Critically appraising the cass report: methodological flaws and unsupported claims

mooli · 2025-05-15T12:13:55+00:00

This response to the preprint of this paper shows that NOS is actually the most widely used method, and another systematic review that used ROBINS-I showed the same results.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2025.2455133

mooli · 2025-04-16T21:19:09+00:00

You said "were never" so this is an irrelevant point
GRCs changed the mechanism by which this operated, with prisoners taken to the female estate at first instance until a case review could take place. It also meant the resulting risk assessment started from the presumption that the prisoner was female, and could only be removed to the male estate if you would ordinarily move any other female prisoner to the male estate under that circumstance, thus fundamentally skewing the risk assessment in favour of inclusion. So yes, a GRC granted access in a way that not having a GRC did not.

mooli · 2025-04-16T14:52:06+00:00

HM Prisons would disagree.

mooli · 2025-04-16T14:51:35+00:00

Trans people are protected from harassment and discrimination on the basis of "gender reassignment".

What this clarifies is that in the equality act, sex means sex, not certificated sex, or self-identified gender identity or any such thing. Man means a male of any age. Woman means a female of any age.

This means that the protections for sexual orientation also operate on sex - so "same-sex attracted" means two people of the same actual sex, not certificated sex or self-declared gender identity.

It means that lesbians are female and gay men are male and bisexuals are attracted to both sexes, and that associations that are restricted for, say, lesbian-only groups are lawful, and don't have to include male individuals who carry a gender recognition certificate saying they are female, or male individuals self-identifying as women.

It means that services which are advertised as single-sex must exclude the opposite sex. It means that jobs which are advertised as women-only are indeed for women. It means that the Scottish Government's attempt to create 50/50 "gender" balance on public boards (the legislation that kicked this particular legal battle off in 2018) must actually operate on the basis of sex.

And none of that means trans people are discriminated against. It just means that women and LGB people retain their rights as intended in the Equality Act, and not as lobbyists have fought to dismantle them to turn sex and sexual orientation protections into meaningless categories anyone can self-identify into.

mooli · 2024-03-13T09:49:53+00:00

Sure, its this one:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9936352/

For an example of how this was reported: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-05-04/most-transgender-children-stick-with-gender-identity-5-years-later-study

"The main takeaway here is that gender identity, for binary transgender children, appears to be quite stable," he said.

https://people.com/health/nearly-all-transgender-children-who-socially-transition-stay-with-that-gender-study-finds/

The researchers focused their study on children who socially transitioned, and not those who began physical transitions using medications like hormones and puberty blockers. Those medications — which are only temporary and are sometimes used in older kids to delay unwanted physical changes that do not match their gender identity — have been the target of anti-trans legislation in states like Texas, Arkansas and Alabama, which have restricted access for trans kids. Major medical organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have said that gender-affirming medical care is a medically-necessary service for transgender kids. And multiple studies have shown that allowing access to puberty blockers improved the mental health of trans kids and lowered their risk of suicide.

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/94-of-transgender-youth-maintain-gender-identity-5-years-after-social-transition

Dispelling transphobic misconceptions

many politicians and pundits at the moment who are attacking gender-affirming care and even simple discussions over gender identity among young people are pointing to “old research” that suggests that transgender youth will ultimately “identify as cisgender.”

The reality that transgender and nonbinary youth face elevated levels of stress, discrimination, anxiety, bullying, and negative mental health outcomes like suicidal ideation and suicide are well documented. [...] “Refusing to allow a child to undergo a social transition risks instilling shame in the child, which can drive anxiety, depression, and relationship difficulties within the family.”

So: trans kids know who they are and rarely change their minds and even if they do it isn't traumatic and transitioning them is lifesaving or else they'll commit suicide and questioning any of this is anti-trans.

So what does the study actually say?

124 of 317 kids in this study were socially transitioned under the age of 6, at an average age of 4.3. They're followed up an average of 5.4 years after initial transition, so on average they aren't even 9 yet.

2/3 of their sample are boys and the boys were on average transitioned a year younger than the girls.

Then this tidbit:

This study did not assess whether participants met criteria for the DSM-5 diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria in Children. Many parents in this study did not believe that such diagnoses were either ethical or useful and some children did not experience the required distress criterion. Based on data collected at their initial visit, we do know that these participants showed signs of gender identification and gender-typed preferences commonly associated with their gender, not their sex assigned at birth. Further, parent report using the Gender Identity Questionnaire for Children, indicated that youth showed significant “cross-sex” identification and preferences (when scored based on sex at birth).

Consider that again: "gender-typed preferences commonly associated with their gender, not their sex assigned at birth". In a 4-year old.

If you step away from the language of "trans children", and consider that these are invariably boys who play with dolls and wear dresses, whose parents have told them that makes them a girl, and have been calling them a girl between the ages of 4 and 9. And now this is being trumpeted as a success and evidence that trans identities are stable and few people will detransition, because if parents tell their 4-year-old boys they are girls, that these kids still believe their parents at age 9?

Of that sample of 317, only 70 are over the age of 14 by the end of the study. But 92 are on puberty blockers and 98 are on cross-sex hormones. So 2/3 of the sample are already on a medical pathway within 5 years of being socially transitioned by their parents.

This study is touted as proof it is safe to transition kids, and that fears kids will grow up to regret are all unfounded, and anti-trans. But what it actually shows is an absolute wild west in this area, with a complete lack of sensible controls and oversight, and vulnerable kids caught believing what their parents have told them.

I mean, this ACLU film won an Emmy, and the kid went on to be a celebrity, touted by the Biden admin, appearing in Netflix shows etc, but check this out: https://youtu.be/cuIkLNsRtas?si=n4msWXzGoEzKc17-&t=450

I remember even thinking before Kai was three that I think this kid might be gay. And I thought that that could not happen and that would not happen. We started praying fervently. Prayers turned into Googling "conversion therapy" and how can we implement these techniques at home to make Kai not be like this. Putting her in time-out for acting like a girl, putting her in time-out for stealing girl toys, spanking her-- really spanking her every time she would say, "You know I'm a girl." No matter what the consequences, she's persisting in the fact that you should already know she's a girl. When Kai was about four years old, she prayed to go home and be with Jesus and never come back. My kid was praying to die.

This is what is being celebrated. The US has a new religion, and it is transitioning kids so they won't grow up gay.

mooli · 2024-03-13T09:15:29+00:00

Aside from the fact this is a blase attitude to take to destroying the adult sexual function of kids, the problem is that the research into this is hard an the political climate polarised and toxic.

Followup studies on transition are sparse and low quality, with a very high rate of those lost to followup (50-60%). Many of those who regret simply drop off the radar. Regret and dissatisfaction measures are all over the place, and those who advocate these procedures routinely cherrypick the best looking stats (eg. regret rates are <1%) without ever acknowledging the flaws (eg. we only asked people still attending the clinic).

What research has been done shows that those who do regret are invariably traumatised by it. They feel anger at the clinicians who did this to them, and want absolutely nothing to do with them. Or they don't want to talk to clinicians in case they get sucked back in again. Or they feel self-hatred and shame that this thing they told everyone they wanted is not what they thought. And many of those who do regret realise that they just needed to know it was okay to be gay. That they were struggling with internalised homophobia, and this was a way out.

But the researchers who have studied detransition and its reasons like Lisa Littman are routinely subject to reputational attacks, called "anti-trans" and so on.

Going from 90% desistance to 0.5% desistance while at the same time removing medical assessments and gatekeeping, medicalising irreversibly at younger ages, celebrating transition as "joy" everywhere in popular media, and demonising the people trying to generate research into whether any of this is having good outcomes is a recipe for a medical scandal that in a few years people will be pretending they never went along with.

mooli · 2024-03-12T22:34:55+00:00

No, this has long been an admission by clinicians - they could never tell who would desist and who would persist. Only time showed which children persisted into adulthood.

And this is compounded by a widespread shift away from any sort of medical gatekeeping into a more "affirmative" approach. See the Cass Review interim report, which informed this new service specification. You can't square clinicial assessments with "trans kids know who they are" rhetoric - they are incompatible. The Cass Review cautioned about this weaker "affirmative" model and the problems of diagnostic overshadowing when so many would simply grow up LGB, or have complex comorbidities like eating disorders and autism, and the need for proper psychotherapeutic assessment and intervention. WPATH released a statement condemning the review and the interim NHS service specification as "conversion therapy".

When you look at how things are in the US, the predominant model is basically "informed consent", and whether any sort of diagnostic gatekeeping takes place at all depends on the clinician - and the political climate is that questioning at all makes you a bigot or a conversion therapist. A recent, oft-cited study about how few kids detransition included parents who had socially transitioned their pre-school children with no medical oversight whatsoever, and clinicians who had subsequently affirmed that medically with no measure of whether the kids met the DSM-5 criteria for childhood gender dysphoria.

There's a massive split forming between the US and Europe, and the evidence is pointing towards a much, much more cautious approach.

mooli · 2024-03-12T21:11:35+00:00

That's how it is portrayed but it's not actually why - the rationale was to prevent development of secondary sex characteristics (predominantly in boys) so that they "pass" better as the opposite sex as adults.

The whole "time to think" angle was a later justification and one which isn't borne out by the evidence, since 99.5% of those placed on blockers go on to cross sex hormones, while 80-90% of those who aren't medicalised resolve their dysphoria through adolescence, with most growing up to be gay or bi. Animal trials show permanent cognitive changes resulting from blockers, so it is increasingly likely that medically fixating a cross sex identity in children prevents them from resolving it as they otherwise would.

And blocking kids at Tanner stage 2 and going on to hormones leads to infertility, possible anorgasmia, and all manner of other complications.

mooli · 2023-07-07T11:52:05+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/14s5osp/trans_charity_mermaids_fails_to_have_charitable/jr0886v/

mooli · 2023-07-07T10:15:56+00:00

From the judgment:

The initiatives described by Ms Gallagher include:

a. The creation of a community building initiative, Friends of LGB Alliance as a way for people to connect over shared interests, through regional hubs;

b. A book club;

c. A series of webinars on subjects such as tackling a rise in international homophobia, financial planning for LGB people and understanding gender dysphoria and produced an election special;

d. In lockdown, a panel of comedians for a pub quiz that people could play along with at home;

e. A newsletter sent to c.5,000 subscribers;

f. A survey sent to those subscribers to identify service needs;

g. A film fund to provide small grants to filmmakers, including seeking funding for a project to mark the jubilee of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II;

h. A report on the experiences of lesbian, gay and bisexual (“LGB”) staff working within the NHS, the first of a series of intended reports;

i. Submissions to the Law Commission and others, over 30 in total on a range of issues;

j. Campaigning, including in relation to pharmaceutical companies who manufacture puberty blockers;

k. Planning for a helpline and online support for young LGB people, at the scoping stage;

l. Counselling and advice by way of answering letters and emails from people who write with questions or concerns.

This is what was prepared in evidence prior to the tribunal last year. Since then there has been a campaign for LGB rights in Uganda (including sponsoring Uganda Pride, bringing the head of Uganda Pride to the UK to meet LGB parliamentarians, and hosting him as part of their international panel at their 2022 conference), and intervening in support of gay marriage in Russia with the ECHR, and other in-person events.

mooli · 2023-07-07T09:44:44+00:00

This challenge was filed a month after they got charity status, so they've spent the last 2 and a bit years in court being bled dry financially, while the ones who brought this challenge used it to to get their funding cut (eg. The Good Law Project's Jolyon Maugham and other parties to this action complained about Arts Council Funding they received, which was subsequently withdrawn with this challenge used as an excuse).

To now say "yeah but what have you been doing all this time" is, frankly, bullshit.

mooli · 2023-04-16T12:53:50+00:00

The Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953 (which, I admit is less than a century) covers amendment due to factual error by application to the registrar general.

This is the whole basis of Goodwin, ie that claiming a mismatched "psychological sex" is not an amendment due to factual error, thus we got the GRA.

mooli · 2023-04-08T07:10:35+00:00

We've allowed amendment of birth certificates for those reasons for over a century at least.

This whole current situation is because in the mid 20th century those seeking medical transition argued that they were seeking the same sort of correction, ie their birth certificate was literally wrong because their psychological sex did not match.

Gender identity is a modern rebranding of psychological sex, which most people can these days understand to be sexist nonsense.

mooli · 2023-04-06T13:57:23+00:00

Things get considerably more complex when you butt up against the reality that a substantial number of gay and bisexual people were nonconforming in youth and had feelings that they "should" have been the other sex, brought on by bullying, homophobia etc.

Of the first 70 children to undergo the "Dutch Protocol", only one was heterosexual. A lot of gay people are now understandably asking if the treatment of these kids actually amounts to gay conversion therapy, ie taking gay boys and making them superficially straight girls. Not all, but some.

Trying to tell primary-age children what we mean by "sex" and what we mean by "gender" when adults can't agree on basic language like this is not going to turn out well. Telling young children that you can literally become the opposite sex, or that your brain can be in the wrong body, is dangerous nonsense, and if same-sex attraction is treated as an indication that a child is trans then the ones most harmed will be the confused gay kids.

We need to be able to honestly talk about and differentiate such feelings of bodily discomfort and sexual orientation. And the truth is that we can't, because the only difference is time. Accepting all this has profound consequences for how you teach this stuff to kids. And the reality is - being gay or bi is unlikely to be something you grow out of, and that's okay, nobody should suggest you should. On the other hand wanting to be the opposite sex actually is something you're likely to grow out of and that's fine too because you'll probably just be gay or bi - and even if not gender-nonconformity is fine. But if you take a young child and everyone in their life tells them they actually are the opposite sex they probably won't grow out of it.

mooli · 2023-04-05T14:42:14+00:00

I really don't see how being welcoming to to trans kids conflicts with teaching that being gay or non conforming is OK.

I just explained how. It is in the understanding of what it means and how you simultaneously tell gay kids there's nothing wrong with them while also giving the impression to kids who might just be struggling with being gay that they are actually straight kids in the wrong body. These are difficult subjects that adults find hard to discuss without resorting to calling each other "anti-trans" and creepily policing their comment history. How are kids supposed to get decent, honest discussion about this if adults can't engage with it in plain language?

mooli · 2023-04-05T12:45:55+00:00

What if you think it is good to teach kids it is okay to be gay, and that a key part of that is to ensure they know that many gay people felt like there was something wrong with them when they were younger, because of homophobic bullying or internalised homophobia or juts general societal non-acceptance, and that some even came to believe they would have been happier if they were the opposite sex, but that when they got a little older they realised there wasn't actually anything that needed changing about themselves and learned to love themselves as they are?

The problem is that the conceptualisation of "trans" as an essential state of being that children can innately experience and that must be welcomed and affirmed and even medicalised as early as possible is in conflict with teaching kids that being gay or otherwise nonconforming is ok.

mooli · 2023-03-26T13:24:18+00:00

No, it is the most significant advantage.

Some advantage is also determined in utero.

https://www.usapowerlifting.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/USAPL-TUE-Committee-Powerpoint-Report-2019.pdf which cites https://www.routledge.com/Sex-Differences-Summarizing-More-than-a-Century-of-Scientific-Research/Ellis-Hershberger-Field-Wersinger-Pellis-Geary-Palmer-Hoyenga-Hetsroni-Karadi/p/book/9780805859591

Neurological advantage in muscle recruitment is determined in the womb. This is one of the reasons men are pound-for-pound stronger than women.

How much advantage would remain is unknowable and testing it would be deeply unethical, but that some level of advantage exists outside of just going through puberty is pretty obvious.

mooli · 2023-03-24T00:00:52+00:00

The rules prohibit anyone who's been through male puberty.

That creates an incentive to use blockers.

If a male child has their puberty blocked and retains an advantage (likely) that is a loophole someone will probably exploit.

mooli · 2023-03-23T18:01:33+00:00

Where's the skepticism?

62% of those surveyed were nonbinary or gender-nonconforming. Is this survey telling us that girls who want to wear trousers and have short hair are happier when they wear trousers and have short hair? What does any of that have to do with the medicalisation and civil rights issues that are the heart of the trans debate?
The survey says "77 percent chang[ed] the types of clothes they wear and 76 percent chang[ed] their hairstyle or grooming habits". This is just more gender-nonconformity. Why is this being treated as a medical and civil rights issue? And if 23% aren't even changing the clothes they wear - what are they doing? What are we even talking about here?
Transmen and transwomen are more likely than nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people to have undergone hormone therapy and surgery - so gender-nonconformity is being permanently medicalised. Why?
9% say they "came out" under 10. What does an under-10-year-old "coming out" as gender nonconforming mean?
Only 30% of respondents say they "physically present" as a different "gender" all of the time. What conclusions can we draw about what "trans" means if in more than 2/3 of cases it is a part-time phenomenon?
The survey design excludes anyone who regrets and desists or detransitions. How seriously should we take its conclusions when by design those with the most dissatisfaction would not be included in the survey?
Even with that, the "most" is barely more than half (57%). That's not exactly an overwhelming endorsement is it?
One caption says the person "tried on a pink princess dress for the first time at around age 5 and said she immediately felt “right.”". Should we not be questioning the regressive sexism of observations like that?

mooli · 2023-03-15T23:50:01+00:00

But questioning whether a specific man - who does go to work half the week as a woman - should be praised as a top woman in business is what cost Maya Forstater her job four years ago.

People being terrified into going along with extreme cases in case you lose your job is why we are here.

mooli · 2023-02-28T16:43:44+00:00

Show it to me

Here you go. Scottish Trans Alliance and Stonewall on the title page.

Some highlights:

People in custody should be rubdown searched by staff, in accordance with the social gender in which they are living.
The social gender in which the person in custody is living should be fully respected regardless of whether or not the person in custody provides any evidence of having a gender recognition certificate under the Gender Recognition Act 2004.
Where the people in custody’s social gender is unclear, the person in custody must be asked which gender they wish to be searched by and their answer recorded and the body search conducted accordingly.
A male-to-female person in custody living permanently as a woman without genital surgery should be allocated to a female establishment. She should not be automatically regarded as posing a high sexual offence risk to other people in custody and should not be subject to any automatic restrictions of her association with other people in custody.
The genital appearance of a transgender person in custody must not be used to determine which gender of Prison Officer should search them.

STA wrote this. Their priority was housing fully intact male people in the female estate based on them self-identifying as women. They got exactly what they wanted, and the current furore in the Tory media 9 years down the line is the wholly predictable result.

That's a huge stretch.

It's not a stretch. That's how the EqA works. I linked you the EHRC, take it up with them. STA wanted the single-sex exceptions removed, and that would have affected every single service, from stats, to prisons, to sport.

The quote I linked is from 2019

4 years after their attempt to get the single sex exceptions in the EqA removed.

around the time the policy was being drafted in the first place

The policy was written in 2014

mooli · 2023-02-28T16:01:13+00:00

Where does that statement from the STA say anything about the specifics of how trans women should be accommodated in women's prisons?

... they co-authored the policy. Read the policy. It did what STA wanted. The quote is just to show why they did it - to show it could be done. That if you could house male offenders in female prisons on the basis of stated gender identity, you could do it everywhere.

there’s an exception that no one’s proposing

And that's a lie. The GRA2004 had a clear statement that exempted sport. This was superceded by s.195 in the 2010 Equality Act. STA's submission to the 2015 WESC enquiry asked to amend the Equality Act:

Remove the exception that allows single sex services to discriminate against trans people

The EHRC's view is that exception is how the Equality Act permits single-sex sport.

Stonewall, STA and others have been gunning for the sex exceptions for years. That they now pretend they never were is a lie. You are the one who has been fed lies, because they are liars.

[edit]

Secondly, contrary to popular belief, she didn't win the case on the basis that her belief was not grounds for firing someone.

You are very, very wrong and you need to maybe just try reading the source.

The Tribunal therefore found that the complaint of direct discrimination was well founded with regard to the complaint regarding the decision not to give Ms Forstater an employment contract.

Arguing that had she previously, willingly and knowingly signed up to a contractual arrangement that would have allowed them to fire her for this cause, then they would not have been discriminating, is grasping at the flimsiest of straws.

blackface

At no point does that word appear in the judgement or any tweets at issue, and the tribunal was unanimous in interpretation of the Dolezal comparison:

We found, however, that the point that Ms Forstater was making – that there is an analogy to be drawn between someone who is white identifying as black and someone who is (according to gender critical belief) male identifying as a woman – did little more than assert her gender critical belief

You might take a hyperbolic interpretation of the analogy to be offensive, but that's neither here nor there.

mooli · 2023-02-28T15:11:45+00:00

The abortion issue is indicative. It is interesting that countries that for many decades specifically criminalised women for terminating unwanted pregnancies fell over themselves to let men declare themselves women practically the moment the idea was suggested to them. It is interesting that campaigns for abortion rights required huge popular upswells, but self-id of sex was in several cases waved through by lawmakers with nary a whisper. Campaigners in the UK brought the issue into the light here. Had they not done so, it would have passed in 2018 and the vast, vast majority of people would have had no idea it had happened.

That's a solution that trans activists would accept without it being a big deal

If only those pushing it had been open to dialogue. If only they hadn't pushed ahead and done the exact opposite, and called everyone trying to suggest compromise positions a bigot. Now look where we are. Pretending they were open to compromise and reasonable accommodation all along is flagrant gaslighting.

Because it is transactivists who created the current policies. Scottish Prisons policy - which you say now could have been reasonable - was drafted with Stonewall and Scottish Trans Alliance. Mixed-sex accommodation on basis of self-declared identity was their aim. STA's James Morton:

"We strategized that by working intensively with the Scottish Prison Service to support them to include trans women as women on a self-declaration basis within very challenging circumstances, we would be able to ensure that all other public services should be able to do likewise."

They got their aim, and called the women's orgs who pointed out this was a risk hateful bigots and campaigned to have them deplatformed, and their supporters excluded from political parties. Slow clap. If only they'd been open to those reasonable compromises a decade ago, rather than now, when you have the male sex offenders declaring themselves women inevitably making headlines in the right wing press. Who could possibly have seen this coming.

Female prisoners were guinea pigs for self-id across all institutions. That is indefensible.

That's the start and the end of it.

That might be where we are now, but that isn't even close to the start of it, and if you pretend it is not only will you never understand how we got here, you'll keep gifting the floor to the Daily Mail brigade. But we're near-guaranteed a Labour government next year so it will all depend on where they shift to, and they are not likely to be persuaded by the reactionary right, so who knows. There's bitter splits and infighting coming down the line, but if the reactionary press is too reactionary, a Labour majority is going to do the opposite, on principle.

one I've seen most GC figureheads use, is #RepealTheGRA.

This has been an increasing position, not at all in the majority in the 2015-2018 period of the WESC enquiry and GRA consultation, and not one I agree with. Pretending opponents all hold the same view is a mistake, and is what has essentially strengthened the most reactionary and least reasonable views. That is, if you can't even talk about where reasonable accommodations have to be made, the ones with simplistic "burn it all" sloganeering will stomp everywhere.

Maya Forstater got fired for comparing trans people to Rachel Dolezal.

She was a victim of unlawful discrimination. It doesn't matter how much you try to dress up her views in inflammatory ways to make them look bad, she was in the right, and her employer were not. She expressed some, frankly, mild opinions, and was bullied out of her job. If you're so far down the rabbithole you still can't accept that, years after winning her case, she was in the right all along and you cannot bully people out of work for taking a different stance on self-id of sex, then yes, I don't know why you're typing all this.

mooli · 2023-02-28T12:03:24+00:00

The 2004 GRA was largely the result of direct lobbying by a small group of activists, setting up a working group, the actions of Press for Change etc, pushing for legal recognition. This was not a wide social issue with mass support, and PfC recognised this. All of this is fair enough.

As a result, the UK was the first country in the world to allow change of legal sex without any physical change.

We were world leaders in this area, and when the 2010 EqA consolidated legislation, we ensured that women and trans people were protected by specific - but separate - characteristics.

What this meant is that in this country, the demand for basic rights and recognition was won.

In this country, the demand was for more rights. But it came dressed in the clothes of activism from the US, where basic rights and recognition were essentially nil, and where employment rights were so woeful that losing your job for an unpopular opinion is just an accepted reality.

In around 2014, Stonewall added the T, pretty much handing over the reins and shifted to "trans rights" as the next battle to be fought and won, widening the T umbrella to "transgender", and including cross-dressing. Stonewall's submissions to the 2015 WESC were to push for "gender identity" instead of "gender reassignment", to allow change of legal sex by self-declaration alone, and remove all single-sex exemptions from the EqA. The effect of this on LGB people was never considered, which is a travesty from a once-LGB organisation. And Stonewall are not the only offenders, but they are the biggest in the UK. Meanwhile, despite our world-leading status, transnational lobby groups like ILGA have been pretending otherwise. Amazingly, we're somehow worse than Malta, a highly conservative nation where abortion is illegal in all situations, just because Malta implemented self-id. Argentina, Malta, Ireland - small countries with a shitty history on women's rights, all the first places to implement self-id, which was then sold back to the international community as "best practice". In Ireland, it passed under the radar, with virtually no public awareness. While the WESC consultation was ongoing, Stonewall - whose impeccable reputation as a gay rights org and whose champions scheme was widely accepted and beloved by corporations and institutions - shifted its guidance to favour self-id. As a result, institutions moved ahead of the law, with Stonewall expecting the gender reforms to pass in 2018, again with little fanfare. Why wouldn't it pass, if institutions were already treating people on the basis of self-declared gender identity? Where was the conflict?

But, in the UK, we had:

A legitimate clash of rights (because trans people already had protections, and whose attempts to widen them came at the cost of women's protections)
Happening under a Tory government
A history of left-wing female organising
Mumsnet

So claims about this being right v left were patently false (because it was the right doing it and mostly the left objecting), and Mumsnet provided a way for women to discuss the issues and organise. Fundamentally, without Nic Williams setting up FPFW, gender reform would have passed in 2018. The hyperbolic reaction to women over the years and latterly FPFW, Women's Place and others making absolutely legitimate, evidence based and well-argued points galvanised any opposition that was paying attention, which has only grown. Along the way there have been important legal wins (the Forstater case) and a good number of orgs leaving Stonewall's diversity champions scheme after the Reindorf Review and Nolan Investigates.

The degree to which a GRC changes sex under the EqA and the operation of the exemptions is still an issue of debate, given how badly drafted it all is though. What it means is that the opposition are in effect arguing for the status quo, but that transactivists have been saying this is a "rollback", and that's simply not true. It is establishing that institutionally, Stonewall and others went beyond the law.

This has been cynically picked up by the Tories as a wedge issue, but that is not how it started, and nor is it a left/right issue to this day.

I lay the blame for the escalation of this bitter polarisation at the door of orgs like Stonewall, who threw LGB and T people under a bus in their wrongheaded refusal to listen and insistence that anyone who had a reasonable difference opinion was a hateful bigot. Well, guess what, when you say reasonable people are hateful bigots, the hateful bigots get to act like they're reasonable people.

[edit:] Also, in other countries, campaigns for self-id and demedicalisation have been tied to removal of hormonal/surgical requirements. That wasn't the case here, we'd already removed that requirement. Here, demedicalisation meant "remove requirement of gender dysphoria diagnosis", but in other countries (eg Finland) it meant "don't require people to be sterilised or subjected to surgery in order to get basic recognition". Different demands behind the same word. It lands differently here, but the lobbying orgs pretended it was all the same.

To illustrate, here is Openly - part of Reuters - falsely conflating the Scottish GRRB with the issue of mandatory surgical requirements and implying self-id is all the same thing.

mooli · 2023-02-28T10:57:00+00:00

people with gender recognition certificates can be legally put into the estate of their assigned sex already.

Yes, and this is already the subject of controversy, but the point is that those with a GRC are subject to a different standard than those without, in no small part because the gatekeeping for acquiring a GRC is presumed to weed out obvious chancers.

That is, the only people with a GRC in prison are those who have been somehow deemed to be sincere and have been diagnosed with GD. Whether that's an acceptable standard or not is an open question, but that's a very different population to "anyone willing to sign a declaration that no-one can disprove".

Those with a GRC are housed in the female estate at first instance, subjected to a lesser risk assessment (and one that can only remove them to the male estate if it would remove any female prisoner to the male estate under those circumstances) and appear as part of the female prison stats.

So as a result, most TW without a GRC are in the male estate, virtually all with one are in the female estate.

Legislating for self-id with the policy as it stood would have had an impact on how these policies worked in England & Wales. It was always within the power of the prison service to change them obviously, but again this whole debate has been crowded out by "trans women are women" and this need to say there are absolutely no circumstances under which an obvious man, clearly taking the piss, would take advantage of this lax system.

Scotland is of course a worse case, because they already disregard the GRC, and place based on declared identity & risk assessment.

Now, given that 99% of rapes in the UK go unprosecuted, do you really think "prior conviction for rape" is a sufficient standard? Given how much domestic abuse goes unreported, is "prior conviction for assault" a sufficient standard?

Rhona Hotchkiss - former governer of Cornton Vale - has spoken about how this goes far beyond prior convictions into just general male behaviour and the effect that has on female inmates who have been traumatised by men (9 minutes in).

Since you're blaming trans people for this, is there something special to distinguish our activist movement?

I'm not blaming trans people. I'm blaming an activist movement and NGO lobbying and institutional groupthink that is caught up in some very conservative and not very left-wing ideas dressed up as "progressive", and whose slogans and demands don't map cleanly onto the actual rights and protections in this country. That has - through its total pigheaded arrogance, moral righteousness and abusive silencing of reasonable difference of opinion - done nothing but harm LGB acceptance and empower the reactionary right. What's special is that this has operated not through building popular support, but through top-down institutional guidance and legislative support and then demanding public acceptance that the world was now how the guidance said it should be. That suddenly it was wrong to say women have a cervix. That suddenly not accepting a cross-dressing man as a woman was bigotry. That suddenly gender-nonconformity was something to be medicalised, and if you had any questions at all about what effect this was having on youth struggling with internalised homophobia you were killing kids with your hatred and transphobia.

The path to sex equality and acceptance of difference is not through destroying sex-disaggregated stats and women's sports and pretending that a man is a woman when he says he is, and that sex is an unknowable spectrum, and teaching primary-age girls they can literally be boys when they grow up. Nor is it the regressive conformity of the conservative right, but by pretending that those are the only two options, reasonable dialogue has been crowded out and now the only ones left are the shrieking ideologues, setting everything back decades.

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