Episode 3 - Self-ID and Gender Identity

This episode uses explicit language, so please be aware of that, especially if any children are nearby. Episode 3, Self-ID, and Gender Identity Oh, thank God I am home. One of the day. One of the day. One of the day. One of the day. One of the day. Never stops. I'll run on the door and show you. That's right. I don't mind. You've got to be good. David, I don't want to say a nickname because it sounds like poetic. David can be a real pain in the arse most of the time. But the reason you put up with that is because he's the best journalist I've met in a long, long time. The relationship with Nolan sometimes is fraught. We always get on well. Like we get on very well actually, but it doesn't mean that there's not heated moments. He'll always bring up the day when I, in his words, flounced off and left. There've been some kind of dispute over a story. He and I didn't see either. I worked for a long time on it and literally packed up all my stuff and was leaving the BBC that day. And here's the thing, two Thompson's his. He was packing all his stuff. I didn't notice any of this. Because I was exhausted. I actually landed the floor and some time I'd go on one stage. And I remember looking up to him and saying, "See, the marmot?" And he smiled at me and said, "All right, so this flange of his. " It was just like it was mum and grey as most of his are. He's never let me live it down. But I'm not like that most of the time. Most of the time in the rational, sane one. I think. Why is he a pain in the arse because he's weird and he's a loof? And he's really, really loyal to me. But when he'd go and walk on me up the street, would he hell? You know, he would tell me, "It's granny's pregnant for every month. Every time I say, "Here, you want to go out and walk?" And yet he would sit up all night working. So he's a kind of a private individual. "Mandy?" "Mandy?" "Come on." He's currently down at Fantasy Island, as he calls it. Amazing house on Strenford Lock and it overlooks like an area of outstanding natural beauty. And he's on this like never-ending diet. So the thing is, he's got this beautiful place and all this equipment, but he's 20 stone. If he would stop eating the crisps and the burgers and the McFlurry's, he wouldn't need to, all this equipment need to be on this diet as whole life. Because it's clearly not working. So, and there's absolutely plaguing me today about the podcast because there's so many questions that he wants answered. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Yes? I'm trying again on the treadmill. How can such a fat man actually be still fat? How can this be possible, Thompson? What number attempt is this? No, but tell me seriously. I keep on trying and then give it up. So here we are again. It's a beautiful day right here. Are you just looking for a life coach or what's up? I'm obsessed with this. This podcast. What is Self-I-D? Self-I-D? Yes. Self-I-D is basically, so at the minute, if you want to change your sex, you have to go through a process. You have to make certain criteria to be accepted and change your sex. That's transgender, right? Well, yeah, sometimes gender people go through that process. If they want to change their sex and be legally recognized as different sex, they go through a process. You don't have to have medical procedures or anything. Are you okay? You basically have to live in the other sex and then you can get a certificate. So that's what happens at the moment. That's someone who goes to their doctor and they go through a whole process and there's consultation and all that. Yeah. So how does that compare to Self-I-D? Okay, so Self-I-D is basically the policy that grips like Stomall would advocate for, which is that it's really up to that person. It's how they declare themselves. This is from Glad's YouTube page. Glad is the gay unless being a lion's against defamation, a US-based LGBT rights group. I love being trans because I'm not forced to be in a box where I don't belong. People spend their entire lives figuring out who they are. We do it and then we can teach that to the rest of the world. So I've been able to create my own narrative, tell my own story and not have to subscribe to other people's ideas of normal or other people's ideas of beauty. Now you might have to fill out a declaration or something to say, "I'm not a different sex to the sex I was born or a different gender to the gender you were born into." Which basically would mean it's much more down to the end of the deal. It's about them living in the gender that they feel most comfortable with. How much are we allowed? Well critics of that would say that it undermines sex-based rights. So there are protections in their quality act and then law about single sex-based, for example. So female change in rooms or women's refuges, that type of stuff where. You see, let me further still more like, why does everything always come down to changing rooms? Do people think that people are constantly obsessed with saying nudity? They can go to the internet for that. I very much doubt that somebody's going to go through this whole process just to get into a changing room to see somebody's genitals. What the critics would say is that it's not about genuine, trans people, but if you don't have that process, then you don't have anything in place to stop people who want to abuse that system. So they're worried about sexual predators, for example, or men who are violent towards women using women's refuges. I don't think the critical groups are saying, you know, you just shouldn't do this. It's not right. You can't just self-ideate a different gender. What a lot of the groups like Fair Play for Women are saying is that there needs to be certain protections, and you need to have single sex basis, that needs to be protected. That's a legally protected already and that needs to stay the same. And if you change this, that would undermine that. The following is a report from CBS Los Angeles, from the 4th of July, 2021. Violent clashes between demonstrators and the LAPD, these demonstrators showed up to support trans rights and we spaw, a business that came under fire this week over a viral video. It's okay for a man to go into the women's section, show his penis around the other women, young little girls, under age. So Thompson, there was a huge rally, wasn't there, and L.A. over this, wasn't there? Yeah, there was a social media storm over reports of a man or maybe a trans woman who went into a changing room that was reserved for women, and the law and that part of America actually protects people's gender expression. N.L.A. does it? Yeah, N.L.A. So someone who was biologically male went into a female changing room, is that right? Yeah, seemingly they were physically male. They took their clothes off and some of the women there were angry about this. There were claims that there were children there and some of the women didn't think it was appropriate. It became this focal point for this huge rye over trans rights and there were police there, protesters foreign against trans rights. There were women who were saying this is a space for women and only women should be allowed here. Okay, no, I'm not one. Actually, I'm a woman who knows how to stand up and speak up from my right. As a woman, I have a right to feel comfortable without a man exposing himself. Well, this person would maybe say they are a woman. It might, and that's what this debate all comes down to. Can someone just say, "I'm a woman?" Why does this make me this hang in there? And this is how I express myself. I think we're a small penis hang in there. Exactly. Some people will say you can never change that. You're still a man, and that's what it comes down to. It's really pretty declared unlawful assembly and officers in tactical gear ushered the crowd off the street. Since we recorded this section, there's been a debate over the accuracy of the initial reports. Some news organizations cast doubt on the veracity of the story. The Guardian reported in an article about misinformation around the incident that the unsubstantiated allegations about Whisper "quickly spread from social media to right wing forums to far right news sites to Fox News and were distorted by anti-transgender groups across multiple countries." The Guardian also reported that, quote, "it is unclear whether a trans woman was actually present" and said that, quote, "a local LGBTQ+ paper reported that a SPA employee said there were no trans patrons with appointments that day, leading some to question whether the incident was staged." Then, subsequently, the Guardian reported that, quote, "the LA police department announced that it had put out an arrest warrant for an individual who is now facing five felony counts of indecent exposure at Whisper." The Guardian also reported that, "LAPD said that five individuals had come forward and that the police service had conducted interviews of victims and witnesses, reviewed the evidence, and ultimately cooperated the allegations of indecent exposure." They reported that the individual's gender identity was also unclear. The New Zealand weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard, is set to become the first transgender athlete to compete at the Olympics. For example, there's a row over trans athletes at the Olympics like the weightlifter, Laurel Hubbard. There are really strict and complex rules and Laurel had to prove her testosterone was below a certain level because testosterone increases your muscle mass. Critics say if you could just self-idea, you could have self-identifying trans woman, sport and what many other women say would be an uneven playing field. She was competing in men's events until she transitioned in 2012. But self-idea isn't just about someone in the to-man, saying they're a woman or a woman, saying they're a man, that's where all this sys stuff and gender queer, what is it? Well, there's different genders on how they fit into that. People don't really know. What you've seen is Stoomwell-Lobby and for those gender identities to be recognised by public bodies. So if you're gender-fluid, for example, you might consider yourself a man one day, a woman on a different day, or you might be somewhere in between and say that you're not either. And they're asking for public bodies to formally recognise that. So self-idea and the discussions in the Scottish Parliament and elsewhere about a self-idea policy is much more related to people that are actually changing their sex, or want to be recognised as a different, either male to female or female to male. But quite where those different gender identities that Stoomwell-Lobby and for half of fit into that, nobody. Now, as you're all listening from home, wherever it is, you're listening to this podcast. You might remember Pears Morgan causing a huge controversy around this type of territory. I'm actually a two-spirit, Newt Shroy's pan-gender penguin. And how dare you? How dare you tell me I can't identify as that? Can you give me an example of some of those identities? You could be gender-queer, you could be non-binary, you could be two-spirit. You know, these are some of the. I think it comes from a native American idea of people here basically, neither male nor female, or they may have both. I mean, some of these terms are not defined, you know, there's not a dictionary definition of them. So, what's really what interpretation people put on those themselves? I've heard of them. I don't really know what they all mean, but I mean, whatever makes you healthy. Yeah, I'm fairly aware of them out of a few friends and even my own brother's trans. So, I feel like society should always accommodate to make people feel more comfortable. Sometimes you can feel a lot more masculine than feminine. Other days you can feel a lot more feminine than masculine. I just don't think it really matters, honestly. I didn't grow up with a lot of LGBT people, so when I find out about, like, trans rights and everything like that, I find myself and I became more comfortable in my own identity. I've no non-binary zone, the thing I've heard of it is, no. One of the people we happened to bump into in the street was Father Timothy Bartlett. He's a Catholic priest who's attended Pride events and discussions on LGBT issues in the past. Here's what he had to say. I've heard of some of those, not all of them. And my starting point, and I think the starting point, particularly if anybody in it from a church pastoral perspective, has to be the individual and their particular story, their history and their understanding of themselves. That's where I always begin and how they define themselves and articulate their experience of who they are. So to me that's much more important than approaching anybody with a particular label in mind. If people want to use that as their identifiers, I respect that, but I'd also want to understand what they mean by that. In some of those cases I do, in some of them I don't. Here's Benjamin Corn from Pink News again. The identities that people give themselves and identify us, for example, two-spirit. I'm a 48 year old man. I have no idea what two-spirit means. Is there any control over what these definitions mean? Like what does two-spirit mean and who decides what is two-spirit and what isn't? And again, without me being facetious, could someone tomorrow say that they're being three-spirit? I understand your point that I'm 10 years younger than you and this is also difficult for that. I guess us older people sometimes to navigate because terminology does change. I first heard the term two-spirit when I was at an event with Canada's High Commissioner and the Canada's LGBT envoy. It's a Canadian term and it's actually from the Native American, it has Native American origins in Canada. So it derives from there. But what does it mean? Oh God, now you're testing me. I can't, I probably couldn't give you the dictionary definition. Can you give me a sense of what it means? So if someone comes to me and says I'm two-spirit, what does it actually mean? It's how they're describing themselves. I know, but surely there needs to be a meaning to these things or it plays into these people who maybe try to be rude and say they're just making this up as they go along. What does it mean? It relates to things like the third. It's just quite complex. I'm not going to, I'm not an expert in different cultures that I'm not part of, but it's part of an indigenous culture in North America. Well if you take something from the UK which we use quite often like gender queer, take it from the UK. What does gender queer mean? Gender queer, I'm more happy to kind of. But I will say to you, maybe I haven't given you a tough enough time in this interview, but the fact that the person at the very top of pink news does not know what two-spirit means and I'm supposed to know and so sadly supposedly expect that it's surely extraordinary. We all have a duty to be educating themselves. You have pointed out to me that I can't give you off the top of my head a definition of two-spirit that would be considered to be accurate. I think that accuracy as, you know, we're all on this cool journalist and I believe accuracy is a central part of being. Or we should be saying to people, you just can't categorise yourself and as all of these different descriptors. No, I don't agree with that because I'm a Jew, but if you have a man in conversation with different Jewish people, we'll talk about the type of Jews. Maybe a concern to this Benjamin is maybe you can express yourself out whatever way you want, but it's a big leap from your personal expression and your personal description of yourself as gender queer or two-spirit or non-binary to actually deal with that practically day-to-day in law. I think an important point is that none of these identities you're talking about are defined in law. So if what you're saying is there needs to be an official definition of different LGBT+ identities, then that is something for politicians to consider with changes to the equality act or things like the Gender Recognition Act, both of which. And shouldn't Stolmol just lobby for that? Shouldn't they just say, "let's change the equality act and let's protect the Jewish people?" No, but the same thing is just that. You said the official definitions. There aren't official definitions. Please Benjamin, tell me before you go what gender queer is. I have no notion. Gender queer, it means your identity is at very and probably the gender that you were to find at birth and different people use different terminology to describe themselves. So some people who describe themselves as gender queer, some people may describe their feeling as gender queer, other people may say non-binary or gender non-binary, but queer is also important because they might also be describing their sexual orientation at the same time. So it's complex and it's not in my view, it's not for an individual who's not part of that community to define themselves. I define myself as a gay man. So does that mean you're gender queer? No. Why not? Why are you not gender queer? Because my gender is not a variance to the gender which I was assigned at birth. And who cares what somebody in their own head is thinking they are? Why have they not got the right to think who they are? And what they are? I don't think. I mean I don't know of any of the critics of Stonewall who have an issue with that. I think where their issue comes is how does a society legislate for this type of stuff? When those sort of identities change, how can an employer for example facilitate that? Obviously Stonewall would say yes of course they can, they can find different ways of accommodating people with different gender identities. But at the minute as things stand sex is binary in law, there's male and there's female. And transgender is recognized. People are protected if they're going through a process of change, male to female or vice versa. But the law has no capacity to deal with people with different gender identities. Do public bodies have to accept the different identities? In other words say somebody was arrested and the police attempt to define them as a man or a woman. Do public bodies have to accept a suspect who says actually I'm too spurt? Trans has become much more than just sort of someone who's going through a process of transition from one sex to another. And you know by Stonewall's own definition it includes those various gender identities. It's kind of like an umbrella term so there's two things. To say for example a male commits violence against a family. female and that male is going through your intent and to go through gender assignment, the formal process. They're protected on the characteristic of gender assignment, the old term's transsexual. If somebody essentially, and there've been cases where this has, arisen, if someone, for example, a male commits a sexual offense or a violent offense against a woman, and that person has self-identified as a different sex, the place services have accepted that. From the documents we have seen, self-ID is already effectively in place in many public bodies in the UK. We put it to Labour MP Rosie Duffield that if that's the case, what's the problem? There's a question of somebody who is having treatment and who really does want to go down the route of gender assignment surgery and has been suffering for a long time feeling that they're in the wrong body biologically and that must be horrendous, I can't imagine what that's like to be a trans person. However, there are also problems if an individual decides that they are male-bodied and yet they identify as a woman, for example, it can obviously go the other way and therefore they can go into biological women's spaces. There's a lot of women who are incredibly uncomfortable about that and we haven't legislated for that whole area because basically we haven't had the time to talk about it in Parliament, it just seems to have gone straight to social media discussions and you know all about people's rights but women are really concerned about their biological sex rights. We have safe spaces and protected biological sex spaces for some very serious reasons and it's not saying by any means that anyone with a male body is a potential pervert or rapist, you know, we have those laws to protect us from the few people that are. You're defining a safe space for a woman as being meal free. Yeah, a lot of women who've had direct experience of men using their bodies for harm or to harm them. Do not want to be anywhere near a male body for some very good reasons. So for example domestic abuse is a really obvious one, you know, and you know you wouldn't necessarily put your children in a position where they can see adults walking around naked. I mean we have protection and safeguarding for a reason but also many women don't believe that just because you feel like a woman if you've got a male body it doesn't make you one magically, you know. This is a discussion that we haven't been able to have because we're automatically labelled bigots or transphobes if we say that and I think it is much more complicated and needs a lot more discussion. And that absolutely needs more discussion but I just wonder if you should be challenged more on suggesting that you know a safe space is meal free because it is a different sex person there. You know you're basically saying that men will be attracted to women and therefore they shouldn't be naked in front of them. You know, Harkham the country doesn't fall over when in male changing rooms gay people, gay meals are allowed into the same changing rooms as heterosexual meals. There's attraction there, nothing you know the world doesn't stop and it's not it's not a non-safed space. It's not about a attraction. I think the crime of rape is a violent crime and men use their bodies as a weapon in that sense. It's nothing to do with attraction or sexuality even. It's a crime of violence. So if we are put in a position where we are vulnerable to male violence or male body people in our space I think we have absolutely the right to question that and to say no actually and these are our bodies. They're different to male bodies and we're allowed to say that and to say no and we've fought for the right to do that and we are saying no a lot of us and you know I'll protect my right to say that so you know I don't yeah I mean some people don't like that but you know we've got to have that discussion. So you can see the fault lines. This is an important debate which will dictate how a society functions in the future. There are people who insist there is only male and female and then there are those who completely disagree. From the mentally disagree to such an extent that they believe there are hundreds of genders. But if you look at the statistics those numbers are going up. But how can there be many many different genders? How can there be? And who is the body that defines what that gender means rather than it just being based on whatever somebody wants to domain? So who has defined like we know what a male means. A male means you've got a penis and testicles doesn't it? So what does male chromosomes and what everyone understands a male domain? No and I get that Thompson and I get what a female means but like who defines what two spur it is? Well a lot of these things are really about how people define themselves. I take your point who defines what that is? They don't think they do but they would list that as an example of a different gender identity that some people would feel. You may get back to your treadmill. Thompson I hope that we have dubbed the sound of the treadmill under this so that nobody knows I stopped after the beginning and then they'll think and then they'll think I'm an athlete that I have been able to calmly while not even being breathless speak to you the whole way through. Speaking as a BBC employee I would have to say that with British and safeguarding trust the audience need to know the truth. How much bad food you can eat and you're a skinny re-rump? That's because I work too hard. No comment. In summary Stonewall is campaigning to make it a societal norm that rather than just male and female human beings can have lots more genders including gender queer, queer, non-binary, two-spirit, many others and that is controversial territory and yet Stonewall's position has infiltrated guess what? The BBC Children's Education Department. What are the different gender identities? That's a really really exciting question to ask. Do you know there are so many gender identities so we know we've got male and female but there are over a hundred if not more gender identities there. Stonewall's influence potentially goes beyond issues of impartiality in the BBC. Stonewall also has influence in a number of politically neutral public bodies that affect all of our lives from the people who gathered data for the census to our governments across the UK and our civil servants. We will look at that. Stonewall seems to have been allowed to position itself as the expert body inequality when it comes to gay lesbian, bisexual or transgender people. It is if no other experts on the planet who might disagree with Stonewall exist. Certain groups are protected from discrimination and law based on characteristics like your race, sex or sexual orientation. In other words, you can't be discriminated against because you're black. That law is the equality act and it makes employers responsible for ensuring none of those protected groups are treated unfairly. Here's the Conservative MP Philip Davies. The bill introduced as the concept of protected characteristics of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, sex and sexual orientations. And many employers invited Stonewall in to help them, particularly around gay and trans employees. Stonewall don't think the locals anywhere near far enough on trans rights. For example, they're thinking that a biological male could decide without any transition process that they should be treated in law as a woman is deeply controversial and it's opposed bitterly by others. And so far it has been rejected by the government. So that is just one example of how Stonewall are in very controversial territory. They may be the experts in some people's view but at others they may be fundamentally wrong. This is all caught up in the middle of a toxic rye over whether your biological sex or how you identify is more important. Opponents say Stonewall advice public bodies on the law as they want the debate rather than what the law actually is. But despite all this controversy many public organizations have been treating Stonewall as the experts what Stonewall says goes. Here's the Conservative MP David T. C. Davies speaking in a Westminster hall debate on Self-ID in November 2018. The point that I'm making is that before any legislation has been passed we already seeing organizations such as schools, hospitals and prisons allowing people to define themselves by a different general to the one that they are born with and in the majority of cases to which their body corresponds and it does have an impact on others. It has an impact on the rights particularly of women to privacy and to sex-segregated spaces. The changes related to sex and gender that Stonewall would lobby for are not yet and may never be law in this country. But Stonewall's advice has resulted in some bodies basically operating self-ID. Let's hear what Ruth Hunt told Oxford University when she was speaking on behalf of Stonewall. Stonewall was set up as a non-democratic organisation designed to provide a very professional lobbying organisation and that pissed people off and always has done. Stonewall are not accountable for any policy changes that public bodies may. Take Stonewall out of this for a second. Forget about whether you agree with them or not. How worrying is it that there is an unaccountable lobby group, partly funded by you, the public, which has unparalleled access to your government, to your employer, to your police force, to your BBC. Should that concern you? The DUP politician Jim Wells has a history of controversial remarks, a rind LGBT issues. It's worrying because many people in the country, tens of thousands of people, particularly church courts, are depending upon the DUP to hold the line on certain issues. So a gay person should not be a public representative of the DUP. It shouldn't be seen in public Germany. No, Stephen, a gay person is every right to stand for a political party. But the DUP has a tradition and an ethos on this issue and that has been broken and many of our supporters look like how it's been done and secondly it goes against the ethos of so many of our members. Jim Wells raised the issue of the Northern Ireland Civil Service being a Stonewall diversity champion in Stormman's Finance Committee in 2020. I think we need to start by finding out a bit more about the relationship between civil service and Stonewall. I don't think it's appropriate that any government agency has a relationship with a very militant one-sided campaigning group. In that same meeting, the chair of the committee, then Ulster Unionist Party leaders Steve Aiken, give his understanding of Stonewall. Just for a matter of disclosure, I'm sort of I'm quite aware of Stonewall's work, I'm going to work with Stonewall with sort of the Royal Navy and various other peduses. And there is a perception that they might be seen as being militant in some places. If they are, but there's a lot of other places, they're not. Theoretically, what could happen here is that any lobby group here representing one of the protected characteristics under the equality act be it on the grounds of religion of sex, of race, could devise a similar scheme to Stonewall and you might think well why not. But if you were then in a position where you had different religious institutions, Mark and public sector organisations on how well they felt that they were representing their interests, how do you end up managing the interests of both a religious organisation and Stonewall and all those different religious organisations. And you can see how this could very quickly get out of control if all of those different lobbies and interests have essentially exceeded the table by being inside these organisations and being able to influence the policies of those organisations. In the next episode, we talk to the UK's first non-binary man. I think it's a shambles that Parliament have decided that they can't be bothered to respect non-binary people enough to accept our gender as legal and allow us to place it on our legal documentation. I think that's a huge failing of Parliament. [MUSIC]