Three years ago, the Conservative government launched a consultation on a somewhat esoteric piece of legislation concerning the rights of trans people to alter their birth certificate and legal sex.
The proposed changes included ‘self ID’, a radical departure from the current system of careful assessment and mindful transition for those suffering dysphoria.
Self ID would have allowed acquisition of legal sex based on no more than a sworn declaration. But, in reality, the sworn declaration was lip service.
The proposed changes would have, de facto, removed, or at least critically compromised, protections afforded by equality legislation on the basis of sex.
‘I am a woman’ would become sufficient to permit access to legally-protected female spaces.
Three years ago, women realised this might be a problem. Many had seen it coming for a long time, but the potential impact of these legislative changes raised an army.
Women said ‘No.’
Not just famous women expert in the politics and theory of gender, but women who had gone about their lives without even realising that these protections apply to themselves each and every day.
Women took to the streets, handed out thousands of leaflets and wrote thousands of letters, raised awareness, lobbied their government representatives, dissected the legal ramifications.
Today, following weeks of leaks and rumours, it seems that Self ID has been scrapped as a mechanism to acquiring the opposite legal sex.
For me, it has been too bitter a fight to evoke much positive emotion.
The three years of campaigning and lobbying has created a climate among service providers such that ‘I am a woman’ is indeed sufficient to permit access to legally-protected female spaces.
I hope this newly-invigorated movement of women, connected in ways unimaginable a few years ago, can stay the course to ensure equality legislation is not only secured but reinforced.
The prison service has reviewed its position on the transfer of transwomen to the female estate. Sporting federations are beginning to revisit their regulations for the female category.
Sex shouldn’t matter half as much as it does, but there are, in my opinion, a small number of situations where it will always matter, and where female protections are necessary.
Let’s see this through.
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Birds use genetic sex determination, just like humans.
The "make male" gene for humans is called SRY, and it lives on the Y chromosome.
If you have functional SRY and its downstream transcriptional storm, you will make testes and make male.
Birds differ. Their "make male" gene is called DMRT1.
It pretty much works like SRY, in that it's immediate downstream target is the parallel gene in both humans and parrots, and the ensuing transcriptional storm triggers testes development (testes being male, of course).
"This model of estradiol’s role in improving resistance to wound sepsis predicts at least four “sexes” across two treatment groups: females who are in the proestrus phase, females who are in the diestrus phase, females who are postmenopausal, and males."
This is Sarah Richardson, of the Fuentes review.
Four "sexes", three of them female and the other male. JFC.
Apparently-female athletes who test positive for SRY will have a consultation with WA, with a view to medical assessment to better understand any medical conditions (DSDs) they have.
It is this diagnosis that will determine eligibility (or not).
After a primer on sex development, Sinclair tries a gotcha.
Describing Swyer Syndrome and CAIS, he argues these athletes would be unfairly excluded.
But WA makes it clear that CAIS is exempt from exclusion. It’s in both the policy and the press release. I doubt Swyer would be excluded either.
Five years ago, I gave a speech comparing sex denialism to creationism.
At the time, my partner-in-crime, Colin Wright, and I were near-lone academic voices willing to stand up and say “Biology! We have a problem!”
@SwipeWright
Reflecting, back in 2020, on that state of affairs:
“[That] there are two sexes, male and female is apparently something that biologists do not think needs to be said.
I think they are wrong.”
Since then, biologists with far more authority than an unknown developmental biologist who was trying to work out how nerves navigate over muscles and an unknown evolutionary biologist who was studying what makes insects mad have spoken up.