Thank you so much for your article (“At last, a consensus is emerging on protecting women-only spaces”, Comment). As a left-leaning feminist, doctor and trainee psychotherapist, I wept with joy and relief to see an article that finally seemed to voice that there is a difference between biological sex and gender identity, and sometimes this difference matters.
It matters most to the most vulnerable women who are also more likely to be conditioned not to speak up, including female inmates in prison, where a huge percentage have been on the receiving end of male violence and sexual assaults. I have been so upset in response to some of the confluence between sex and gender identity in language and statistics. I feel this serves neither biological women or men, nor trans women or trans men.
I desperately want protection for biological women, trans women and trans men from male violence, abuse and discrimination. We shouldn’t have to wait until women are getting their necks broken on sports pitches or more women are raped by males in female-only prisons before we as a society wake up, use our common sense and listen to science.
Sexual dimorphism is a biological fact of human existence. This doesn’t inhibit anyone from identifying or expressing themselves however they like and diversity should be celebrated, but sometimes sex matters. Sex-protected rights were fought for and granted for important reasons and we can’t see them erased.
Kate Newman
Brighton
As a trans person, I won’t pretend that Sonia Sodha’s article didn’t deeply wound me. To claim an “emerging consensus” around Gender Recognition Act reform is to construct a public and to draw a line – right-thinking people on one side, gender ideologues on the other.
Only a small number of trans people bother to apply for a gender recognition certificate. The process is frustrating, dehumanising, bureaucratic, but, even if it were not, a GRC has no bearing on your day-to-day life, which toilets you use, how others perceive you. Trans women have been using women’s spaces, especially public toilets, for years, with or without GRCs, but usually without. A GRC enables death and marriage certificates to be filed correctly. That’s all. My status as a trans woman is legally protected under the Equality Act, without a GRC.
The government has issued guidance in the last few months advising women’s refuges and similar charities that they may exclude trans women if they believe there are reasonable grounds to do so for others’ benefit. Given the paucity of options for trans women fleeing domestic violence, this is a bad state of affairs. Sodha suggests that GRA reform is all that stands between us and a world where trans women can use whatever bathroom they please. That world is already here, and has been for decades.
Finally, I think the assertion that “someone female with a GRC who gets pregnant would not be covered by Equality Act protections against pregnancy and maternity discrimination” is bogus. Trans men have made clear that the compassionate solution is to reform the Equality Act to extend such protections, rather than removing existing ones.
Ell Johnson
Norwich
Distorting the truth
Will Hutton rightly warns of the corrosive impact that “truth denial” will have on democracy (“A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is fast following suit”, Comment). I hope he would agree that Labour’s “attack strategy” demonstrates that this equally applies to grotesque truth distortion.
Richard de Friend
London NW5
Not all gloom for churches
Peter Stanford’s article regretting the demise of rural church buildings was informative, but struck a rather gloomy note (“Is the melancholy fate off derelict rural churches sealed – or can we change it?”, Focus). Much can be done by communities to retain their churches if they campaign energetically and innovatively.
The Romney Marsh Historic Churches Trust is a good example of how this can be done. For more than 40 years, the trust has provided funds for the maintenance of 12 medieval churches across the large marsh area of Kent, having secured support from art, entertainment, politics and journalism.
It now has significant resources that are directed towards these beautiful and historic churches in their sparsely populated villages and hamlets. What has been done on Romney Marsh can be replicated elsewhere.
Shaun Leavey
Sherborne, Dorset
The SNP is where I want to be
Andrew Rawnsley suggests that Labour must seize the opportunity offered by troubles in the SNP (“As the SNP loses its iron grip on Scotland, Labour must seize this golden opportunity”, Comment). He may be right, but Labour has treated Scotland badly in the past and folk have long memories. Second, Labour is no longer a left-of-centre party. Its stance on most issues is in tune with the Tories and nowhere near where I want to be.
The SNP has offered Scottish voters policies and strategies that are progressive and based on the wellbeing of the nation. It has had to mitigate the worst that Westminster has thrown at us.
Donald MacKay
Crossford, Fife
Eat like it’s 1950
The news that low-carb diets can be a cure for obesity and diabetes would not have seemed so surprising in the 1950s (“Obesity, diabetes… has this GP found the drug-free treatment?”, News). The classic textbook Human Nutrition and Dietetics (1959) stated: “The intake of foods rich in carbohydrate should be drastically reduced since over-indulgence in such foods is the most common cause of obesity.” This was common-sense advice at the time.
But since then, we have been obsessed with reducing consumption of animal fats, replacing them with manufactured margarines, until the trans-fats that they contained were found to be too dangerous to eat. We have eaten sugar with abandon because throughout the second half of the 20th century we were assured that it was harmless. Had we stuck to the earlier views about diet, we could have avoided this epidemic of chronic ill-health.
Maggie Watson
London E9
Thanks for nothing, Nigel
So one of the reasons Nigel Lawson retired to France was the “old-fashioned way of life” there (“Labour is still in thrall to the low tax regime championed by my friend Nigel Lawson”, Comment). I can still remember the old-fashioned way of life in this country: the river into which the water board did not dump tons of sewage, the time when the man from the gas board did visit, the city with the grand post office building. All gone, of course, thanks to Nigel’s programme of privatisation and deregulation.
Ivor Morgan
Lincoln
