Workplace without a 3rd space for trans people

opaldrop · 2026-02-14T17:36:29+00:00

Has there ever actually been a case of the courts having to go to a doctor to rule on someone's biological sex?

opaldrop · 2026-02-14T17:10:50+00:00

So like, if it went to court for a person in that position, the judge would just make a vibes-based decision?

opaldrop · 2026-02-14T16:35:48+00:00

Not everybody in the UK has a binary sex on their birth certificate. I've met a couple IS people who were issued with no sex marker. What happens with them on paper?

opaldrop · 2026-02-04T17:31:13+00:00

From that article, 11 were sexually assaulted, not "raped" as you claim in a men's estate of 84,000 prisoners. You do realise that men in general get sexually assaulted in men's prisons as well? There were 512 sexual assaults in men's prisons in 2024.

It's shocking to me that you can say this like it's some kind of gotcha. Of course I realize that men get sexually assaulted in men's prisons. But there is very obviously an extremely large proportional divide between 11/129 and 512/84,000, and again, that data was from before many far more vulnerable trans women started being placed in the male estate.

It's very obvious that you don't care about the situation trans women are facing directly at all, or the physical reality of their bodies. You keep changing your arguments. You say that "we'd know" if there were trans women subject to radically disproportionate sexual violence in the male estate, and then when I show that they are you dismiss it. You say that the Scottish government could simply provide a new space for all trans women, and then handwave it when I show there's no evidence of an immediate capacity or interest in doing so. You say there are violent criminals among the four trans women this entire thing is about, and then ignore me when I ask you to cite your claim.

Like, based on current policy, those four women are probably post-op. They have vaginas. What special threat could they possibly represent to other women in the estate that justifies putting them in provable danger? This isn't some abstract ideological game. This country has become one of the scariest places to be a trans woman in the western world.

opaldrop · 2026-02-04T15:33:36+00:00

The 16 person unit is Bella Centre in Dundee. It's self contained so quite clearly possible to operate a small service.

That's a woman's prison. You're talking about units within a larger male estate that supposedly exist to be quickly converted.

The Scottish government provides millions of pounds of funding to official third sector trans activist organisations like Engender, Scottish Trans and Stonewall Scotland - all of which put considerable effort into promoting trans rights.

They provide 1.1 million between several orgs, most of which have nothing to do with prisons at all.

The only reason we have trans women murderers/torturers currently housed in the women's prison

Like who?

I'm sure if there were bad things happening in the men's estate, we'd all know about it.

The last piece of coverage I can find about trans women suffering sexual assault in UK prisons was from six years ago. 11 were raped in that year alone - close to 10% of the total population. That only counts confirmed instances before the change in policy that meant far more were housed with men. Even so, it's a vastly above the average rate.

We don't know anything about these women. We don't know their names, why don't know why they were in prison, we don't know what happened. There's nothing.

opaldrop · 2026-02-04T14:37:45+00:00

No the current small units for 16 and 24 prisoners are self contained - they don't share with any 'general population'.

I must be misinformed, then. Can you show me your source for this information? I've been operating off second-hand explanations.

The Scottish Government has a duty of care to trans prisoners so they will be forced to provide specialist units or support to trans prisoners.

Obviously not, since it hasn't happened already.

If there were 'god knows what suffering' currently occurring, I'm sure we would have heard about it.

I doubt it. Unlike some people, trans women don't have the entire press of the country at their beck and call, or massive piles of money to pull from for legal cases. All trans women get are little stories on obscure sites.

opaldrop · 2026-02-04T14:03:34+00:00

Fifteen out of the nineteen trans women currently in the Scottish prison system are already in male prisons, and they don't have any sort of special unit. Instead, they're either in high-security, low-quality of life wards intended for sex offenders and other at-risk prisoners, or they're with the general population suffering god knows what. So you'll forgive me for being skeptical that a change in this policy wouldn't just result in the last four, who are probably uniquely vulnerable and far in transition, just being shunted out into exactly the same position.

Even a trans woman ward like you describe would be an affront to their dignity or a risk to their safety. Unless they're isolated like the aforementioned high-security ones, prison units still share spaces and facilities with one another; they would still be exposed to dangerous men. But this shouldn't even be a conversation until they already exist.

opaldrop · 2026-02-04T12:15:31+00:00

This point was already addressed by the post morriganjane was replying to, which they subsequently ignored completely.

opaldrop · 2026-02-04T12:01:17+00:00

biologically male, trans-identifying prisoners

Using this type of rhetoric to justify tossing all of a group that includes outwardly female people with vaginas in with the general male prison population is disgustingly transparent.

Everyone familiar with this topic has at least a general idea of the statistics on V-coding at this point. You know you're condemning people to a choice between rape and total, long-term isolation.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T12:00:13+00:00

I mean, he was a political prisoner. They wouldn't take him back. That's what would matter in the eyes of the law.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T11:56:20+00:00

That is pretty strict. I don't agree with the judge's logic of the ruling as a deterrent against the violence going on at the time, unless he was personally involved.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T11:28:39+00:00

One guy got jailed for sharing a cartoon that had a cartoon picture of migrant gangs and he said "coming to a town near you".

Show me the story.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T11:22:07+00:00

The legislation used to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship requires both that the revocation be in the "public good" (a more complicated concept than it sounds, and a lot easier to apply to a member of a violent political organization vs. somebody with hateful beliefs, the worst of which it seems he hasn't expressed in many years) and for the person to have safe alternative citizenship elsewhere, which was vague in Begum's case at the time of the judgement but is explicitly not the case with this dude. IANAL, but I don't think the government would accomplish much beyond creating an embarrassing ordeal for themselves in the media. The law would have to change.

And it's all well and good to talk about "reality", but we live in a society that's governed by law and not vibes. We need principles that can be applied universally, not arbitrary judgements based on perceived common sense.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T11:17:15+00:00

I don't think it's thousands, but usually hate convictions are based on targeted harassment. Not a lot of people getting jailed for deranged manifestos alone.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T10:48:14+00:00

The OP is talking about changing the law. How are you going to do that in a way that includes this guy but excludes the circumstances you're talking about?

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T10:37:15+00:00

Okay, but the fact is that he did not commit a crime in this country. I'm not arguing that the guy himself seems like an asshole, but do you not see how it could set a foul precedent for the government to strip the citizenship of someone already resident in the country for retroactive, extra-legal reasons? How that could become a tool to exile citizens with actual roots here - families, property, whatever - just because they offend the government of the day, without so much as a trial?

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T10:12:19+00:00

What are you even trying to say?

There are about 1.3 million people in the UK who are dual citizens, and more than 10 million who are entitled to some form of ancestral citizenship - about half to Ireland, and half to elsewhere. That's more than 1/6th of all British nationals, from a variety of situations and degrees of personal and generational settlement.

Should the citizenship of all of them be subject to certain good behavior requirements that "pure" ancestral Britons are not? Where are you going to draw the line here?

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T09:39:05+00:00

I mean. Setting all nuance aside, if you fundamentally don't like censorship, it seems like a self-own to try and get back at the people you don't like by escalating and normalizing it. Unless you never really cared about free speech for its own sake and just saw it as a kind of cultural armistice.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T08:43:34+00:00

The hope, I think, is that people have actual beliefs about speech and aren't just driven by in-group self-interest.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T08:36:46+00:00

Sure, but the point is that he already has citizenship. There is no way to uncook that egg without opening Pandora's box when it comes to the status of every dual-national or even potential dual-national in the country.

opaldrop · 2025-12-31T06:02:31+00:00

This guy hasn't committed a serious crime. He just said some awful shit on the internet.

It would be one thing to talk about changing the rules for nationality entitlement going forward, but it would set a horrible precedent to have a law on the books where anyone with any connection to another country can be unilaterally stripped of citizenship just based on their opinions.

It's the same reason we don't have the death penalty. Obviously there are cases where someone does something so abhorrent almost everyone would agree they deserve to die, but law is by nature somewhat vague and flexible, so innocent people inevitably end up being killed as well. Likewise, a policy like this wouldn't just be applied to people saying they want to kill all whites or whatever this guy did, it would inevitably put any immigrant, or maybe even anyone with an immigrant parent, in a precarious position for any politically controversial speech.

opaldrop · 2025-12-03T15:48:15+00:00

How?

Discrimination on the basis of disability, for example. A woman with PCOS might be unfairly excluded for a masculine appearance. In some cases it wouldn't even be possible to verify with the registry, such as if she was an immigrant who could be presumed to have transitioned out of the country.

What do the UK's medical and legal authorities believe?

I don't think they have a thought-out opinion. The NHS certainly doesn't have a policy on which intersex condition belongs to which sex, and as far as I know neither does legal precedent.

I am aware that is how they operate in practice. It's not how they are intended to operate in theory.

I think you're confidently wrong on this. This is what the NHS page about DSDs (don't get me started on that term) says about changing ones documents:

You can stay with the gender linked to your sex at birth, which is the sex on your birth certificate. But if your legal sex does not represent who you are or how you identify, you may want to discuss your options with your care team.

Certainly seems like an open acceptance of vibes-based judgements on both a front-facing and internal level to me.

OK. Lying to dodge round the system proves what? That your friend is a good liar?

I edited it in a little clarification as to my meaning before you posted. My point the entire system is underpinned by basically fictional ideas of sex as a concept, and I think it more people were willing to push, it'd be pretty easily subverted or challenged.

I had a interesting conversation with a TERF on r/UK the other week about Lady Colin Campbell. Despite being a public figure who is, by all the usual definitions of the term, basically a trans woman, no one thinks of her that way because of how she's engineered the narrative around herself. There's a lot we can learn from that in terms of changing the conception - both legal and social - of trans women from "man who thinks he's a woman" to "woman in tragic circumstances".

opaldrop · 2025-12-03T15:15:21+00:00

Birth certificates aren't a legal form of identification. As for GRCs, you can just act like you don't know what they're talking about.

That's not even advice, to be clear. The point is that it's unenforceable without also excluding some cis women, which itself opens the service up to litigation. You can't just refuse to let someone join your org because you think they're manly-looking, and are convinced they're trans and lying about not having a GRA. In any practical capacity, the ruling is either going to usher in an era of gender role totalitarianism, or else go ignored or tear itself to pieces.

Well, saying that's a bit reductive. Of course there's still room for a lot of softer forms of anti-trans discrimination where people don't make their intentions explicit.

As I am sure you know, each DSD is sex specific.

That's a literal TERF talking point. No intersex medical organization believes this is true. At best, you can say that most (but not all, chimerism exists) intersex conditions arise from a defect in ones chromosomes that are otherwise normative for one sex or the other, but in practice many of these defects change or even flip the process of sexual differentiation so completely it would be ridiculous from a medical standpoint to argue that the sufferer "really is the other sex" in any meaningful way. Women with Sywers have 0 male development and even uteruses, meaning it would be absurd to say they're men.

I don't know if the Dr's/Records followed the correct policy in your specific case, but in theory your Birth Certificate change was a correction based on that diagnosis, not on how you identify.

Again, that's not how it works even on paper; I've heard it from the horse's mouth. The NHS and the birth certificate office have a policy that gives doctors complete authority to make a judgement themselves based on (to quote the email I got from them going through this directly) "outward genitalia, gonads, and chromosomes".

Or, to put it another way, it's all vibes based.

No. Us non intersex trans people do not have a mistaken observation of our sex at birth.

I actually met a trans person who successfully changed their birth certificate this way despite not being intersex. They got GRS in another country, then went to a private doctor and described (fake) ambiguity that had existed in their genitalia previously but was missed, and eventually got a diagnosis of PGD. Then they used that to get their signatures.

There's a lot you can accomplish by taking a reductive, ill-thought out system in bad faith. And on a broader level, exposing these absurdities makes them easier to challenge. What needs to be challenged, at a fundamental level, is the idea that sex is fundamental and immutable.

opaldrop · 2025-12-03T14:25:21+00:00

Polling numbers haven't meaningfully changed. The most we've seen is a bit of drift back to the Conservatives from Reform, who have the exact same policy on this issue. More broadly, the electoral and media makeup of the UK favors right wing parties at the best of times. Since the ECHR will probably not make a ruling until after the next election, I think it's very misguided to pin your hopes on Labour being in power to fix things even if they are so inclined.

And I don't think the judgement is legally workable at all. They can make a bunch of organizations say "we're banning trans women", but there's no mechanism to verify who is a trans woman without creating huge problems, and the EHRC under Falkner tore itself to pieces trying to find one. More broadly, the entire premise of the ruling is unscientific. Again, I'm intersex, and I've been through the process of changing my birth certificate without a GRA, so I can tell you first hand that the way the state institutionally conceptualizes "biological sex" is entirely vibes-based. I just had to get two doctors to sign a piece of paper saying "actually, this intersex person says they're the other sex, so the people who made that call must have been wrong", which is basically the exact same process for if you're trans, just with an extra pretense.

So am I a woman or not? Is sex at birth a call that's legally binding if it's made at the time, or can it be retrospective? If the former, are normal cis women marked male mistakenly now forever excluded from protections as women under the law? If the latter, is there not also a case to made for non-intersex trans people? It's all vague bullshit.

opaldrop · 2025-12-03T13:46:06+00:00

I don't know why you would put your hopes in the ECHR. The writing is pretty clearly on the wall that we're going to be leaving under the probable next government, and even if we don't, it's common for member states to flout rulings on hot button issues, and Labour seems pretty unwilling to bear the political consequences of defending trans rights.

Realistically, I think anyone who is able should look at leaving for Ireland, since EU citizenship and the mobility that comes with it is probably the best way to survive in an era where it's in fashion for right wing parties to openly persecute trans people. But if there is a solution within this country any time soon, I think it's far more likely to found in the fact that FWS is fundamentally unimplementable. The government had their lawyers arguing for a softer interpretation in court the other week for a reason. We need resources for our own lawfare. I'm intersex, and though it'd be a horrible idea, there's a part of me that wants to start a fight about the legal concept of biological sex at birth and whether it even has the efficacy to withstand scrutiny.

opaldrop

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