UK looks like it move towards banning trans people from *all* single-sex spaces https://archive.ph/taXyE

But wait there's more... trans women will definitely be banned from women's restrooms under this, but what about trans men and women's bathrooms?

The proposed law says that they *might also* be banned from women's restrooms, or maybe men's, it depends on whether they make people uncomfortable or something completely unclear

What the fuck is this nonsense

By "the UK might move" this means the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is effectively now a fully transphobia centered org, is pushing it, and it's likely to move forward (including with broad support from the Labor party)

Awesome great wonderful lovely

@cwebber In the 1800s, I'm told, the British government passed laws banning male homosexuality, but did not ban female homosexuality because it did not want to admit on paper that female homosexuality is a real thing.

Perhaps this is the exact same effect. Britain will ban transfemme transsexualism, but they are stymied in passing effective regulation against transmasc transsexualism because their #1 goal with transmascs is to never admit they really exist

@cwebber That sounds like gender-neutral toilets are going to be required, since gender reassignment is still a protected characteristic and the European Convention on Human Rights still applies.

(Also, could you please post the original unarchived link? I'm getting blocked by cloudflare so I can't actually read that article.)

@cwebber My understanding is that it's also UK law that businesses cannot prohibit people from using restrooms... so, yeah, big "fuck you" to everyone all around.

@cwebber This is hardly the most fucked up thing about this but… birth certificates?? Sure, everyone goes around with theirs at all times, right 🙄 Or maybe it’s another way to nudge people toward a National ID Card (“think how much easier than a birth certificate that would be!”)?

@crowbriarhexe @cwebber trans men will be banned from all single sex spaces, whereas trans women might be banned from all single sex spaces or forced to use male spaces.

This really is about as safe as walking into a flaming furnace naked, and clear as mud.

@cwebber They've been on board the "trans people should not exist" train for a while now, but I wonder how far they are from just fucking saying it

@cwebber The Lib Dems are supporting this?!

@cwebber (The reason I ask is because the gender criticals were literally run out of the most recent Lib Dem conference)

@krans Is that true? I'd love a link to that!

@krans Oh I see my mistake. I wrote Liberal when I meant Labor. Oopsie. Fixed!

@cwebber

use either restroom and be arrested

that's pretty much what it boils down to

it is bigotry and completely unacceptable

no discrimination

@cwebber “The law is the law, and the law’s not going to change.” What are you talking about, the law was changed by the Supreme Court in April. And there’s a good chance it’ll get changed again when a case reaches the ECtHR.

@noisytoot @cwebber “since gender reassignment is still a protected characteristic” The Supreme Court judgement addressed this. They claim that if everybody is treated as their legal birth sex, that’s not discrimination. I wonder if the ECtHR will agree.

@mallory @cwebber The Supreme Court judgement changed the definition of the protected characteristic of sex, but didn't modify the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, which still exists. It means that if you ban trans people from single-sex spaces, you still have to provide a space for them otherwise you'll be discriminating against people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, which effectively means that gender neutral toilets are required.

@noisytoot Ah. That one is addressed by the article: “It will say that in the case of areas that are necessary for everyone, such as lavatories, it would not be proportionate to leave a trans person with no facilities.” So I’d assume only buildings with a non-gendered toilet would be banning trans people entirely from the gendered toilets. At least officially. In practice, many bigots will not know or care about the law and just yell at trans people in every bathroom.

@cwebber

You've probably heard of the engineering principle of "unintended consequences".

This, on the other hand, is what we call "an intended consequence", or, the machine working successfully as designed.

The intent was laid out 46 years ago, in 1979, when Janice Raymond wrote The Transsexual Empire. In that vile book, she called for genocide of trans people.

She said you can't use death camps, that's messy and public opinion will turn against you. In 1979, this made sense. We all knew family who'd been affected by the war. Now, we're learning that the US isn't as exceptional as it thought.

Instead, she said, you have to legislate them out of existence. Make life as a trans person so difficult that they simply cease to exist. If that happens by self-harm, fine. If it leads to desperate crime which has us locked up forever? Fine. If it leads to total poverty? No problem. If it's deep-seated addiction, tearing the body apart until it can't hold anymore? Excellent.

Someone in Project 2025 has clearly read it. It's exactly what we're seeing. Systemic pressure from the top down to repress transness in any and every way imaginable. Make health care unavailable. Make being in public difficult and unpleasant, by restricting bathroom use. Don't allow ID changes, and charge people who use altered gender markers as fraud perpetrators. Lock 'em up. Deny their existence. Scrub anything about them from every public source of information. Make acknowledging their existence cost you everything, even if you're not trans yourself. Ban the words from use. Fire anyone who's revealed to be trans, and do so for publicly-applauded bigotry.

It's from the textbook of repression. Every authoritarian state needs an internal enemy. Someone to blame it all on.

This time it's us. Again.

They did the same move in 1930s Germany. Berlin had been the queerest city in the world before that.

They died.

Let's not.

@mallory Is it up to the owners of buildings or would it be legally required to ban trans people from single-sex spaces? If the latter (which I think it is), then it seems that buildings without gender-neutral toilets would be required to install them.

@cwebber

Oh, and sorry, i ran out of space before I could acknowledge that this was also becoming true with terrifying speed in the UK, and that you don't have a court system inclined to stop it.

Under a Labour government. Sickening.

@noisytoot My understanding is: building owners would be required to ban trans women from the women's bathrooms and trans men from the men's bathrooms, but that trans women will be permitted to use men's bathrooms and trans men will be allowed to use women's bathrooms for the most part. Although in "some circumstances" (which ones?) building owners would also be permitted to ban trans women from the men's bathrooms and trans men from the women's bathrooms so long as there are gender-neutral bathrooms.

The interim guidance from April: https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/media-centre/interim-update-practical-implications-uk-supreme-court-judgment

"trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities and trans men (biological women) should not be permitted to use the men’s facilities, as this will mean that they are no longer single-sex facilities and must be open to all users of the opposite sex"

"in some circumstances the law also allows trans women (biological men) not to be permitted to use the men’s facilities, and trans men (biological woman) not to be permitted to use the women’s facilities"

"however where facilities are available to both men and women, trans people should not be put in a position where there are no facilities for them to use"