Thank you for a thoughtful piece Ian - as with your previous trans-focused posts, this will be a mess in the comments, but you have set out the mess we're in.
As a transgender person with a Gender Recognition Certificate, if I were to get married then I'd be married as a woman but be expected to use the mens loos at my wedding reception as there is no (ridiculous, othering, outing) 'third space'. One of those things can't be right. No need for anyone to tell me which is the wrong one, I can guess your various opinions.
You're right about courage. Courage is needed both by politicians, and by the transgender people who have to navigate this madness every single day. It's getting harder, which I presume is what some transphobes want.
Yes, a very clear exposition of the way that successive governments and the EHRC have tied themselves in knots, and how this has become a stalking horse for those with their own agenda.
Thankyou Ian, this is brilliant. As a biological woman with an adult trans stepdaughter, I would much (!) rather share toilet space with trans women than men ( toilet seats anyone? Late night discussions of relationships? Sisterly comfort and support for distressed women?). More importantly I am appalled at the risk trans women will be placed in if forced to
use male spaces. This “ guidance” does not acknowledge the high level of risk trans women face from cis men, but assumes that trans women pose a risk to cis women ( which the data does not support). And what about cis women whose presentation is androgynous or masculine? The consequences of this “guidance” will be to expose women, cis and trans, to risk, challenge and humiliation, and to reduce the private spaces available to women. I despair.
Ian, great podcast on this too. What’s most remarkable is that the Supreme Court drew upon zero expertise from biologists. None. And yet they came to a conclusion based on their understanding of biology gleaned when they were each about 15. It’s like Catholic Church’s position in the 17th century on heliocentrism.
The Supreme Court also didn’t draw upon the experience of, guess who, trans people - but was happy to accept representations from the gender critical side. As someone who works inside the legal system, it does seems rather absurd.
The standard entirely 'trans'-centric raft of half-truths, misunderstandings and outright falsehoods, and the usual, tiresome pretence at not understanding a concept - that of single-sex spaces, sports and provisions - that worked perfectly well for decades, with no objections from anyone, and which have now suddenly and inexplicably been declared unworkable, confusing, hateful and the height of bigotry.
The Code is just guidance. It doesn't change the Supreme Court ruling, which asserted in law that female rape victims have a right to female-only support services; lesbians have a right to associations and events that exclude men; and elderly and religious women have a right to female-only intimate care. Why would anyone object to these rights?
Absolutely nobody did, until five minutes ago, when their friends, like Ian's podcast pal, felt unable to tell their narcissistic teenage kids the truth - that they cannot be the opposite sex, and their 'identity' is not the centre of the universe - and insisted on reframing these simple, important, hard-won rights as hate. It's sadly easy to see right through all of these bluff. You've abandoned all concern for the safety, dignity and privacy of women and girls, lesbians, disabled women and elderly women, in support of a crackpot identity cult that centres transvestite men as the most 'marginalised' minority in all of human history. This entire post is nothing but a raging mantrum that women refuse to do as they are told.
The truth is that single-sex provisions exist for very solid reasons. They are not hateful, they are an ordinary, important part of society and it is time you accepted this.
Perhaps if you believe there are half-truths (and therefore wish to accuse the author of misleading, you’ll share with us what those half-truths are, and your evidence for saying that? I respect your right to disagree with this post, and I am open to learning from what those I disagree with have to say and changing my mind. Your comment is no more an angry, ad hominem rant, and so seems unlikely to change anyone’s mind. The point is not that trans folk are suddenly “new”, it’s that hatred towards them is. All these things which you say have been working for decades have, by simple inference, certainly been working with trans folk using them. If anyone believes that the hate, bigotry, and suspicion of trans people will remain limited to that group for any length of time, I have a lovely bridge to sell you.
Many thousands of women like myself (I've even given birth to a child!!*) have signed the "Not In My Name" open letter.
We do not want to be co-opted against our will in a battle to discriminate. You mention Lesbians; they are the population group with the highest support for trans rights in repeated surveys.
I appreciate that because anti trans voices dominate the media and are listened to by many politicians, a bystander could (wrongly) get the impression that they speak on behalf of most women. They don't.
*Am not saying childbirth is the ultimate demonstration of being a woman, but insultingly, especially for women who do not want or cannot have kids, it is sometimes held up as such by the "biology is everything" crew.
Not all lesbians, and most definitely not all.women...Just because you dont mind sharing intimate spaces with men doesn't mean you can give the consent away of those women and girls who don't
You're quite right: the existing concept of single-sex spaces was long-established, worked perfectly well for all concerned and drew no objections. This concept was the trans-inclusive one: trans women have been using women's facilities and trans men men's facilities for as long as those facilities have existed. The SC ruling and EHRC guidance overturning that and implementing something different is what's unworkable, confusing and hateful.
Superbly written. I will be sending this to my MP (who has previously been decent on equalities issues but is blandly defending the EHRC on this one while completely failing to engage with any substantive or specific questions on it) and sharing it widely.
Thank you, so much, for this. It should go viral. I'm going to send it to my MP. The impact that this guidance is having on trans people before it's even in place is horrendous. This is the first time I've been able to find a coherent explanation of why the guidance is nonsense.
Thank you for explaining this Ian. I've just used it in my submission on a proposed law in New Zealand which would likel y create just as big a mess here as it has there, as well as causing just as much harm.
“Until the Supreme Court judgment, everyone had always assumed that single sex spaces by default included trans people in their acquired gender”.
No. For decades (centuries, really), UK public facilities like toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges, and sports were segregated by biological sex — “men” meant adult human males, “women” meant adult human females. This was not controversial.
I know you're not worth replying to but you're just wrong. Trans people didn't just pop out of the ground in the last 6 years. They've been using these toilets and facilities since they've been available and no-one has given a fucking shit. It WASN'T controversial.
Except, of course, that the truth is that no-one much noticed or cared if some trans person used the "wrong" facilities, or perhaps more accurately, the "right" ones.
They went quietly under the radar until the rage machine spotted an opportunity to make money.
And by the way, for most of history, there were no UK public facilities like toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges, and sports.
They cared, you just didn’t notice: Greer,Bindel, Raymond etc then in the 90s, naughts and 2010s fetishistic men wanting to violate women’s boundaries proliferated like mushrooms and even more women fought to protect their dignity, privacy, and safety. On your second point, you walked into that one: why do you think women campaigned for their own spaces?
If your idea of "previous centuries" goes no further back than that, you're rather politically short-sighted, which explains a lot.
A very few women campaigned - mostly, as you say, people like Bindel & Greer, who were desperate for attention because their fame was fading. Most of the campaigners were, like yourself, men. And the fact that I didn't notice, and I'm pretty politically active, tells me that they didn't have a huge following & most people just shrugged & moved on to more interesting topics.
As a woman, I can say that I've never felt threatened by trans men, but then I've not (yet) come across one that was both trans & a wannabe rapist. They seem to be rather rare, especially if you exclude people known to be rapey before they made their claim to be trans.
I have felt threatened by a very odd man (in men's clothing) who invaded a women's toilet, but my response on that occasion was to go back to my office & collect an old bottle of rotring ink, and spray it on his hands as they groped under the partition - the police from the next-door station found he was very easy to identify. He was a known flasher, so as soon as they saw him, they realised what was going on.
And that sort of issue is maybe why in more modern setups, the partitions between cubicles in women's toilets tend be floor-to-ceiling, meaning that actually there's not much actual concern from normal people about trans women in women's toilets.
I would worry about the safety of trans men in the gent's, though, and women of masculine appearance getting threatened. Gender critical people don't seem to care about things like that.
Hear hear - and 'Greer, Bindel and Raymond etc.' is easily countered with a list of trans-inclusive feminists - Steinem, Feinburg, Davis, Butler.... As Judith Butler has pointed out, the majority of feminist movements across place/time have been trans-inclusive, because they recognise common cause against misogyny and patriarchy.
Trans people have existed throughout the time you're thinking of (not to mention, in some form, for millennia before that and throughout the world). Where do you think they were getting changed, recovering from surgery or having a wee? Obviously all along they were in the facilities aligned with the gender they identified with, or you'd have noticed otherwise. You didn't know this because you weren't paying attention till recently, when the media and political interest groups started whipping this up and telling you to be upset about it. It didn't affect you at all, and it still doesn't.
Really appreciated this digest of intensely complex wrangling that clearly the people at the centre of it either haven’t thought through or don’t understand. Meanwhile lives are being ruined and undermined daily, all because of opinion-writers jumping on a bandwagon of a sustained campaign wrought by extremists. Thoroughly depressing
(And just in case it wasn’t clear, those opinion-writers in question are not Ian, whose work here is much appreciated, but professional purveyors of “common sense” in the right wing press, and assorted transphobes.)
The same applies to really difficult situations **unlike** hospital wards. This is the sharp end of things. One of the most impressive MPs on the women’s committee was Labour MP Kevin McKenna, who had previously worked as a nurse. He started to ask the EHRC representatives a series of detailed questions to which they did not know the answer.
"We are expecting them to respond if there are complaints" is the real stickler here. Usually there wouldn't be complaints, but the GCs will be looking for it. They will have a national campaign to hunt down any trans woman using a women's toilet or entering a women's organization in order to have a box to put some bollocks complaints into.
That last part about the ECHR is pretty scary, you've already got the right side of politics obsessed with leaving the ECHR... if THAT is a solution, then it will seem reasonable in that ridiculous "get Brexit done" way... where we just ignore the actual problem, stick our heads in the sand, and fuck over a ton of people. And they can frame it all as some "we didn't do Brexit right, so give me another chance" story for Farage because it's in Strasbourg and says Europe in the name.
I'm happy to sacrifice for the good of my trans friends and family, but damn it's gonna suck when every space turns into cubicles and men like me will finally experience ridiculously long queues to go take a fucking piss because urinals don't make legal sense anymore. God dammit.
Thank you for a thoughtful piece Ian - as with your previous trans-focused posts, this will be a mess in the comments, but you have set out the mess we're in.
As a transgender person with a Gender Recognition Certificate, if I were to get married then I'd be married as a woman but be expected to use the mens loos at my wedding reception as there is no (ridiculous, othering, outing) 'third space'. One of those things can't be right. No need for anyone to tell me which is the wrong one, I can guess your various opinions.
You're right about courage. Courage is needed both by politicians, and by the transgender people who have to navigate this madness every single day. It's getting harder, which I presume is what some transphobes want.
Ian this post is a masterpiece, thank you for taking the time to grind through the EHRC guidance, and for testing it in this way.
Yes, a very clear exposition of the way that successive governments and the EHRC have tied themselves in knots, and how this has become a stalking horse for those with their own agenda.
Thankyou Ian, this is brilliant. As a biological woman with an adult trans stepdaughter, I would much (!) rather share toilet space with trans women than men ( toilet seats anyone? Late night discussions of relationships? Sisterly comfort and support for distressed women?). More importantly I am appalled at the risk trans women will be placed in if forced to
use male spaces. This “ guidance” does not acknowledge the high level of risk trans women face from cis men, but assumes that trans women pose a risk to cis women ( which the data does not support). And what about cis women whose presentation is androgynous or masculine? The consequences of this “guidance” will be to expose women, cis and trans, to risk, challenge and humiliation, and to reduce the private spaces available to women. I despair.
Ian, great podcast on this too. What’s most remarkable is that the Supreme Court drew upon zero expertise from biologists. None. And yet they came to a conclusion based on their understanding of biology gleaned when they were each about 15. It’s like Catholic Church’s position in the 17th century on heliocentrism.
The Supreme Court also didn’t draw upon the experience of, guess who, trans people - but was happy to accept representations from the gender critical side. As someone who works inside the legal system, it does seems rather absurd.
Good grief, a clear, sensible piece on trans rights.
It will probably upset pretty much everyone.
The standard entirely 'trans'-centric raft of half-truths, misunderstandings and outright falsehoods, and the usual, tiresome pretence at not understanding a concept - that of single-sex spaces, sports and provisions - that worked perfectly well for decades, with no objections from anyone, and which have now suddenly and inexplicably been declared unworkable, confusing, hateful and the height of bigotry.
The Code is just guidance. It doesn't change the Supreme Court ruling, which asserted in law that female rape victims have a right to female-only support services; lesbians have a right to associations and events that exclude men; and elderly and religious women have a right to female-only intimate care. Why would anyone object to these rights?
Absolutely nobody did, until five minutes ago, when their friends, like Ian's podcast pal, felt unable to tell their narcissistic teenage kids the truth - that they cannot be the opposite sex, and their 'identity' is not the centre of the universe - and insisted on reframing these simple, important, hard-won rights as hate. It's sadly easy to see right through all of these bluff. You've abandoned all concern for the safety, dignity and privacy of women and girls, lesbians, disabled women and elderly women, in support of a crackpot identity cult that centres transvestite men as the most 'marginalised' minority in all of human history. This entire post is nothing but a raging mantrum that women refuse to do as they are told.
The truth is that single-sex provisions exist for very solid reasons. They are not hateful, they are an ordinary, important part of society and it is time you accepted this.
Perhaps if you believe there are half-truths (and therefore wish to accuse the author of misleading, you’ll share with us what those half-truths are, and your evidence for saying that? I respect your right to disagree with this post, and I am open to learning from what those I disagree with have to say and changing my mind. Your comment is no more an angry, ad hominem rant, and so seems unlikely to change anyone’s mind. The point is not that trans folk are suddenly “new”, it’s that hatred towards them is. All these things which you say have been working for decades have, by simple inference, certainly been working with trans folk using them. If anyone believes that the hate, bigotry, and suspicion of trans people will remain limited to that group for any length of time, I have a lovely bridge to sell you.
I wouldn't bother. Will Harley only interacts with trans stuff and it's always the same tired one-sided drivel.
Thanks, I suspected as much, given the length of post 3 mins after publication, but, no skin off my nose trying to be reasonable.
Many thousands of women like myself (I've even given birth to a child!!*) have signed the "Not In My Name" open letter.
We do not want to be co-opted against our will in a battle to discriminate. You mention Lesbians; they are the population group with the highest support for trans rights in repeated surveys.
I appreciate that because anti trans voices dominate the media and are listened to by many politicians, a bystander could (wrongly) get the impression that they speak on behalf of most women. They don't.
*Am not saying childbirth is the ultimate demonstration of being a woman, but insultingly, especially for women who do not want or cannot have kids, it is sometimes held up as such by the "biology is everything" crew.
Not all lesbians, and most definitely not all.women...Just because you dont mind sharing intimate spaces with men doesn't mean you can give the consent away of those women and girls who don't
You're quite right: the existing concept of single-sex spaces was long-established, worked perfectly well for all concerned and drew no objections. This concept was the trans-inclusive one: trans women have been using women's facilities and trans men men's facilities for as long as those facilities have existed. The SC ruling and EHRC guidance overturning that and implementing something different is what's unworkable, confusing and hateful.
Superbly written. I will be sending this to my MP (who has previously been decent on equalities issues but is blandly defending the EHRC on this one while completely failing to engage with any substantive or specific questions on it) and sharing it widely.
Thank you, so much, for this. It should go viral. I'm going to send it to my MP. The impact that this guidance is having on trans people before it's even in place is horrendous. This is the first time I've been able to find a coherent explanation of why the guidance is nonsense.
Thank you for explaining this Ian. I've just used it in my submission on a proposed law in New Zealand which would likel y create just as big a mess here as it has there, as well as causing just as much harm.
New Zealand's Definitions of Woman and Man Bill and how the public can give submissions | RNZ News https://share.google/vHpOBbWVq5yLzlHo8
Ian, thank you so much for your brave, careful and perceptive dig into this issue.
“Until the Supreme Court judgment, everyone had always assumed that single sex spaces by default included trans people in their acquired gender”.
No. For decades (centuries, really), UK public facilities like toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges, and sports were segregated by biological sex — “men” meant adult human males, “women” meant adult human females. This was not controversial.
I know you're not worth replying to but you're just wrong. Trans people didn't just pop out of the ground in the last 6 years. They've been using these toilets and facilities since they've been available and no-one has given a fucking shit. It WASN'T controversial.
Except, of course, that the truth is that no-one much noticed or cared if some trans person used the "wrong" facilities, or perhaps more accurately, the "right" ones.
They went quietly under the radar until the rage machine spotted an opportunity to make money.
And by the way, for most of history, there were no UK public facilities like toilets, changing rooms, hospital wards, refuges, and sports.
They're mostly a relatively modern invention.
You've been had.
They cared, you just didn’t notice: Greer,Bindel, Raymond etc then in the 90s, naughts and 2010s fetishistic men wanting to violate women’s boundaries proliferated like mushrooms and even more women fought to protect their dignity, privacy, and safety. On your second point, you walked into that one: why do you think women campaigned for their own spaces?
If your idea of "previous centuries" goes no further back than that, you're rather politically short-sighted, which explains a lot.
A very few women campaigned - mostly, as you say, people like Bindel & Greer, who were desperate for attention because their fame was fading. Most of the campaigners were, like yourself, men. And the fact that I didn't notice, and I'm pretty politically active, tells me that they didn't have a huge following & most people just shrugged & moved on to more interesting topics.
As a woman, I can say that I've never felt threatened by trans men, but then I've not (yet) come across one that was both trans & a wannabe rapist. They seem to be rather rare, especially if you exclude people known to be rapey before they made their claim to be trans.
I have felt threatened by a very odd man (in men's clothing) who invaded a women's toilet, but my response on that occasion was to go back to my office & collect an old bottle of rotring ink, and spray it on his hands as they groped under the partition - the police from the next-door station found he was very easy to identify. He was a known flasher, so as soon as they saw him, they realised what was going on.
And that sort of issue is maybe why in more modern setups, the partitions between cubicles in women's toilets tend be floor-to-ceiling, meaning that actually there's not much actual concern from normal people about trans women in women's toilets.
I would worry about the safety of trans men in the gent's, though, and women of masculine appearance getting threatened. Gender critical people don't seem to care about things like that.
Hear hear - and 'Greer, Bindel and Raymond etc.' is easily countered with a list of trans-inclusive feminists - Steinem, Feinburg, Davis, Butler.... As Judith Butler has pointed out, the majority of feminist movements across place/time have been trans-inclusive, because they recognise common cause against misogyny and patriarchy.
Trans people have existed throughout the time you're thinking of (not to mention, in some form, for millennia before that and throughout the world). Where do you think they were getting changed, recovering from surgery or having a wee? Obviously all along they were in the facilities aligned with the gender they identified with, or you'd have noticed otherwise. You didn't know this because you weren't paying attention till recently, when the media and political interest groups started whipping this up and telling you to be upset about it. It didn't affect you at all, and it still doesn't.
Really appreciated this digest of intensely complex wrangling that clearly the people at the centre of it either haven’t thought through or don’t understand. Meanwhile lives are being ruined and undermined daily, all because of opinion-writers jumping on a bandwagon of a sustained campaign wrought by extremists. Thoroughly depressing
(And just in case it wasn’t clear, those opinion-writers in question are not Ian, whose work here is much appreciated, but professional purveyors of “common sense” in the right wing press, and assorted transphobes.)
It is an excellent analysis.
There’s a significant typo here: (**unlike**) :
The same applies to really difficult situations **unlike** hospital wards. This is the sharp end of things. One of the most impressive MPs on the women’s committee was Labour MP Kevin McKenna, who had previously worked as a nurse. He started to ask the EHRC representatives a series of detailed questions to which they did not know the answer.
Superb, Ian, thank you.
Amazing work as always, Ian.
"We are expecting them to respond if there are complaints" is the real stickler here. Usually there wouldn't be complaints, but the GCs will be looking for it. They will have a national campaign to hunt down any trans woman using a women's toilet or entering a women's organization in order to have a box to put some bollocks complaints into.
That last part about the ECHR is pretty scary, you've already got the right side of politics obsessed with leaving the ECHR... if THAT is a solution, then it will seem reasonable in that ridiculous "get Brexit done" way... where we just ignore the actual problem, stick our heads in the sand, and fuck over a ton of people. And they can frame it all as some "we didn't do Brexit right, so give me another chance" story for Farage because it's in Strasbourg and says Europe in the name.
I'm happy to sacrifice for the good of my trans friends and family, but damn it's gonna suck when every space turns into cubicles and men like me will finally experience ridiculously long queues to go take a fucking piss because urinals don't make legal sense anymore. God dammit.
Thanks Ian. Just listened to your JKR podcast episodes too in the same area of thought. Really useful and informative. Appreciated