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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 they can potentially have children. |
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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 began to compete 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 a replacement Birth Certificate to be issued. One example in the UK is that daughters have inherited hereditary titles as a man and become a Lord, whilst sons have married as a woman and become a Lady.
I find particularly worrying
indications that teenage children are seeking to change their gender
just because their friends are. Social media sites are a massive
influence on teenagers and encourage a bandwagon effect when popular
infuencers transition, whilst the mission of leading trans charities in
the UK such as Stonewall and Mermaids leads them to encourage and
support young children in changing their gender without questioning if
this is necessary and in the best interests of the child. Even worse, the NHS in
the UK has been overwhelmed by the number of children who now apparently
suffer from gender identification disorders (GID), and as result it's providing
irreversible
"gender
confirmation" treatments and surgery to teenage children with minimal assessment. I
fear that there will be huge backlash by the end of 2020's, with
thousands of young transmen and transwomen (it's rarely recognised that the former outnumber
the later) bitterly regretting their poorly advised decisions as a
teenager.
Gender
vs.
Physical Sex
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
who have often not had GCS or even hormone treatment.
For example, transwoman: using
women's toilets and changing rooms
being admitted
to women-only hospital wards and prisons entering
women-only refuges, safe houses and havens demanding access to women-only societies and events enroling for women only courses and workshops, e.g.
yoga, pilates and even maternity classes participating in
women's sport events advocating radical feminist views on topics such as
rape and abortion availing of state benefits available only to women (such as an earlier pension
age)
Other issues include: the misstatement of someone's preferred gender
becoming considered a hate crime, with a criminal record potentially
resulting suggesting in conversation that
"biological sex cannot be changed” or that "transwomen are not women" can
have serious consequences, such
as the loss of your job the introduction of confusing
pronouns such as "them" and "they"
lesbian and bisexual women (10% of cis-women in the UK in 2022) who do
not want to have sex or a relationship with a transwoman who still has male genitals
being verbally abused, branded as unacceptably transphobic by activists,
and even raped by a "woman" physically far larger and stronger reading leaflets, newspaper and articles that go to extreme lengths to avoid
sex specific words such as
"vagina". E.g. a
UK charity refers to the vaginal opening as the "bonus hole",
whilst an Australian professional medical publication uses
the term "front hole" discovering that the in-print edition of classic books by JR Rowling, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, Ian Flemming - amongst others - have been re-written to remove sexual stereotyping potentially offensive to a very small minority traditional family friendly films such as Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music being re-certified to require parental guidance, with trigger warnings added about their sexual stereotyping
the NHS's National Menopause People Policy Framework claiming
"It is important to note that not everyone who
experiences menopause is a woman." I'm going to be controversial by stating that I consider some of the complaints to be valid as I've been personally affected by the increasing backlash against transwomen because a few men (I can't find an alternative word) and "trans activists" have abused the rights that it took decades for us to win. For example, I had a horrible experience queuing in a gender neutral toilet to use the only cubicle, whilst a steady stream of men used (with varying degrees of embarrassment) the urinals. In another example, I swim at a local pool during a women-only session as the time is ideal for me, but I now must sign for entry a form whose small print now oddly includes "people who are not having menstrual periods can be excluded". As an alternative I tried another swimming pool and spotted a notice advising swimmers to "Use the Changing Room (Male or Female) you are most comfortable with". This means that I could be sharing the Female changing room with physically complete and sexually fully functional males. It seems to be a victory for a tiny number of transactivitists (often pre-GCS/SRS) over perhaps 1000 times more cis-women. Even outside a women's changing room or toilets', I've met some very scary (both physically and behaviourally) individuals whom I've struggled to accept as being women. I was astonished in a meeting to hear a very large and masculine looking transgender activist proclaiming as apparently a positive to 'her' LGBT+ credentials the fact that 'she' had not had any medical treatment!
Transwomen are often emerging from the process of changing their
gender much poorer, jobless, disowned by their family and friends, struggling
to pass as a woman, infertile, unable to sexually attract 'normal' men,
and suffering from medical complications.
From my own experience I favour the rule in the now obsolescent V4 of the Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse
People which prescribes a two-year real-world test before a
surgeon performs SRS/GCS.
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" and obviously had a functional 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". Thousands of UK companies, schools and public sector bodies thus now subscribe to schemes run by the LGBTQ charity Stonewall, which is largely taxpayer funded. It's unclear why Stonewall qualifies as being a charity as when it appointed a new CEO in May 2020, her salary was more than the £160,000 paid to the UK's Prime Minister! Stonewall advice 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, for example, the NHS Scotland is removing these apparently offensive words from all of its forms, leaflets, websited, etc.
By 2021 the trans agenda was so succesful that a leading medical journal, The Lancet, avoided the word "women" and instead used the phrase "bodies with vaginas" on its front cover in reference to an article about menstrual periods. Crazily, this still created a hail of criticism on the grounds that the phrase was prejudicial and exclusionary to transwoman, with a British politician confusingly stating that "it was not right [to say] only women have a cervix". 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.
A
scene in the 1986 movie the
Life of Brian lampoons the current situation with surprising
accuracy: Stan: I want to have babies. There has since been huge pressure to delete this scene from both the movie and a prospective 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.
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 include:
The EHRC's guidance immediately hit a storm of criticism, including from the NHS which will have to change it's supposedly progressive policies to comply, and is relucant to do so. In June 2024 a group of NHS nurses in Darlington sued their employer for allowing transwomen to use the female changing rooms. In particular, they felt unsafe and even experienced panic attacks after being required to change into work clothes in front of a sexually active biological male with an all too obvious penis who claimed to identify as a woman, and had changed her name to Rose. After raising concerns, the nurses were told by HR that they needed to be "re-educated" - which Rose offered to help do.
Woman or Transwomen A massive challenge that is never addressed by lawyers or trans advocates is the physical reality that there is a huge difference between transwomen, for example: Example 1. A 20-year-old who is 160 cm tall (5ft 3in), weighs 48kg (106lbs), transitioned and began hormones age 17 under supervision after a medical assessment, had SRS age 19 and identifies as a hetrosexual woman attracted to men. However, her USA passport still states that he is "Male". and Example 2. A 58-year-old who is 185 cm tall (6ft 1in), weighs 102kg (223lbs), and transitioned age 56 without any medical supervision and doesn't take hormones consistently. He is pre-SRS but identifies as a lesbian attracted to women. He has obtained a UK Gender Recognition Certificate and her passport now states that she is "Female".
Applying a law where just completing a form makes an adult man legally a "woman" not only doesn't work, but it can dangerously abuse the rights of other women.
Impact on Children Personally, I'm very concerned about the impact that saturation trans-advocacy on social media is having on children. In 2000 I was a strong supporter of the earliest possible medical treatment of children with GID. But that was when just 1 in 4000 of UK children (the majority male to female) under 18 were being reported as having GID, in 2020 the number astonishingly reached over 2 in 100, with 76% female to male! Something has surely gone badly wrong when so many teenagers, particularly girls, are questioning their gender. The increasing number de-transitioners in their twenties - who have often had irreversible and ironically named "gender confirmation surgery" - need to be listened to. 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. W 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.
My Experience Since 2020 the term Sex-Reassignment Surgery (SRS) has largely been replaced by the term Gender Confirmation Surgery (GCS). I prefer the later term as SRS didn't change my physical sex - I'm still genetically XY.
To be successfully recognised as a woman at work and in daily life required me to continuously intake female hormones and other drugs, undertake procedures such as facial electrolysis and rhinoplasty to feminise my body, and have voice training. The financial cost was huge, whilst at the same time my take home pay dropped to about a third of that pre-transition. When I started a serious relationship with a heterosexual man there was no avoiding the fact that I also needed to have major surgery. Breast augmentation and SRS/GCS resulted in my physical secondary sexual characteristics being clearly female, to the satisfaction of my now husband and myself. But does passing and living my life as a woman to the extent that I'm a wife mean that my "sex" is female? I'm dubious that this is reasonable or factually correct. For example, when we first married I still just young enough to be regularly asked if we intended to have children, or even if I might be pregnant. Whilst I would have liked to have experienced pregnancy and had babies, I knew that it was physically impossible for me, but it's a gaping hole in the life of many young transwomen. I'm registered with the Health Service in Ireland as "Female". Given my increasingly mature age, I regularly need intimate medical examinations and tests - which can be a cause of confusion. I haven't found the mammograms offered to me every two years since I reached 50 to be a problem, I inform the staff that I have breast implants and have [so far] always received an all clear letter a few weeks later. However, it's not always so easy. After several letters asking me to attend a cervical cancer screening for a PAP test, I eventually complied after discovering that there was a small possibility that my neo-vagina (constructed from penile skin) can contract this. But my visit resulted in a confused nurse, a very puzzled doctor, and having to out myself as trans MTF. Back to top |
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Last updated: 1
April, 2022
(c) 2000-2024 Annie Richards |
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. 
(No spaces)