is just worse for women, over some imagined problem that this was supposed to “fix”.
I’m fully aware that you aren’t arguing in good faith so this will be my last response to you
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Woman means adult human female, and Man means Human Adult Male. That is the literal definition.
The actual, literal definition of woman:
Words aren’t bestowed upon us, we make them up and can decide their meaning.
I was far from a feminist in my younger years but the way women are treated now is abhorrent. Especially in sports and places like Changing rooms.
So you don’t actually care about patriarchal oppression women face everyday and the systemic violence they face from men, but like using them as a cudgel against trans people. The reason most feminists are trans inclusive (apart from it being the morally correct position) is that definitions of womanhood that are bioessentialist is a tool of patriarchal oppression.
You can argue a trans Women is a women all you like but you had to prefix
It’s an adjective, under this logic blonde women aren’t women.
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That is not the Scientific definition of woman. Woman is a descriptive word for Female adult. Your “gender” version has no basis is science or biology.
There is no scientific definition of woman, women are a social category. What it means to be a women is only tangentially related to biology.
I’m don’t talking on this now. Society does not reflect you or people on heres opinions. We are tired of the Smallest minority effecting politics/lives and women.
You are not society and you don’t speak for it. You are an incurious bigot too stubborn in your ignorance to grow as a person. It’s also lovely to be lectured to on language by a person who can’t use capital letters or apostrophes properly. Ta-ra.
Exactly my point
Actually that’s over reaching what the judgement said. The SC said that the equalities act, as worded, needs the word female to mean biological in order to make sense. Not that trans women could not be women, just not with regards to way this specific act was worded if you were relying on it. Now parliament can review the act and see how differently to word it to accommodate both female at birth and trans women etc.
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As someone who lives as a minority Japan and is very obviously not ethnically Japanese, lemme tell you that being a small portion of the population does not make ANY discrimination or assault OK and impacts you in ways you may not predict.
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