Thread by @HairyLeggdHarpy, Time for another thread of quotes from the GRA debates of 2003/04, [...]

Time for another thread of quotes from the GRA debates of 2003/04, I think.

This one about how critical it is to define SEX and GENDER in law and never to conflate the two.

And how the Government repeatedly refused to allow that distinction, despite being asked to.

#GRA2004

Tebbit was relentless, tabling amendments to force the distinction:
"... apart from anything else, my concern is to smoke out in some way the Government's view of the distinction between those words or to ascertain whether they believe that there is a distinction between them."

Tebbit: "Is the bill about a change of sex, or a change of gender?"

The opposition denied and dodged the clear distinction. The GRA falls apart, of course, unless the 2 concepts are both different when needed, and same when needed. That's the basis of all bait and switch games, and this law is one such example.

Introducing...'psyche'

The KEY CORNERSTONE of the GRA, and of all transgender ideology, is the dodgy idea that the most compelling thing about a female or a male is their 'psyche'.
That's what the law was about. Redefining biology into psychology.

We all are told we have a male, or a female psyche.

Filkin was clinging hard to the opinion of Lord Justice Thorpe who had opined that the apparent female psyche of a man trumped the real biology of every woman. Gender superseding sex. It should be said that other judges disagreed.

Filkin resisted attempts to separate the two concepts.
"not a great deal of fruit in spending a lot of time on trying to define the meanings of those words, although there are distinctions between them"
The word "sex" now has more of a social and psychological connotation"

Much manure was produced in valiant efforts to try and give the concept of 'female psyche' some credibility as to why it ought to trump, well, reality:
Lord Lucas made some toe curling contributions:
"psychological man" "psychological woman".
Watch here how he gaslights himself

But Filkin of course was leading the charge:
"There is no stark dichotomy between the meaning of the words"
"The Bill does not fundamentally turn on the semantic distinction between gender and sex"

No, apparently what makes us female is how we live

This is how Filkin eventually shut down the discussions on sex & gender:
We've no time to talk about it; its only a tiny number of exceptions; promise we'll make the process really watertight, blah blah, look, squirrel!
The Government 'didn't have time' to discuss definitions.

And it was obvious why Filkin kept shutting down attempts to distinguish. When supporters of gender, like Lord Turnberg spoke up, it sounded like this big old muddle, which Tebbit calmly and consistently challenged:

Tebbit: "but what he has not told me is what is his definition of the words "sex" and "gender".

Then, they wheeled in Robert Winston, lovely twinkly, mustachioed child of our times. Who proceeded to splurge out the most dreadful confused nonsense about spectrums, and intersex conditions, and sex being awfully terribly difficult to tell.

Mosaicism? Femininity?
Squirrel!

Of course, Winston knows full well, that this bill had nothing to do with intersex conditions, since it was about the unambiguously male being declared legally female, and vice versa.
But the confusion was necessary.

This bullshit (sorry, but really) didn't get past everyone.

Tebbit responded. You have to admire him a little for this bit.
"The Heavy mob"
"The Light Cavalry"

He was having no truck with Winston claiming sex was hard to ascertain.
It's ascertained every day, thousands of times over. Accurately.

Ferrers was having none of it either.

"Sex, on the whole, is pretty obvious"

Indeed.

Lord Chan also made the point that this was NOT ABOUT INTERSEX PEOPLE.

Chan's contributions were interesting. He challenged the assumptions upon which transgenderism rests and raised concerns:

Baroness O'Cathain also quoted concerned medical professionals. What follows is quite an astonishing letter published by medical professionals at the Portman Clinic in 2002.

Here is the letter. It was written by EIGHT medical professionals at the Portman Gender Clinic.

"from an intolerable psychological reality...to a more comfortable fantasy"
"the recent legal victory risks...a false belief that it is possible to actually change a person's gender"

"A victory of fantasy over reality"

Medics from the Portman clinic, 2002, regarding legal recognition of transexuals as the opposite sex.

Latest Threads Unrolled: