Monday, April 4, 2022
This day in Herstory: Maya Angelou, born April 4, 1928 (died May 28, 2014), was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.[3] Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim. (more)
Trans people CAN be legally banned from single-sex spaces in hospitals, sports clubs, shops and refuges if there is 'sufficiently good reason', rules equalities watchdog - in victory for women's rights groups
EHRC: Public bodies and businesses can legally limit services to a single sex
Declaration by equalities watchdog today is a major boost for women's rights
It follows uncertainty over whether services are allowed to exclude trans people
New guidance will have huge ramifications for hospitals, retailers and hospitality
It is a victory for women's right groups campaigning to uphold single-sex spaces
From Daily Mail (UK)
By DANIEL MARTIN
April 4, 2022
It is perfectly legal for public bodies and businesses to limit services to a single sex, the equalities watchdog declared today in a boost for women's rights.
There has long been uncertainty over whether services such as refuges for female rape victims are allowed to exclude trans people who were born as a man.
Today the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said that service providers wishing to limit services to a single sex are legally able to do so, provided the reasons are justified and proportionate.
The new guidance will have huge ramifications for hospitals, retailers, hospitality and sports clubs which have faced difficult issues in recent years under pressure from the trans lobby.
It makes it clear that it is legal for a gym to limit communal changing rooms to a single sex, as long as a gender neutral changing room is also provided for trans people.
It comes as a new women's rights campaign, called Respect My Sex If You Want My X, builds up momentum in advance of next month's local elections on May 5.
The campaign aims to draw attention to how a policy of 'self-identification' by trans people jeopardises single-sex spaces for women and female-only sporting events - while also being a potential child safeguarding issue. … read full article
Separate and single-sex service providers: a guide on the Equality Act sex and gender reassignment provisions
ADVICE AND GUIDANCE
From Equality and Human Rights Commission (UK)
Guidance updated April 4, 2022
Summary
The Equality Act allows for the provision of separate or single sex services in certain circumstances under ‘exceptions’ relating to sex.
To establish a separate or single-sex service, you must show that you meet at least one of a number of statutory conditions (set out in this section of the guide) and that limiting the service on the basis of sex is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. For example, a legitimate aim could be for reasons of privacy, decency, to prevent trauma or to ensure health and safety. You must then be able to show that your action is a proportionate way of achieving that aim.
There are circumstances where a lawfully-established separate or single-sex service provider can prevent, limit or modify trans people’s access to the service. This is allowed under the Act. However, limiting or modifying access to, or excluding a trans person from, the separate or single-sex service of the gender in which they present might be unlawful if you cannot show such action is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This applies whether the person has a Gender Recognition Certificate or not.
When considering how your service is provided to trans people, you must balance the impact on all service users and show that there is a sufficiently good reason for excluding trans people or limiting or modifying their access to the service. Some service providers may find it helpful to have a policy for how services are provided to trans people. Where this is the case we recommend you develop a policy but this is not a legal requirement. If you do have a policy you should be prepared to consider whether particular circumstances justify departing from the policy.
Next pages in this guide:
Statement on EHRC guidance
Sex Matters welcomes new guidance on single-sex services and calls on EHRC to revise the statutory codes of practice.
From Sex Matters (UK)
April 4, 2022
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has released new guidance on separate and single-sex services.
Sex Matters welcomes the new guidance as a very positive and important step in the right direction.
The guidance clarifies that “sex” (as understood in the Equality Act 2010) is binary, and that a person’s legal sex is their biological sex as recorded on their birth certificate.
It recommends that service providers have clear policies, and make the information accessible to everyone, so that all users know what to expect about whether a service or space is single-sex or mixed-sex.
Although a person’s legal sex can be changed with a gender recognition certificate, the EHRC states that this isn’t relevant information for determining access to single-sex services.
Sex Matters says that this clarity is very welcome. “The EHRC’s straightforward explanation should help service providers avoid the difficulties currently plaguing politicians when they are asked questions about the difference between sex and gender identity,” said the Executive Director of Sex Matters, Maya Forstater.
The EHRC says that the Equality Act allows service providers and employers to offer facilities to women and men separately (or to offer them for one sex only) wherever this is a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” – such as maintaining dignity and privacy. This guidance makes it explicit that single-sex services can be clearly signposted as accessible to people on the basis of biological sex.
The new guidance departs from the 2010 Statutory Code of Practice (COP), which did not include recognition of the need for clear policies, or of the need to balance the rights of different service users. In contrast, the new guidance says that everyone’s rights must be considered, and gives a wide range of examples of everyday situations in which a policy based on biological sex would be lawful – a policy, that is, which excludes all transwomen (male people who identify as women – or, in the terms of the Equality Act, males with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment) from using a service intended for females. Those examples include:
rape counselling for women
a women’s refuge
a women’s fitness class
communal changing rooms at a gym
male and female toilets at a community centre.
The 2010 COP, in contrast, incorrectly suggested that female customers’ discomfort about the presence of a transsexual in a single-sex health spa should be disregarded.
Another area where the guidance departs from the existing COP is that it does not include the direction to undertake individual “case-by-case” assessment on whether to allow entry to an opposite-sex space. The removal of this recommendation will help service providers avoid inadvertent indirect discrimination against other service users on the basis of sex. … read full article
Florida Republican pledges to make gender transition-related medical care for minors felony child abuse
Florida’s 2023 session is currently some 11 months away. Fine’s term — along with Florida’s 160 legislative seats — are up for election in November.
From Politico (USA)
By ANDREW ATTERBURY
April 4, 2022
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Florida state House Republican on Monday pledged to introduce legislation to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors throughout the state, a proposal similar to a measure backed by Arkansas Republicans last year that was condemned by LGBTQ rights advocates.
State Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay), who recently served as the House’s K-12 budget chief, said he wants to “shepherd legislation” in 2023 that would create a “felony child abuse” penalty for doctors who provide surgery or prescribe drugs that aid in the “gender assignment” of youth in Florida. He also proposed that doctors lose their medical license.
Florida’s 2023 session is currently some 11 months away. Fine’s term — along with Florida’s 160 legislative seats — are up for election in November.
“I can say I’m a porcupine, but that doesn’t make it so,” Fine wrote in a tweet Monday. “It is time to dispense with this fantasy making women’s sports a joke and our schools into a cesspool.” … read full article
Should puberty be optional?
Girls deserve a better deal growing up — but avoiding puberty isn’t the answer
From The Critic (UK)
By Victoria Smith
April 4, 2022
Being the first girl at school to get breasts is not all it’s cracked up to be. To be nine, ten years old, suddenly propelled from child to consumable product, can be deeply distressing. The patriarchal marketplace leaves you with two choices: gloss your lips, smile your smile and brazen it out, or resist by declaring war on your own flesh.
The ultimate human-to-object rite of passage
For a while, I hovered between the two, unsure which way to jump. This was the mid-eighties, Samantha Fox and Mandy Smith served up as examples of just where, if you were lucky, your tits could get you. I decided this wasn’t for me and stopped eating. I didn’t bleed or need a bra again until 1996. In the changing rooms for PE, I’d look down on the other girls, the ones allowing themselves to become woman-shaped. Hips, breasts, blood, surrender; I was better than that. These girls, I’d tell myself, had made a choice. If they weren’t exactly what they looked like — female, normative, inferior — they’d have been like me and said no.
Back then, no one offered you shortcuts to puberty avoidance. You did it old-style, slowly, like a starving saint. It wasn’t like today, when we are far more progressive.
It’s not that we don’t continue to put precociously pubescent girls on a one-way ticket to sexual exploitation. It’s that we offer a select few — those who do not consider themselves tits and ass and are willing to suffer to prove it — a medicalised exit strategy. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to The Critic!)
Dear Mr. Paxton
Please think of the parents-we are victims too when it comes to trans ideology
From Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) (USA)
April 4, 2022
Dear Mr. Paxton:
As a parent of a child with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) in California, I was very pleased to see your opinion that gender medicine on minors falls within the statutory scheme for child abuse. I understand that you used the strongest tool available to stop children from harm, and for that I applaud you. No child can consent to gender medicine. No one has the right—even a parent—to take away the fertility of a child or irreversibly harm them based upon, what will likely be, an ephemeral belief. However, I respectfully request some compassion to protect parents who were pressured to medicalize their children, as despite popular belief, not all parents whose children end up “transitioning” are fully informed or fully supportive during this process.
Parents are placed in an untenable position. I am a lead of a parent group in my liberal state. There is not one parent in our 75 plus person group who was provided with an alternative treatment for their child. Affirm the identity and provide for immediate social and medical transition was the only option for many of us. Abigail Martinez lost custody of her child for not affirming, and her daughter ended up taking her life after she was removed from the home and given wrong-sex hormones. Many parents in the US have lost custody of their children for not affirming them. We parents are "damned if we do and damned if we don't."
We are blackmailed by therapists, school counselors, social workers, teachers, medical professionals and advocacy groups and told that, if we do not give into our children's demands for gender care (life-affirming care as they pose it), they will kill themselves. This mantra is repeated endlessly to devastating effect. Nothing is scarier to a parent than the idea of your child killing him or herself. One only need to go to a few gender clinic sites or advocacy groups (Trevor Project, GLSEN, GLADD, ACLU, etc.) to see how parents are held hostage to these unfounded claims. When doctors repeat those suicide statements, parents are terrified. … read full article (and SUBSCRIBE to PITT!)
Nearly 17K Americans may request gender ‘X’ passport this year
The new gender designation will be available on U.S. passports beginning April 11.
From The Hill (USA)
By Brooke Migdon
April 4, 2022
Story at a glance:
An estimated 16,700 U.S. residents are expected to request passports with an “X” gender designation this year, according to a Williams Institute analysis.
Currently, 21 states and the District of Columbia allow residents to select an ‘X’ gender marker for their driver’s licenses.
The study did not account for changes in demand over time, and demand in the first year of implementation could be higher because of pent-up interest or lower because of lack of knowledge of the new gender marker’s availability.
Demand for passports with an “X” gender designation could spike once the option is made widely available beginning this month, according to a new report by the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ public policy think tank, with nearly 17,000 of the nation’s more than 1 million nonbinary LGBTQ+ residents expected to request an official gender-neutral identity document from the state department.
An estimated 16,700 people will request an “X” gender marker on their passports this year, according to the Williams Institute, representing roughly 1.4 percent of the country’s nonbinary LGBTQ+ population.
Currently, 21 states and the District of Columbia allow residents to select an ‘X’ gender marker for their driver’s licenses, an option that has been relatively popular among individuals identifying as neither male nor female. … read full article
Twitter allows trans attack on JK Rowling
From The Times (UK)
By Charlie Moloney
April 4, 2022
Twitter has been criticised for ruling that a transgender rights activist who said she hoped JK Rowling would “fit in a hearse” did not breach its guidelines.
Faye Fadem, a drummer, has produced a video for a “diss track” aimed at the Harry Potter author. The song includes the lyrics “I kill Terfs”, an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, used as a term of derision. The chorus to the song is: “JK, I hope you fit in a hearse. Bitch.”
Last month Fadem tweeted under the name Trust Fund Ozu: “Glad I finally have a video to share every time JK Rowling posts transphobic bullshit.”
Rowling replied: “I’m afraid I can’t give a shout out to everyone promising to murder me — there are so many and I’m a busy woman — but this one deserves a mention for the nineties rave vibe.” … read full article (share token)
Sorry, but you don't become a woman by just saying you are one: Hounded from her job by the fanatical trans rights lobby, brave academic Professor KATHLEEN STOCK defiantly backs a new campaign for women's rights
From Daily Mail (UK)
By PROFESSOR KATHLEEN STOCK
April 3, 2022
Had someone told you, not so long ago, that politicians would be terrified to answer the simple question ‘What is a woman?’ who would have believed it?
Very few, I think. Yet today the question has become so toxic that elected representatives try desperately to change the subject when it’s raised. Or they stammer something nonsensical by way of reply.
For we live in a world where to state a simple truth — that ‘a woman is an adult human female’, or ‘women don’t have penises’ — is deemed so offensive you could be banned from social media, rebuked by your teacher, disciplined by your employer or even cautioned by the police. And I should know.
Last year, I was harassed out of my university job of 18 years for saying such things. Masked men with flares came on to the campus, putting up posters and holding banners saying I should be fired.
Some of my colleagues took to social media to say they agreed with them. Eventually, I felt I had no choice but to leave.
Extreme as it was, my case is part of a wider pattern, one that is affecting ever greater numbers of ordinary people.
This is why I welcome the new campaign to protect women’s rights: Respect My Sex If You Want My X. … read full article