What do you mean by ‘trans rights’? Trans people already have all the same human rights that everybody does under the Human Rights Act. And their gender identity is also a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.There's a curious venn diagram appearing on Twitter: many of the women speaking out against EJ could also be considered terfs (apologies, please consider this to be shorthand) and are referencing Joyce's support of unisex spaces in relation to this conviction. I'm not sure where I sit in the debate, but am generally pro trans rights, so this is just really interesting to me
The only rights that trans women don’t have are women’s rights. The trans lobby wants to appropriate women’s rights that are explicitly protected in the Equality Act. Trans people don’t need these rights because the rights that women have fought so hard for over decades (the right to single sex spaces, the right to refuse medical treatment by a man, the right to talk about their biology and anatomy in any context where it is relevant) are necessary because of the discrimination, oppression and abuse that women have endured for centuries. Abuse and oppression specific to the fact that they are born female in a male-dominated society. Abuse and oppression that women have never been able to identity out of, despite their supposedly enormous ‘cis privilege’.
The problem with men like Eric Joyce, and why his support of unisex spaces is relevant to the ‘trans rights’ discussion is because Eric Joyce, like lots and lots of other men, is a violent sex offender. The trans lobby wants to remove the current threshold for legal gender transition. At the moment the gender reassignment act requires a trans person to live as their preferred ‘gender’ for two years, and to have had gender reassignment surgery in order to be legally recognised as their preferred gender.
(For the moment, let’s leave to one side the question of what ‘gender’ even is, versus biological sex. Gender is essentially a bunch of sexist tropes and sterotypes defined by a patriarchal society and imposed on the different sexes. I do not identify as female. I am female because of my anatomy, but I never wear dresses or high heels. I rarely wear makeup. I do a ‘masculine’ job. If you take my biology out of the question, by all gender metrics I am overwhelmingly more male than female.)
If the standard for ‘who can transition into a woman’ stops being: ‘someone who has lived as a woman for two years and who has had gender reassignment surgery’ and instead becomes: ‘anyone who says they identify as one’, then at what point during that transition process does a violent male sexual offender like Eric Joyce, for example, stop being a threat to women and children?
Of course not all men...etc. But enough men. And it is overwhelmingly men. So, what are safeguarding and single sex spaces even for, if not to afford women protection from being exposed to potentially violent sexual predators?
And if it no longer becomes a requirement for a trans woman to even shave their beard, how are we to know whether the flat-chested male-looking person in eyeliner who’s pointlessly trying on bras in the next M&S cubicle is eyeing us up for the wank bank, or just one of the girls?
To even voice any of what I’ve written here is to be branded transphobic or a ‘terf’ (which is a misogynistic slur, by the way).
You bet that women who are concerned about the erosion of women’s rights and the protection of women and children are terrified by this judgment. Because men like Eric Joyce want access to our safe spaces. And on the one hand they are being given tacit assent by the legal system to just crack on with being a p*edo perv. And on the other hand, the woke brigade are cheering his support for unisex spaces.
I suggest, rather than opining that it’s ‘interesting’ there’s an overlap between women who are gender critical, and critics of Joyce’s sentence, why not wonder instead why men who like to wank to child sex abuse are advocates of unisex spaces. If you dig deeper into it, you’ll see there’s a massive overlap there too.