Scottish survey on gender recognition bill update

Some good points were made at this session. I stopped watching before the questions started - I have other things to do - but I shall come back to it.

Thanks for the link Elegran. I have spent an hour listening to most of it and become even more confused as to where I stand on these issues. For instance during the discussion re Muslim Women and their 'right' or belief that they will have 'broken' their faith if they allow a male person, other than their husband, to touch their bodies, even within a medical setting. This 'rule' is, of course the patriarchy at work and as a feminist I must object to it. It is as bad as the parents who will deny their children a life saving blood transfusion on religious grounds. I visualised a dilemma, (or maybe I saw it a while ago on Casualty) where after an accident the paramedics who turn up are both male and the husband forbids them to touch his badly injured, unconscious wife.

What to do when one group of people's 'Rights', are diametrically in opposition to another group's????

Granny23 It was FarNorth who posted the link.

There are two other videos, of previous sessions. I haven't watched those, but I may do so when I can sit and concentrate on them. My brain was over-heated after this one.

I think most of us accept that when we need medical help and advice, it doesn't matter which sex the doctor is, but I would like to know whether they were male or female.

There is a lot of emphasis on a trans person's right to secrecy about their birth sex, but the rest of us don't have that right - our birth certificates have to be produced at various times, our births, marriages and deaths are recorded in official registers, our passports show our sex. It is a fact that they were once of a different sex to the one they have adopted. That fact has not changed.

That secrecy, and the wide variety of appearance of men, women, trand men and transwomen, means that it is impossible to know whether an individual is a transwoman, with the right to be in any women-only place, or a bog-standard male man, who doesn't have that right. Large organisations and institutions, like women's refuges, prisons, hospitals, surgeries and so on, have staff with the training and experience to distinguish one from the other and the confidence and power that goes with the organisation behind them, when they interact with public.

I have concerns about small dress shops for women on the high street. They don't have the space for a lot of individual changing rooms, so they have one communal one. The staff are usually women, and at the weekend there are schoolgirls with a Saturday job. If a (male) man enters the shop, picks out dresses, and wishes to try them on alongside the (female) women, who will be brave enough to question whether he is there because he is trans, or if he is decidedly male and untransitioned and means to stay that way, and has just popped in to watch women take their clothes off? If I were in that changing room I for one would like to know which!

If they ^are trans, anyone asking the question is invading their privacy. Yet without asking the question, and getting an honest answer, how does anyone know that asking it invades the special privacy of a trans person?

And what about the privacy of women in a state of undress, if any Tom Dick or Harry can walk in on them, certificate or no certificate, because it is forbidden to ask whether they were once of the other sex? You don't have to have a restrictive religion to object to that.

Granny23 thank you for continuing to think about this.

Did you follow the final voting on the Forensic Medical Services Bill in December 2020?

www.thenational.scot/news/18936441.msps-overwhelmingly-vote-replace-gender-sex-rape-support-law/

During the debate on whether a rape survivor should be able to request the sex or the gender of a medical examiner, Monica Lennon MSP said "It seems that some want to prevent transwomen from examining women." as if that was an unreasonable thing.
Yes, we did want to prevent that happening to a female person who has asked for a female examiner.
Surely most people would be horrified that a woman who has to examined because of sexual violence, and who has requested a female examiner, should expect that she might in fact be presented with a male person who claims to be female.

Luckily, SNP must have realised the strength of feeling on this among the electorate and they voted in favour of Johann Lamont's amendment to use the word 'sex' not 'gender'.

In any non-emergency medical situation, where a person has expressed a preference for the sex of a nurse or doctor who will examine them, surely it's reasonable that the request will be met or an explanation given of why it cannot be met.
What is not acceptable is to deceive the patient.

the special privacy of a trans person in my view shouldn't exist.
Birth certificates should not be altered and gender recognition certificates (if they are needed at all) should state the person's sex as well as their chosen gender identity.

The legislation we have was set up to get around the marriage laws for same sex couples.
That is no longer necessary so it should be removed.

Secrecy around trans identity should stop, just as secrecy around homosexuality has stopped.