• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Fair Play For Women

Fair Play For Women

  • Prison
  • Sport
  • GRA
  • Language
  • Changing rooms
  • Resources ▼
    • Take action! Here’s how
    • Key facts
    • UK law
    • Science
    • Sex vs gender
    • Consultation submissions
    • Materials
  • About Us ▼
    • Review of 2022
    • Our aim
    • Our beliefs
    • Our spokeswoman
    • Our history and achievements
    • Our supporters
    • News
      • Newspapers
      • TV Interviews
      • Radio interviews
    • Contact
    • Donate
You are here: Home / GRA consultation / Why is scrapping GRA reform such good news for women and girls?

Why is scrapping GRA reform such good news for women and girls?

20th September 2020 by FPFW

GRA reform has been scrapped by the UK government for England and Wales. This comes after an incredible grassroots campaign by ordinary women against allowing people to simply self-identify (“self-ID”) as the other sex to get a Gender Recognition Certificate and then a new birth certificate. But why was it so important for us to defend our rights?

Transgender rights are already protected in law, and that won’t change. But trans pressure groups took it too far, they weren’t just asking for trans rights, they were demanding women’s sex-based rights too. Women said no.

Current rules mean the number of people who are allowed to change the sex on their birth certificates is small. Just a few thousand people have done so since 2004.

But demands for Self-ID would have meant *any man* could have changed his birth certificate to say he’d been BORN female.

We were told time and again not to worry about it.  This will have no impact on women’s sex-based rights. There’s no impact on privacy, safety or fairness for women and girls. They were wrong. This short article explains why.

“The Gender Recognition Act will not affect anyone except transgender people”. All About Trans

“It’s just admin”. Ruth Hunt, Stonewall

“I don’t believe there is a problem”. Jo Swinson, LibDems

“No changes will be made to laws that protect single-sex spaces and services” Scottish Government

“I don’t think it threatens women” Sarah Wollaston, LibDems

GRA reform was fundamentally about language capture and would limit a woman’s ability to discuss and uphold her sex-based rights.

It started out as transgender people simply asking to be protected from being treated unfairly because they are transgender.

Women should respect someone’s gender identity by treating a man “as if he were a woman”.

It was a courtesy, a kindness extended to people who suffered from gender dysphoria. We all know that trans people aren’t *literally* the sex they identify as. It was simply polite to use “preferred pronouns” and repeat the platitude that “transwomen are women”.

But this then fundamentally changed.

It was no longer enough to treat a man ‘as if he was a woman’. To respect his gender identity, we were told we must now believe that he was *literally* female, that he hadn’t even been born the male sex at all.

Why does scrapping GRA reform matter to women?

It matters because back in 2004 the Gender Recognition Act created two routes to becoming female. Some of us are by virtue of birth and our sexed body; and others are female by virtue of asserting a gender identity – despite their sexed body. GRA reform would have opened up that second route to *any male* who wanted it.

Women are fast becoming a subset of their own sex class. It matters because the word woman is becoming ambiguous and no longer associated with a persons sex. It matters because women’s rights are no longer about sex-based oppression. We are “cis women” now. Being female is just a niche issue peculiar to us. It’s no longer centre stage when it comes to talking about women’s issues, in fact it is actively discouraged and considered exclusionary.

This has had a profound and damaging effect on how women talk about our sex-based rights. Wholesale changes in social convention mean that many of the words used by women to discuss sex-based oppression are now off limits. This makes even the most respectful conversations about how we fairly balance rights based on sex and rights based on gender identity fraught with difficulties and tension.

We have all but lost the word woman. The only words that we are still allowed to use without sanction is “male” and “female”. They must not be given away.

Even now, spurious scientific arguments and unfair accusations of transphobia are frequently used to muddy the meaning and use of these most basic words to describe someone’s sex.

We are already starting to see Twitter impose sanctions for using male and female. Fair Play For Women was temporarily suspended for ‘hateful conduct’ for using the word “male”. We successfully appealed and Twitter admitted their mistake because under current UK law it is still accurate to state that most transwomen are the male sex. Indeed the  Equality and Human Rights Commission has recently clarified this legal position.

Fair Play For Women has also been recently accused of ‘transphobic abuse’ by a newspaper for describing a transgender cricketer as male, despite this being legally accurate and relevant to discussions about fairness and safety in sport. We complained to the press regulator IPSO and won.

But most shocking of all has been the increasing pressure not to use the words “male” and “female” in official policy development meetings. As a policy stakeholder invited to represent the sex-based rights of women and girls, both in the UK and internationally, we respectfully refuse. We use sex-based language not to be rude, but because gender identity is not the same characteristic as sex. Being able to acknowledge and identify the male and female sex is fundamental to the theory and practice of sex-based rights for women and girls.

Self-ID GRA reform would fatally undermine the sex-based rights of women and girls.

It is no longer enough to treat a man as if he is woman.

It is not longer enough to consider all transwoman to be a type of woman.

It is now being demanded that all transwoman are *literally* female too.

Trans activists no longer wanted transwomen to be transgender.  They wanted to be female, and for their trans history to be a secret. They wanted to be identical to the “cis women”. Indistinguishable from us.

GRA reform won’t just allow every trans person to change the sex they were born on their birth certificate, it will also become impossible to confirm it was ever changed. On paper, a transwomen’s maleness will have been totally erased.

How will campaigners, policy makers or journalists be able to do their job when we are all obliged to name someone born male, with a male body and male genitals, as being the female sex?

How can we protect single-sex spaces and services when we can no longer know or say who was born male or female?

How can a female-only space ever be guaranteed to be male-free when we can no longer acknowledge that transwomen are actually the male sex.

How will you be able to express your legitimate concerns if you can no longer say things like:

 

“I don’t want a transwoman to share a changing room with my daughter because that person is male”

“I don’t want a transwoman to perform a cervical smear on me because that person is male”.

“I don’t want my elderly mother to be washed and dressed by a transwoman at the care home because that person is male”.

“I don’t think its fair or safe for my daughter to play rugby against a team that fields a transwoman because that person is male”.

 

If we can’t talk freely about the material reality of sex we can not discuss, monitor or uphold our sex-based rights.

This is why is matters to women and girls.

This is why we had to say NO.

This is why GRA reform was scrapped.

 


You can help to defend female rights by making a donation. Fair Play For Women receives no formal or government funding to support the vital work we do. We rely completely on donations made by our supporters.

DONATE NOW

Filed Under: GRA consultation, Law

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Biological sex
  • Children
  • Gender Identity
  • Male violence
  • Scottish GRA reforms
  • Silencing women
  • Policy guidance

Our materials

  • Our factsheets
  • Our short films and animations
  • Our memes
  • Our research

Our latest articles

  • Testosterone suppression in sport: time to drop the Roberts study
  • World Athletics new transgender policy fails women
  • Statement on the UK government move to block the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill
  • Rowing policies make no sense
  • A progress report on the fight to restore fairness in female sport

Archives

Footer

Prisons, crime and protecting women

  • The facts about transgender prisoners
  • Prisons timeline – how did we get here?
  • Karen White & prison review
  • Sex attacks in female prisons
  • Refuge shelters deeply worried
  • How do women in prison feel about sharing with transgender prisoners?
  • Can you believe what you read about sexual and violent crimes?
  • The judicial review of prisons policy
  • Factsheets

Sport and the human body

  • A progress report on the fight to restore fairness in female sport
  • Biological sex differences
  • Chromosomes, sex and gender
  • The science and statistics behind the transgender debate
  • Guidelines for single-sex sport policy
  • Testosterone suppression in “elite athletes” – what do we know?
  • Safeguarding in sport still matters
  • Male inclusion leads to female exclusion
  • What you can do

Making policy and the law

  • Scottish government is forcing sex self-ID on whole of UK.
  • The Equality Act 2010 and women’s rights
  • GRA reform
  • Advice and guidance for policy makers
  • Changing room policy advice
  • What can I do now?
  • Take Action: Say NO to letting Sex Self-ID in through the back door.
  • Public opinion on the tension between women’s rights and trans demands

© 2023 · Fair Play For Women

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt out if you wish. Read More

Accept Decline Cookie Settings
I consent to the use of following cookies:
Cookie Declaration About Cookies
Necessary (2) Marketing (1) Analytics (4) Preferences (0) Unclassified (4)
Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
wpl_user_preference fairplayforwomen.com WP GDPR Cookie Consent Preferences 1 year HTTP
YSC youtube.com YouTube session cookie. 52 years HTTP
Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and thereby more valuable for publishers and third party advertisers.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE youtube.com YouTube cookie. 6 months HTTP
Analytics cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
_ga fairplayforwomen.com Google Universal Analytics long-time unique user tracking identifier. 2 years HTTP
_gid fairplayforwomen.com Google Universal Analytics short-time unique user tracking identifier. 1 days HTTP
vuid vimeo.com Vimeo tracking cookie 2 years HTTP
IDE doubleclick.net Google advertising cookie used for user tracking and ad targeting purposes. 2 years HTTP
Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
We do not use cookies of this type.
Unclassified cookies are cookies that we are in the process of classifying, together with the providers of individual cookies.
Name Domain Purpose Expiry Type
_gat_UA-109881507-1 fairplayforwomen.com --- Session ---
GASessionCookie fairplayforwomen.com --- Session ---
rtc linkedin.com --- Session ---
_wpfuuid fairplayforwomen.com --- 11 years ---
Cookies are small text files that can be used by websites to make a user's experience more efficient. The law states that we can store cookies on your device if they are strictly necessary for the operation of this site. For all other types of cookies we need your permission. This site uses different types of cookies. Some cookies are placed by third party services that appear on our pages.
Cookie Settings