Karen Hawa
@kazhawa.bsky.social
89 followers 200 following 710 posts
Doxastic believe it or not.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 1d
The evidence is certainly important but what it all boils down to I think is a small group just couldn’t believe the law meant what it said and so they said it doesn’t. Their inability to comprehend why the law should be as it is written, is ultimately where the judges failed.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 1d
Now we can be “absolutely sure the legislation would achieve its intended effect” (or not). It’s rare for failings to be so obvious. Not only did the Court fail to discern its intention, Parliament knew it might struggle so went out of its way to help them so they couldn’t mess up. But they did

6/6
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 1d
And so we get the final form of Section 9 we have today. It says change of gender, which also entails a change of sex. It also explicitly mentions in an explanatory note the 2 pieces of legislation that the committee was especially concerned about, including the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.

5/6
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 1d
And what did the government say? Did it say, as the Supreme Court expects, “You’ve misunderstood, a gender recognition certificate does not change a person's sex for the Sex Discrimination Act 1975? Nope, and it’s all documented too:

4/6

researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP...
researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 1d
“To make absolutely sure that the legislation would achieve its intended effect, we recommend that it should expressly state that ‘sex’ in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 is to be interpreted as including the acquired gender of a person who has obtained a full gender recognition certificate.”

3/6
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 1d
The Committee accepted a change of gender means a change of sex from ECtHR rulings but the government had been burnt before (in Bellinger v Bellinger) so they wanted the language of Section 5 (what became Section 9) updated. They also wanted impact on the Sex Discrimination Act made explicit:

2/6
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 1d
Let’s talk about the Draft Gender Recognition Bill and the report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. They were concerned that a court might fail to interpret the bill correctly because it talked about a change of gender, not sex (report below).

1/6

publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200203/...
publications.parliament.uk
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 2d
Interestingly Cass Report made increase in referrals a central issue which it concluded meant there was a problem. But maybe the number of referrals tells us almost nothing about the number of trans young people? It’s just a measure of how patients feel about the service. Under Cass that’s very bad.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 2d
It’ll be years before we see it in the UK although there was one recent article which shows how carefully couched even the mildest criticism needs to be, to be published.

What Cass really oversaw was a collapse in patient trust leading to a collapse in referrals

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...
Cass review: how has report affected care for transgender young people?
Review led to profound changes, some of which made young people feel unsupported, yet new clinics are opening
www.theguardian.com
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Reposted by Karen Hawa
mimmymum.bsky.social
Helen 🏳️‍⚧️✊🏻💕 @mimmymum.bsky.social · 3d
“The Cass Review's contradictions are striking. It acknowledged some trans young people benefit from [blockers], but its recommendations have made this currently inaccessible to all. It found no evidence psychological treatments improve gender dysphoria, yet recommended expanding their provision.”
Cass Review does not guide care for trans young people
Good medicine is guided by the values of the patient, not those of a clinician, politician or commentator. The Cass Review, lacking expertise and compromised by implicit stigma and misinformation, doe...
www.mja.com.au
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 7d
I found the following interesting background. It’s a more philosophical / cognitive science foundation. It starts from some general observations about what we consider to be true using sentences that are not so toxic before moving to the tendency to essentialise.

www.princeton.edu/~sjleslie/Th...
www.princeton.edu
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 8d
You might find the following interesting. It’s CJEU rather than ECHR but a) it’s hard to see ECHR coming to a different conclusion and b) note the data protection comments. However I can’t believe how dumb Labour are - how can they not know this was going to happen?

www.thegist.ie/the-gist-tra...
The Gist: Trans rights are Data rights
A UK court has made a decision defining genders which has put it at odds with a less noticed, more important, decision from the CJEU. This is the Gist.
www.thegist.ie
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 8d
“ ... Over time it strengthens, resists challenge, and can drive powerful — even harmful — actions in its service.”

JKR is not alone with Linehan another notable sufferer. Trans people of course often live happy lives even tho JKR & Linehan etc have destroyed their own lives to make it harder.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 8d
Hmm reading this after Genspects latest attack on trans people. Inadvertently they describe JKR:

“An extreme overvalued belief is a rigid, non-delusional conviction, shared and reinforced within a culture or subculture, defended with passion, and experienced by the individual as entirely rational …
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 9d
And yet with all the months Supreme Court had to ponder the issue they failed at 172: “We can identify no good reason why the legislature should have intended that sex-based rights and protections under the EA 2010 should apply”. To address a major permanent social problem sounds like a good reason.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 9d
12 days from the FWS decision Sex Matters:

“Instead it becomes a major, permanent social problem for those young people, since their future lives and freedoms will be seriously curtailed by being legally barred from using the other sex’s spaces while appearing anomalous in those for their own sex.”
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 10d
Interesting that extreme overvalued belief is a perfect fit for gender critical beliefs and in other words for Genspect itself. One likely consequence of course of having an extreme overvalued belief is that Genspect is entirely incapable of recognising that this is what they are suffering from.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 11d
1. The difference between straw man and false equivalence.

2. That you haven’t provided any justification at all for why racial segregation is a false equivalence for trans segregation.

3. That trans segregation therefore is also unjustified.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 11d
False equivalence

“A false equivalence or false equivalency is an informal fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed, faulty, or false reasoning.”

See the diff? Re racial segregation you actually mean false equivalency not straw man (but it’s not that either).
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 11d
Good googling skills. All you’ve got to do now is understand what this means.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 11d
You don’t understand what a straw man is. I can see why you’re losing this argument so badly.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 11d
“They made them carry ID cards to state where they’re from
As if by being born they had done something wrong”

- What if Punk Never Happened by The King Blues, 2008
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 12d
What on Earth is the “prevailing view about issues such as sexuality or transgenderism” that Phillimore does not share? It’s hard to get anything other than “dignity and respect” from the government. Now if that’s the prevailing view that Phillimore does not share then yep that’s definitely bigoted.
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Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 12d
Of course we’re no longer in the EU and GCs will lobbyfor sex to be sex assigned at birth because their papers please for single sex spaces needs it (and we can expect EHRC to push it too waving away human rights angle). That puts us back at needing ECHR again but here too there’s Ireland (and NI).
Karen Hawa @kazhawa.bsky.social · 12d
This is rather lengthy but accessible and relaxed in presentation. The ket bit the author summarises from the CJEU decision is:

“If the purpose is to identify the person, then it should "refer to that person's lived gender identity" not that assigned at birth.”
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