How does this impact on Community Wellbeing? Women are excluded from taking part in society when they cannot rely on facilities being single sex (no male bodied people admitted) - eg toilets, changing rooms - they will self exclude esp if from minority community with traditional views. And they are made vulnerable to trauma and assault in hospitals and prisons. The govts proposed changes to the ease of access to a birth certificate (changing someones sex not just their “gender”) will make the supposed protections of the 2010 Equality Act still valid in theory but meaningless in practice. Community cohesion is undermined by making facilities feel unsafe to women. The current proposals to remove any medical gatekeeping altogether and slash the waiting period for a GRC render the legal protections women have meaningless. Citizans must respond to the consultation on the proposals online before 17 March. Why should the Committee focus on this as part of their future work? Because half the population are female and their access to facilities is driven by whether they feel safe to use them. They should not have to return to the urinary leash of Victorian times, going only as far from home that they could get back home to pee, and girls at school self excluding when they have their period because boys humiliate them in unisex toilets.
All citizens, councillors and MSPs
Because it took MILLENIA right up until 2010, for all Scottish & U.K. FEMALE BORN HUMAN BEINGS to get access to mis-called legislative ‘equality’ into THE RULE OF LAW to SAFEGUARD and MITIGATE (sadly not erase) against the ENDEMIC NATURE of MALE VIOLENCE & THE URINARY & MENSTRUAL LEASH & it should never be accessed by Males, no matter the demand! Females need “equity” to ensure we can SAFEGUARD & MITIGATE!
Because if we want to be an inclusive society, we must recognise that if we do not have sex segregation we drive out women of religious faith, women who have been traumatised and women, like myself, who will no longer go to my local swimming pool which has mixed changing facilities since spotting a phone being slid under the partition.
Equal rights charity Stonewall estimated that two in five trans people had experienced a hate crime or incident in the past year. I would much prefer to share a bathroom with a transgender woman than send that woman into an actual male toilet knowing how vulnerable they are and how terrifying that experience would be for her.
This content is created by the open source Your Priorities citizen engagement platform designed by the non profit Citizens Foundation