Letter to my MP
Apr. 22nd, 2025 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnrA letter to Pippa Heylings, Lib Dem MP for South Cambs, about the Supreme Court trans ruling
Attn: Pippa Heylings MP
South Cambridgeshire
Tuesday 22 April 2025
Eleanor Blair
[Address redacted]
CB22 5AE
eleanorb@gmail.com
Dear Pippa Heylings,
I'm afraid I think this message may be a little incoherent at times, but I needed to write now, while it is still fresh.
I am enormously concerned by the recent Supreme Court ruling on the use of the word "woman" in the Equality Act, and rather more so at the disproportionate response to this ruling by various organisations. In particular today both the BBC and the Independent are reporting that the minister for equalities Bridget Phillipson has said that trans people should use the toilets matching their biological sex, rather than their gender identity, and the alarming news last week that the British Transport Police now state that trans women (males) should be search by male police officers in future.
Someone asked me earlier today if I would be happy with males using women's changing rooms, and this was my response:
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Yes. As a cis woman, a "biological woman" if you insist, I am absolutely happy to share changing rooms with trans women or with young children who are not independent enough to change on their own in the men's changing room.
And I also think *all* changing rooms should have at least some locking cubicles for privacy regardless of this opinion because not everyone can face being naked in front of other people even of the same sex. For all sorts of reasons from embarrassment to periods to colostomy bags to religion to previous trauma.
Stop thinking this is a gotcha, it isn't.
I'm *not* happy that British Transport Police have immediately officially changed their policy to state that trans women must be searched by male police officers. Or that the government are now saying the NHS must reconsider same sex spaces too.
It was *always* possible to exclude trans women from women-only spaces *if there was a legitimate and proportional reason to do so*. It seems that this judgment has shifted the bar considerably as to what is being considered proportional and that worries me, not just for "biological" women who will inevitably be caught in the cross fire (don't tell me it won't happen, it already does) but also for trans women and trans men and non-binary people who just want to get on with their lives in peace and not have to campaign for third spaces which don't currently exist in order to do so.
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I don't know what you can do here, but I would like to see you speak out against this over-reaction to the Supreme Court ruling.
Yours sincerely,
Eleanor Blair