Repeal the Gender Recognition Act, a Homophobic and Sexist Relic

The Gender Recognition Act is a leftover from before gay marriage was legalised, and is founded on sexist pseudoscience. It must be repealed.

It is not illegal in the U.K. to wear clothes described as for the opposite sex. David Bowie, Boy George and others were not arrested for wearing make-up. Boys I grew up with commonly wore eye-liner. If one faced discrimination based on what one was wearing, for example, not gaining a promotion at work because one was male who liked to wear skirts, a claim of sex discrimination could and should be taken. The GRA was originally passed with homophobic intentions, to prevent having to legislate same-sex marriage, and that legal barrier and inequality has thankfully been removed.¹ The GRA, the sex-role stereotype recognition Act, does not serve to right a legislative injustice but rather to entrench a world-view. This creed is one where women’s oppression is natural and desired, same-sex attraction is bigotry which can be unlearnt and individual men get to define reality based on their wishes. It is a dogma where children who do not conform to strict social categories of boyish and girlish are declared to have been born wrong. The suffix ‘ism’ denotes that this is a belief system, like how ‘ism’ is added to feminism, Catholicism, conservatism, liberalism. It frightens and offends me that the government has endorsed these doctrines through legislation which intends to compel belief and subscription.

Sex-Role Stereotype Discomfort Disorder

The GRA, the sex-role stereotype recognition Act, and the ideology it imbeds is based on sexist ‘science’. The notion of sex-role discomfort disorder (gender dysphoria) presupposes that sex-role stereotypes are innate to all of us and is based on woo woo. What convinced you of sex-role stereotype discomfort disorder? Was it the small study of tomboys whose assertive play then ‘proved’ that there are girl brains and boy brains? Or was it the way some of the offspring of stressed rats have coitus which ‘proved’ that prenatal hormones alter mating and thus a gender identity exists? Was it the idea of feminised testicles? Or maybe it was the hypothesis that the mother had been over attentive to a male child which made him either feel like a girl or wish to distance himself from the men his mother allegedly hated?² Or maybe it is the notion that what a woman wears mentally disturbs her child? That if a woman doesn’t have enthusiastic sex with her husband or heaven forfend is a bisexual then her child’s ‘gender identity’ will be disrupted.³ Do you agree with Harry Benjamin that

‘The normal male… is sexually attracted to women, and would be horrified to wear female clothes or “change his sex.” He is often husband and father, works in a job or profession in accord with his sex and gender that is never questioned legally or socially. The genetically normal female presents the opposite picture. She feels, looks, acts, and functions as a woman, wants to be nothing else, usually marries and has children. She dresses and makes up to be attractive to men and her sex and gender are never doubted either by society or by the law’.⁴

Yes: Benjamin, and therefore the ‘science’ of transsexualism/transgenderism posited that any variation from a heterosexual stereotype was against nature, was abnormal. Furthermore, even one of the founding fathers of the idea of transsexualism/transgenderism admitted that the concept was undermined by reality. Robert Stoller made the striking admission that ‘obviously, not all beliefs that are contradicted by reality are delusions’.⁵ Law change has been undertaken on the basis of three dream studies conducted by Robert Stoller on boys he deemed feminine.⁶

Do you really believe that some children are born wrong if they don’t conform to sexism? A boy that prefers dance to rough and tumble play requires surgical correction? A girl who prefers to wear trousers rather than dresses requires medicating? We need to stop approving their ideology and the idea that if you are uncomfortable with discrimination then you have a mental illness.

The rapid rise in teenage girls identifying as boys and buying into this concept that they were born wrong means we must act with haste. Every moment wasted is another child mutilated. Transgenderism, for teenage girls, is the wrong answer to a woman-and-girl-hating culture. It is the wrong response to a society where the female is Objectified, seen as an instrument for male pleasure and judged on her appearance as if she had no inner world.⁷ Teenage girls are given two options in our culture: be f**kable or be invisible. Trans identification is a way our girls are trying to forge a third path; to be visible and celebrated but not pornified.⁸ Supporting the dogma of sex-role discomfort disorder (gender dysphoria) means we are failing girls and saying society was right, they were born mistaken. The lies presented as just a kindness are in fact a cruelty.

Furthermore, it is a dangerous cruelty. The sex-role stereotype recognition Act and the ideology that men are women on the basis of their feelings is incompatible with child-safeguarding. The Bichard report highlights the necessity of keeping clear and accurate personal history on those wanting to work with children and vulnerable adults while the GRA and prevailing ‘before-the law’ attitudes obscure personal history and threaten criminal sanctions for disclosure. Ian Huntley and his use of Ian Nixon shows what can happen with a simple name change, let alone a name change and claim to a different biological sex.

The sex-role stereotype recognition Act, and the mantra of men are women (‘transwomen are women’) means males are permitted in female single-sex spaces such as changing rooms, sleeping accommodation and toilets. Women and girls should not be exposed to male genitals because it makes the man happy, how is this different to the crime of exposure? Women and girls should not be forced to undress in front of a man, how is this different to the crime of voyeurism? ‘Almost 90% of reported sexual assaults, harassment and voyeurism in swimming pool and sports-centre changing rooms happen in unisex facilities, which make up less than half the total’.⁹ Though UNICEF promotes and funds single sex toilet facilities in schools in places such as Rajasthan, it campaigns for the removal of single-sex facilities in schools in the UK.10 ¹⁰ The BBC, which has introduced mixed-sex toilets in all of its buildings and pushes transgender ideology, once reported on how a lack of access to single-sex facilities contributed to the sexual violence and murder women in countries such as India experienced. ¹¹ As ‘hidden camera’ porn increases in popularity on porn sites such as Pornhub and the tech becomes cheaper and easier to purchase, unisex toilets and changing rooms have become even more dangerous for women and girls.12 ¹²

The GRA Legitimises Domestic Abuse of Women & Children

The home is not safer when autogynephilia is present. The sex-role stereotype recognition Act is complicit with AGP (autogynephile) domestic abuse of their partners, spouses and children. It is saying that the coercive control, the restructuring of reality, the isolation of their spouse, the sexual abuse is to be celebrated.¹³ Transwidows require support, indeed ‘it is estimated that some 100 hundred women per year are delivered into psychiatric care as a direct result of their experiences [of being wives or partners of transsexuals]. Many remain silent, too traumatised to describe what has happened to them’.¹⁴ rather than society and the government saying that their suffering is a stunning part of a man’s journey.

No Compromise

Women should not be considering compromising on the fact of the full humanity of women, on female rights as unassailable. Forced teaming and a craving for self-advancement has led some to develop a position that sometimes men should be considered women, that sometimes women’s oppression is innate, that sometimes children are born wrong, that sometimes domestic abuse is not domestic abuse but stunning and brave, that sometimes women’s basic rights should be given to men who claim to feel sad.¹⁵ What other male sexual fetish should we compromise women’s rights on and compel all women to participate in with law?

Feminism has a long-history of no compromise with male demands and rejecting sex-role stereotypes. No compromise on objectification, no compromise on sexual violence, no compromise on domestic violence, no compromise on incest and paedophilia. Since the 1970s feminists have been saying no to transsexualism/transgenderism.¹⁶ The clash between these two belief systems was such that Janice Raymond wrote a book on it in 1979.¹⁷ It is intrinsic to feminism to say ‘no’.

Conclusion

The GRA, the sex-role stereotype recognition Act, is unworkable legislation. Every time a male wishes to invoke a sex-role stereotype recognition certificate women will respond with the single-sex exemption. As a society we cannot challenge homophobia and discrimination if same-sex attraction is legislatively declared unreal and taught to be bigotry in our schools, if the State is dictating that men can be lesbians and gay men need to sexually consider vulvas. Legislation, such as the sex-role stereotype recognition Act (GRA), that is in opposition to the Human Rights Act 1998, the Equality Act 2010, UN CEDAW 1979, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1990 is neither good nor well-intentioned legislation. Bad law does get repealed: it took 15 years, from 1988 to 2003, to repeal Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986. Section 13 of The Criminal Law Act 1967 declared the offence of being a common scold (a troublesome and angry woman who broke the public peace by habitually arguing and quarrelling) obsolete. Bad policies get rescinded at private companies. In 1949 Lloyds Bank reversed its marriage bar which terminated women’s employment upon their marriage. Those who argue that legislation can’t be repealed once it is written, voted and signed lack imagination, ambition and a knowledge of history.