We have been busy looking at transgender legislation in the UK and US with the aim of adding pages to the site for easily accessible information. The UK page is up here, outlining various guidelines, codes of practice and government Acts from the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 onwards. The US page will be up soon, so keep checking, we’ll get it finished as soon as possible.
We think an analysis of legislation is important because every piece of government legislation validates and normalises the idea that gender is innate and overrides biology, and gives transgender theory the official stamp of approval. The impact will be felt in several different ways:
- Parents, teachers and professionals will accept transgender theory more readily, or be more afraid to challenge it, if they see it is sanctioned by government, even if the legislation covers only adult rights
- The media may be less inclined to investigate the theory underpinning legislation, less likely to report sympathetically on those affected negatively by it, less motivated to include a dissenting voice to balance reports on transgender issues, and more predisposed to an uncritical acceptance of ‘trans kids’ stories
- Everyone bound by transgender rights legislation is obliged to treat everyone according to their ‘gender identity’ and not their biological sex, even if this compromises their own integrity and professionalism. For example, a service provider cannot reasonably challenge a man walking into a women’s toilet if the man claims to be a woman. Officials and service staff are also obliged to effectively collude in the ‘social transition’ of children, even if they personally feel this is damaging to the child
- ‘Gender identity’ rights cancel out sex-based rights, so young girls (and all women) lose the right to the protection, privacy and dignity of sex-segregated toilets and changing-rooms. Gender identity protection effectively prioritises the feelings of adult males over the safety of young girls. Teenage girls in schools are obliged to share toilets and bathrooms with teenage boys at a time of sexual development when privacy is most crucial for girls
- Gender identity protection extends to children, obliging teachers to play along with the re-sexing of a child of any age, even if they feel this is damaging to the child’s development. All children in a school are conditioned to believe that it is possible to change sex if one child is ‘socially transitioned’ by the adults
- If ‘gender identity’ is enshrined in law as the fixed difference between the sexes instead of biology, this reinforces the message that children already receive from extreme gendered toys, books and clothes, that there are ‘girl’ personalities and ‘boy’ personalities, which limits full human development for all children
- Gender identity legislation takes away the protection of children from adults who would impose on them their ideas about gender stereotypes and ‘correct’ gendered behaviour. Children who would likely grow up to be gay or lesbian are particularly at risk of being misdiagnosed as transgender
- Online trans forums which urge teenagers to transition are given more validity by government policies which affirm their theories and teenage girls in particular are consequently made more vulnerable to this pressure
- Government policy affects public beliefs generally and the more adults believe it’s possible to be ‘born in the wrong body,’ the more children are at risk of being diagnosed as transgender
We want to challenge this legislation, and we need your help. This year we will be sending out press releases and taking further action which we will post on this blog to keep you informed and let you know what you can do. In the meantime, please share this site widely; the more parents know about us, the bigger the team we have to challenge governments.
Of course you don’t have to be a parent to join in, please support us if you are concerned about the transgendering of children for whatever reason. As an organisation of parents, together with supporters, we hope that governments will listen to us and we aim to continue shouting loudly until they do.
Thanks for all your support.
I watched my 16 year old daughter walk to the toilets in a restaurant recently and noticed two 20 to 30 something men watch her and look her up and down as she went by. It occurred to me how appalling it would be if they had followed her into the toilets. I would have run in to watch out for her. I’m not around to protect her all the time of course though. If men have the right to declare themselves women and enter toilets after girls, we are in real trouble. How can we go anywhere – not just restaurants but schools, work places or hospitals, train stations etc etc. We have recognised the needs of women and girls in developing countries to have safe toilets as a very basic right of emancipation, and now recognise that many girls don’t go to school for example in India because they don’t have safe toilets, We seem to be in danger of losing this legal and cultural rule against men in women’s toilets/ changing areas here. Are men really going to be able to chose if they can walk into female swimming pool changing ares or camp site showers where small children and women are changing? I was in the toilets in a bar in the U.S. a few years ago when 2 drunk men thought it would be fun to come into the Ladies and swagger about and menace the women. What was terrifying was that I realised there was only one exit – which they were blocking deliberately, and no one would hear if you shouted. You were completely trapped in an enclosed space. They thought better of it and left- perhaps because there were quite a few women in there, but if I’d been on my own I would almost certainly have been assaulted. This isn’t a little matter it’s huge – we need to be really vocal and organised on this.
I agree, Clare! And I am so grateful for this work. We need to get the word out. It’s a scary big subject because it has been adopted by liberals as the social justice cause du jour. Too often people who bring up these issues are branded as bigots, or racists, or amazingly, “not feminists.”
This was a great post. One of the important ramifications of these strangely broad gender identity laws is as you mention a teacher of young children would be required to go along with the new gender. Even if they believe that was harmful to the child, including cases where say the teacher believes in the trans phenomenon but happens to be convinced that this particular child is not transgender. Like for instance because the child told them. Or they saw the child learning at school to put on transgender “behaviors” in a context where the child knew at the time it was playing a game.