#CampaignForFemaleRights

THE CAMPAIGN

This is urgent: the Government has just launched a public consultation on changes to the Gender Recognition Act,  which will run until 19th October, and every single political party has so far utterly failed to acknowledge the negative impact this will have on women’s rights. This is why a public awareness campaign is so important and why we need your help.

The government is considering whether to allow anyone to choose the sex written on their birth certificate.

A recent YouGov poll showed that only 18% of the electorate support this idea but this will count for nothing unless everyone knows about the consultation and has their chance to make their views known.  

The intention is to make the legal process easier for transgender people. However, this will be at the cost of women's rights and will effectively signal the end of male-free spaces for women. Service providers are already running ahead of the law and allowing any man who says he's a woman into their women's only spaces. GRA reform could see self-identification of sex cemented into UK law; the final nail in the coffin. 

We have an exciting programme of campaign films, bite-size legal explainers, information packs and workshops planned, with the generous help of a fantastic team of filmmakers, graphic designers, publicists and lawyers. We have already raised £10,000 and work has now started in earnest to produce these top-quality campaign materials.

We now need to raise our second tranche of £10,000 to pay for more films to keep the campaign alive right through to October, campaigning materials for local groups, media training for our spokeswomen, outreach to other groups covered by the Equality Act's 'protected characteristics' and some really great clickable and shareable information for social media.

The proponents of sex self-ID have huge budgets and major institutional supporters on their side; we have a brilliant team of volunteers and a phenomenal reserve of goodwill on ours. We now need your help in hitting our £20,000 total to pay for these materials.  The public must know the whole story. Everyone must know what is at stake. Women in particular deserve to be informed about the implications of sex self-ID.  Our campaign will make that happen.

WHO ARE WE?

Fair Play for Women is an apolitical group of ordinary people from all walks of life who have come together to fight for women’s and girls’ rights. Run entirely by a team of volunteers with skills in many different disciplines, we have worked hard over the past year to bring this issue to public attention. 

We ask for rational, evidence-led debate before any legal changes are made that affect our existing legal sex based rights. 

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? 

The government has just (3rd July 2018) launched a public consultation on the Gender Recognition Act  to decide whether to enshrine sex self-ID in law. If the legal change goes ahead, any man, whether transgender or not, will be able to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) by a simple on-demand process, and subsequently change the marker on his birth certificate to Female. He may swear on oath that he intends to live as his chosen sex: but, with no checks or safeguards and no requirement to make any surgical, physical, behavioural or other change, there will be no objective way of disproving his word.

Sex self-ID will in practice destroy all female-only space and activities, as the law governing single-sex protections will become practically unenforceable on the ground.  Supporters of self-ID tell us our sex-based rights will be unaffected, but this is untrue. When any man can opt into the female sex, while protected by strict privacy rules that hide his transgender status, no one can challenge his right to enter a space lawfully reserved for natal females. When any man has the right to be female, single-sex protections lose all meaning. 

Like all decent people in this country, we want transgender men and women to be able to live in peace and dignity, to flourish and prosper as human beings in their chosen presentation, and to get access to the services they need. But this must not come at the expense of women’s and girls’ rights.

Women’s hard won single-sex spaces are still desperately needed. As long as men are responsible for 98% of sexually motivated crimes, as long as 85,000 of women are raped in England and Wales every year, and 510,000 women are assaulted, as long as more than two women a week are murdered by their male partner, as long as males are bigger, stronger and more prone to violence than females, we will need single-sex showers, toilets, changing-rooms, refuges, prisons, hospital wards, and sports.

Women have been subjected to vicious personal attacks simply for asking rational questions about self-identification of sex. We’ve been vilified, no-platformed and silenced, reported to our employers and political parties, prevented from speaking by masked activists at public events, and physically assaulted for the heresy of defending our rights. The ferocity of these attempts to bully women into acquiescing has been astonishing to witness. But we are not going to shut up.  In a liberal democracy, women are entitled to talk about issues that concern us, demand impartial facts and enforce our rights.  With your help we can make sure that everyone understands exactly what sex self-ID really means for women and girls. 

Thank you for joining the struggle to protect female sex-based rights. Help us get the message out there, for the sake of our daughters, our mothers, our sisters, our partners and ourselves!

#CampaignForFemaleRights

 Fair Play for Women