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Notes -
New Culture war fodder from the UK: The Guardian (I read it for the math puzzles):
Seems like the TERFs (including JK Rowling) won this one.
The process for obtaining a GRC is detailed in the WP Article on the Gender Recognition Act 2004 . It seems that you require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and then a panel will rule your case.
Now, I have no idea how much of a hassle this is. For all I know, it could be a rubber stamp process where any bearded 40yo can get his diagnosis and GRC with minimum hassle and then proceed to jerk off to random women in communal showers. Or it could be a long journey to get the diagnosis.
How many perverts who got their GRC just to watch naked women are there in the UK, anyhow? Is this a practical concern, do women get raped by m2f GRC holders in safe spaces, or is this a moral panic?
On the matter, I don't think there is a great "one size fits all" solution. Allowing biologically male perverts to intrude on women safe spaces just by yelling "I identify as a woman" seems bad. Forcing someone who underwent HRT and surgery and passes as female even naked to shower with the guys also seems bad. For that matter, making a passing f2m with beard, muscles and a dick shower with the women is also not helping anyone.
Also, should I don't think it is a good idea to let the government regulate which groups get safe spaces where. If a private swimming pool decides to establish unisex communal showers, let them try it. If some weirdo religious organization tells people who they think are non-straight to use individual changing rooms lest anyone is aroused, let them. If a lesbian organizations requires all their members to menstruate, let them. (Yes, this leaves public bathrooms and the like as a point of contention.)
On a more meta-level, this feels like legislation from the bench. From my understanding, the 2004 GRA updated the legal definition of "man" and "woman". The Equality Act was passed in 2010. Presumably, parliament was aware of changed definition when they passed the Equality Act. If they meant "biological woman", not "legal woman", they should have specified that. If we allow people to change their legal gender, then their gender should also be recognized in all aspects. If you are f2m and the men get drafted, you get drafted. If a judge orders a mass DNA test of all men, then the f2m gets swabbed as well. If NHS pays for a mammography for women of a certain age, then the m2f gets their fucking mammography.
Finally,
Now, I don't know this circumstances. Perhaps one in 30 board seats is reserved for women, and on half of the boards they were filled with trans-women, leading to everyone on that board having the Y chromosome. If that is the case, then I apologize for the following misinterpretation.
Quotas suck in the first place. Most people are not on some Board Of Important People, and the ones who are on them take care of their class, not their gender cohort. Sure, an all-male board of directors will fuck over working class women in the company, but they will just as eagerly fuck over men in the company. The childless career female board member will not care more for the plights of a single mother than her male colleagues. But whatever, apparently we have quotas. If you have, say eight out of 20 board appointments thanks to your quota, and then you bitch that one of them is a trans-woman when that seat is clearly the birth-right of a biological woman, that seems incredibly petty.
I think I’d be marginally okay with a process that had significant time and effort to “transition”. I don’t think it reasonable to have an intact male declare on Tuesday that he feels like a woman and then get unrestricted free rein to enter any women’s spaces he likes — especially those where women would undress. But my fear is that the process once adopted will be made less strict over time — no need for surgery, then no need for hormones, then no need for medical diagnosis — until you end up with the thing the requirements were to prevent.
We can simply have a different bathroom for trans people (maybe a single stall). In India, it is required by law for all public places to have a different bathroom for the third gender.
This seems the sanest alternative. Sometimes technological solutions can fix social problems. (Just like the washing machine). Most trans-people who do not pass when naked will prefer single cabins, and a few shy or traumatized cis-genders might also prefer single cabins.
We have disabled loos already, which they can use in many places. More to the point, I suspect that a significant percentage of trans people are motivated precisely by the desire to be openly accepted as a member of the opposite sex, and will oppose this kind of segregation.
I think this percentage likely looks more than the actual percentage due to vocal activists. Probably, many transgender people will like being openly accepted as the opposite sex but they would still be ok with a compromise that has other areas for them.
I believe that you are almost definitely correct on this. Such a compromise most likely would be acceptable to the vast majority of people, including trans people. However, this would fail to mollify the vocal activists, and so it wouldn't solve the actual problem we have, of the vocal activists annoying the rest of us. In the long run, we can reduce the throughput of the pipeline that leads to people becoming vocal activists so that their population is small enough not to cause problems, but in the short run, we'll likely have to keep running into this problem.
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