This seems like emotive language, designed with the express purpose of quelling the voices of those who assert that despite advances in medicine, it is not literally possible to change sex.
I’m not saying any of the concerns you list (& others you haven’t) aren’t honestly held. What I doubt is that making the GRC process easier will have any effect on the things people are concerned about. If it’s an issue now, it still will be. If it’s not now, it won’t be after.
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Brian, it absolutely WILL make a huge difference to actual women’s lives. Here’s why: 4500 people have GRCs now. If sex self-ID goes ahead, there could be 500,000 (GIRES figure), a 11,000% increase in the numbers of people with a birth certificate that doesn’t match their sex.
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Frontline staff at women-only services (eg domestic violence shelters) will face a drastic rise in males with female birth certificates seeking entry. Although they can legally exclude all males from female-only services, staff cannot access the register of people with GRCs.
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With no register to rely on in deciding whether to exclude a transgender male, a worker at a rape crisis centre will be forced - on pain of being sacked or vilified if she gets it wrong - to admit male-bodied people into shelters for women who’ve been traumatised by males.
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If sex self-ID is passed (which would be a nightmare for women & girls, & undermine the rationalist basis of our legal system), transgender privacy laws will have to be reduced to enable women-only & lesbian-only service providers to enforce their legal right to single-sex space.
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The onus is on supporters of sex self-ID to come up with practical solutions that empower female-only service providers to enforce girls’ and women’s rights to single-sex space. Without these, women are justified in seeing GRA ‘reform’ as a male rights-grab & an attack on the EA.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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I think it has opened a whole can of worms though. If it is just about the GRC then organisations need to know that does not mean people simply self-declaring their gender.
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Indeed, organizations need to have clear safeguarding procedires to avoid abuse of the system and those safeguarding procedures must be prioritised even at the risk of hurting some one's feeling, like asking for ID when you purchase alcohol.
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For example,
@BTP should not just allow self declared sex or gender. We could take the opportunity to clear up ambiguities. Eg. making it clear that even if gender changes legally, sex does not, -
and then considering where and when we take decisions about for example monitoring crime, running a refuge, which we base decision making around, and why.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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