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Kayla and Shelby identify as a transwoman and a ciswoman.
Although they consider themselves to be a married lesbian couple, Kayla
hasn't had any surgery and their having children remains a
physical possibility. |
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The early 2000's were an extraordinary period for the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender) community. After decades of apparently fruitless campaigning, the walls suddenly fell and politicians and big corporates were suddenly competing to prove their LGBT friendly credentials at Pride and Awareness events. Arguably transgender individuals have been the greatest beneficiary of this change, as laws were passed in country after country that allowed them to legally change their "sex" to match their preferred gender, and even replacement Birth Certificates to be issued. As such, daughters have inherited as sons, and sons married as daughters - among many examples.
I find particularly worrying
indications that teenage children are seeking to change their gender
because their friends are; that social media site and charities are
encouraging this; and that the medical profession is providing
irreversible treatments and surgery with minimal assessment. I
fear that there will be huge backlash by the end of 2020's, with
thousands of young transmen and women (the former now greatly out number
the later) bitterly regretting their poorly advised decisions as a
teenager.
Despite all the positive developments, huge problem remains in the
wide-spread assumption that gender and sex are
the same when in fact they are very different. Gender is a mental
and lifestyle attribute), whilst is sex is a physical attribute which
includes genes, sexual intercourse and reproduction. In the UK, the ignorance of Civil Servants and Members
of Parliament about the difference between sex and gender resulted in
the passing into law of the Gender Recognition Act 2004
(GRA2004). This inaccurately confuses sex as being synonymous with
gender.
In
2016 it was announced that GRA2004 would be reviewed after a
campaign for a 'simplified' Gender Recognition procedure where
the applicant could
self-declare their gender
with no medical assessment required, and that this declaration will be
legally binding. An amendment to the Act was expected to be passed
allowing this in 2019, but other UK government priorities such as Brexit
and then Covid-19 delayed the legislation and it was eventually dropped.
However the Scottish Parliament, which
has extensive devolved powers, has
continued to pursue the self declaration route, for example the 2022
census will in Scotland allow anyone to self declare their sex -
regardless of what official documents such as their Birth Certificate or
Passport may state. Implementation of the GRA2004
has become a triumph of the views of a small but very
vocal trans-lobby. The rights, safety and best interests of women
with a vagina (yes, I'm including constructed neo-vagina's) are
subordinated to anyone with a penis who can coherently fill in a form. Possession of a GRC permits the holder to be considered female for all legal
purposes, whilst often still
physically a fertile male with a fully functional penis.
One (and not unique) appalling example of the
consequences of this is the case of David Thompson.
Whilst on remand for grievous bodily harm, burglary, multiple rapes and
other sexual offences against women - David applied for and obtained
a female GRC as Karen White. When subsequently convicted
as a male paedophile who had sexually abused young girls, her GRC meant that 'she' was sent to a women-only prison
- despite
having had no genital surgery or even any hormone treatment. Within
a few weeks
Karen had raped or sexually assaulted four fellow prisoners. As a
result, Leeds Crown Court described Karen as being a "predator who was a
danger to women and children". However, whilst Karen had been
temporarily relocated to a male-only prison, the court couldn't order
this to be made permanent as she was legally female! More positively, GRA2004 has helped to legalise
thousands of marriages in the UK between a man and a transwoman. For
this, both partners must complete a statutory declaration for submission to the Gender Recognition Panel. Whilst the vast majority of husbands are aware that their wife
is transgender (or vice versa), there are a small number of instances where
she has successfully been in deep stealth and this is a
huge surprise, and a source of magazine articles!
The pendulum has swung
extraordinary quickly and I'm not
surprised about the increasing number of cis-women complaining about
transwomen: using
women's toilets and changing rooms participating in
women's sport events being admitted to female-only hospital wards and prisons advocating radical feminist views on
topics such as rape and abortion without having a vagina or uterus availing of state benefits available only to women (such as an earlier pension
age) male rapists being able to self-declare on arrest
that they are a woman, and then having to be treated as such by the
police I'm
going to be controversial by stating that I consider some of the
complaints to be valid. For example in 2019 the UK's NHS published
guidance (commonly referred to as "Annex B") that allows "physically
intact men who identify as women" to be "housed on female-only wards" -
this is surely an unnecessary source of problems and worry for both
medical staff and other patients. Meanwhile, my local swimming
pool Even outside a women's changing room or toilets', I've met some very scary (both physically and behaviourally) individuals who I've struggled to accept as being women. I was once astonished to hear a very large and masculine looking transgender activist proclaiming as apparently a positive to 'her' LGBT+ credentials the fact that 'she' had had not had any medical treatment! Some countries such as Japan (since 2002) and Sweden (until 2013) require an applicant requesting a legal change of sex to have been sterilized (most commonly via an orchiectomy) or have completed sex-assignment surgery before this is granted. There is a lot well-argued opposition to such rules, but after a bad experience I can reluctantly see some merit in favour of them.
The Thought Police Extreme and polarised views are now dominating the transgender agenda in the UK and in other western countries. For example, a lesbian woman (normally the good person in 'woke' thinking) who refused to have sex with a self-labelled lesbian transwoman who had not had "bottom surgery" (i.e. she had a penis!) was damned on social media as being 'transphobic'.
Supposed transphobic behaviour (e.g. posting a comment on Twitter that a post-GCS neovagina "goes nowhere" - which is physically true) has become so unacceptable in the UK that it can lead to a visit by the police, with a formal warning issued that "whilst a criminal offence has not been committed, you now have civil offence record for a hate incident". In the UK, thousands of companies, schools and public sector bodies subscribe to schemes run by the LGBTQ charity Stonewall, which is largely tax payer funded. It's unclear why Stonewall qualifies as being a charity and when it appointed a new CEO in May 2020 her salary was reported as being more than the £160,000 paid to the UK's Prime Minister! Stonewall advices participating organisations against the use of the words "mother" and "father" (instead use "parent who has/has not given birth"); "boy" and "girl" (instead use terms such as "learner"); and "he" and "she" (use "they"). Compliance will gain Bronze, Silver and Gold awards. As a result, the NHS Scotland is busily removing these apparently offensive words from its forms, leaflets, website, etc.
I find it impossible to defend this situation - it's a modern
incarnation of the Thought Police in George Orwell's novel 1984.
If
the recommendations of Stonewall and similar organisations are followed, the resulting genderless
society seems akin to a science fiction book - and certainly does
nothing to advance women rights. Indeed, women's rights are
becoming subsumed into the rights of transwoman, even if the later have
had no medical treatment.
For example, in 2021 the medical journal
The Lancet tried to be progressive and
inclusive by avoiding the word "women" and instead used the phrase
"bodies with vaginas" on its front cover in reference to an article
about menstrual periods. This nevertheless created a hail of criticism that the
phrase was prejudicial and exclusionary to transwoman, in the midst of which a senior
British politician unhelpfully stated that "it was not right [to say] only women have a cervix".
A
scene in the 1986 movie the
Life of Brian lampoons the current situation with surprising
accuracy: Stan: I want to have babies. In 2023, John Cleese came under huge pressure to delete this scene from both the movie and a stage show because it might offend some people. Despite all the high profile and superficially very successful LGBT+ campaigning (at least in the USA and Western Europe, I suspect that the vast majority (99% ?) of the world's human population still identify themselves as 'male' (a man) or 'female' (a woman). Trying to encourage or even enforce the use of gender neutral terms such as 'them' (rather than 'he' or 'she'), 'person' (rather than 'man or 'woman') and 'parent and co-parent' (rather than 'mother and father') seems to me to be an oppressive rather than liberating action. The words 'women' and 'woman' have social connotations for people who describe themselves as such that don't deserve to be destroyed by a very small minority with a differing opinion. Deleting the word 'mother' is surely simply putting wishful or woke thinking before the reality of biology. In October 2021 the European Commission published communication guidelines which attempted to ban gender specific words and phrases such as "man-made" and "ladies and gentlemen" and replace them with neutral phrases like "human-induced" and "dear colleagues". This was withdrawn a month later with the official reason that it was not "a mature document and more work was required". An alternative reason is that examples were in English but the French language categorises every noun as masculine or feminine, and France is strongly advocating that French should replace English as the primary working language of the EU post-Brexit.
A Moment of Sanity? To widespread astonishment, in April 2022 the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) unexpectedly pushed back against the headlong acceptance of transwomen who were still physically completely male as women. It published guidance that allows "where proportionate" transwomen to be excluded from female-only changing rooms and lavatories, and said that a "service provider can exclude, modify or limit access to their service for trans people" ... "for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma or to ensure health and safety”. Examples of where restrictions would be applicable included:
The EHRC's guidance immediately hit a storm of criticism, including from the NHS which would have to change its Annex B policy to comply. Legal challenges to the guidance are almost certain.
Women / Woman Since renaming this website as Second Type Woman in 2003 I've occasionally received comments and complaints about the name. These essentially suggest that transgender women are just 'women', not a 'second type' of women. I personally believe that the spectrum of sex and gender is very wide - but that the two can't be completely separated. For example, I gather that as the years have passed I've become ever more like my mother in both appearance and behaviour, but unlike her I will never experience the highs and lows of pregnancy and child birth . I consider this to be a major differentiator from a First Type Woman and thus that the name I adopted for this site is still valid.
I've also received several quite strongly worded emails about my use of the word "transwoman" rather than "woman" in some articles. I accept that the world has moved on immensely in the last 20 years and confining the word "woman" to essentially cis-women is now potentially offensive. However, I remain reluctant to include as "women" genetically XY men who self-identify as women without having had any professional medical treatment. I struggle to support the decision by the SNP to allow respondents to the 2022 census to in Scotland to self-declare if they are male or female - among other things it will make the census useless for heath care planning for cis-women. Following what has become the "woke" norm, the British Music Awards ("the Brits") went gender neutral in 2022, i.e. no more male and female categories. There was thus a sharp intake of breath when the singer Adele proclaimed when accepting the Artist of the Year award that "I really love being a woman and a female artist". Whether this was deliberate brave statement by Adele, or simply any imprompt remark remains uncetain. Nevertheless she immediately joined the likes of J.K. Rowling on the naughty step of trans-rights advocates for daring to imply that there may be fundamental differences between 'women' and 'men'. The reality is that in the UK no more than 1 in 100 women are transsexual women, and that is a high estimate except perhaps among teenagers where challenging one's gender identity is currently very fashionable. The vast majority of transwomen keep a low profile - I doubt if 10% would consider themselves to be a LGTQ activist. But even among activists, I've never heard any complain at the use of the words "woman" and "mother" being used in a context that excludes transwomen, e.g. pregnancy and childbirth. It appears that in the UK, and other countries, officials are now trying to second think what might offend anyone suffering with Gender Identify Disorder, and are thus putting in place rules and regulations that only benefit a miniscule percentage of the population, whilst simultaneously worrying and stressing many more.
My Experience Since 2020 the term Sex-Reassignment Surgery (SRS) has largely been replaced by the term Gender Confirmation Surgery (GCS). I have no strong feelings in favour of either - SRS definitely didn't change my sex as I'm still genetically XY and can't get pregnant baring a miracle. However, I'm unsure what gender GCS confirmed. As a teenager I knew that I was a boy and fancied girls, but also envied girls. After many difficult years I reluctantly accepted that for reasons I can never explain, I needed to live my life as a woman. To do this successfully has required me to take female hormones and have major surgery. But does living my life as a woman to the extent that that I'm now a happily married wife mean that my gender is female and that I'm a woman? I'm not sure.
Impact on Children Children are now being bombarded on social media, television and even at school by LGBT+ messaging. Organisations such as Stonewall are sponsoring television programmes and making adverts to encourage children 'to be themselves' and come out as transgender. Their pamphlets and posters have also appeared in almost every school. It's become trendy and attention gaining among teenage children to come out as transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, gender neutral, etc. UK children with Gender Identify Disorder (GID) are almost doubling annually - the NHS accepted 77 children for treatment in 2009, 2,590 in 2019. A typical UK school now has 1% of its pupils registered as having GID. We seem to be getting close to a once Science Fiction like scenario where every child can decide if they want to be male, female or something else - both legally and in their secondary sexual characteristics (i.e. external physical appearance). As a society, we need to consider carefully the implications of giving children that choice, a choice which that they may later bitterly regret. In my own (medically unqualified) experience there's a small proportion of transgender children who after expert medical assessment should be given pro-active medical assistance (including blockers, hormones and surgery) at the earliest possible age. But there's also a greater number where it would be best not to intervene medically - even if that meant them passing through puberty. Unfortunately, there are a substantial number of children in the middle that require the "Wisdom of Solomon" to assess correctly. Back to top |
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Gender
vs.
Physical Sex
Even without the amendment, under GRA2004 it is possible
in the UK to legally to change sex from male to female, or vice-versa, without having
had any medical treatment. The requirements are: fill in a form; find a
registered doctor who will sign it; and pay the requisite fee (just £5).
About
a month later a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) will arrive in the post. 
Being Controversial
has put up a notice advising swimmers that they can use the
Changing Room (Male or Female) that they are most comfortable with.
This notice extraordinarily ignores the fact that "bodies with vaginas"
(a term adopted by the medical journal The Lancet to replace
the word "women") are often
horrified at sharing changing rooms with physically complete and sexually fully functional
males. It's a victory for the few
over the many. 
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