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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.
Where does that happen? At what point in any trans person's life will they be through the transition process so well that they "pass", and also still sharing showers with sex-segregated people? I can only think of a couple, and they're either voluntary organizations that can make their own rules (like gyms) or places like prison where they don't have full civil rights anyway. What's the scenario here?
The sort of situation the underlies Oncale-style scenarios -- long on-site deployments in grungy conditions with little or restricted access to non-company facilities -- is rare, but does still exist. Some of those fields are historically male-dominated, like oil field work in Oncale's case, but whether that's -dominated in the sense of near-zero remainder or just a lean varies. Restroom access tends to be far more common and serious a problem (and there's reasons for Ally's Law, for a non-trans context), though.
Yes, it's possible to leave your job (and sometimes career), or to some limited extent just suffer through it (the trans woman coworker I've mentioned before did Have To Negotiate re: restrooms, but just ducked the hotel room and shower questions, sometimes at pretty significant costs), but that's 'voluntary organization' in only slightly more of a sense than public schools are 'voluntary' where home-schooling or moving is an option.
Moreover, the line between public-commanded and voluntary private organizations gets fuzzy, in the modern day. The government does, actually, put rules about the spacing of toilets and showers in your private member-only org. At best, this turns into a trans-equivalent of what the New York vampire rule was trying to do to gunnies; it might be theoretically possible to comply with the law and carry a firearm/use a gym shower as a post-op trans person matching your presentation, but in practice actually doing so, and even a business trying to work with you might not be capable of actually doing so in a way you could trust. More often, it invites restrictions on those private orgs that don't cooperate.
There's a fair criticism that the trans movement is a good part of why that's the case. I agree this would be a more compelling argument had activists spent the last ten years trying to win hearts and minds, rather than argue for Bostock maximalism-and-then-some or obfuscate even the most egregious abuses of their proposed alternative policies when the shave-my-balls guy starts trolling random beauty salons.
((Though in turn, there's a counterargument that this policies impact otherwise normal people, not just activists, and for every Andrea James there's a few dozen non-trans trans activists that are aggressive nutjobs.))
But regardless, it's worth keeping clear eyes on what the ramifications of a policy actually involve.
So your scenario is an oil field roughneck who transitions so well that he passes, but goes back to his job?
You got even one example of this, or are we purely hypothetical?
Oilfield specifically, no, Oncale's just the best-documented example of what people are worried about. There's some practical and procedural reasons trans women (or men, for that matter) are unlikely to work on oilfield or remote drilling platforms, and from a quick google search I haven't seen any examples.
Aviation, fire rescue, emergency medical services or elder care services? The exact dividing lines for examples gets complicated, especially since people have often wildly varying bars for passing (and for firefighters specially you're a lot more likely to see ftm, where 'post-op' is a lot more varied and... probably not something most straight guys are going to find more awkward), but people either transitioning while in the field or right before joining it aren't that unheard of.
Fortunately for society, but unfortunately for discussion on this matter, a lot contention gets solved through relatively low profile compromise, partly because people can be reasonable and partly because of the big exception in the ADA. So lawsuits tend to involve people either are very litigious who run into assholes (and note there the actual lawsuit targeted Cabela's, not the battery company where the shower situation actually would have mattered had Blatt stayed).
I maintain
1: Virtually no one passes in person, definitely not in a communal shower.
and
2: Any scenario in which this could theoretically be an issue is so vanishingly rare as to be not worth worrying about as a societal problem. This is trans angels on the head of a pin.
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