You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 166. Maya Forstater.mp3
Maya Forstater:
You know, it sort of turns these organizations inside out and back to front. When you put a lie into the heart of the organization, it turns an organization that's supposed to be protecting women against male violence into an organization that's coercing and bullying women. So there's a big reset going on right now, and lots of organizations are resisting it because for the past 15 years they've told themselves and told the rest of the world that the law said something else. So it's a huge kind of cross-society big reset on the meaning of sex and the fact that women's rights matter. You must be some kind of therapist.

Stephanie Winn: Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Maya Forstater. She probably needs no introduction for many of our listeners, but in case you're new to the whole gender-critical political debates, here's a little of her claim to fame. She is the co-founder and CEO of Sex Matters, a human rights charity campaigning for clarity on sex in law and policy in the UK. You might have recognized my former guest, Helen Joyce, as another prominent member of Sex Matters. Sex Matters were interveners on the winning side in the recent Four Women Scotland Supreme Court case on the meaning of woman in the Equality Act in the UK. So that's mostly what we're going to talk about today. In case you don't know, Maya came into the gender debate as the claimant in an employment tribunal test case on belief discrimination when she lost her job at the Center for Global Development after tweeting and writing about sex and gender. Her case established that ordinary beliefs about the two sexes are covered by the protected characteristic of belief in the Equality Act 2010. Maya, so glad you could make it. Thanks for joining us. No worries. All right. So just in case anyone's new to this and doesn't know your backstory, what's sort of the elevator pitch version of your claim to fame?

Maya Forstater: I was an ordinary mum, an ordinary person doing my job. My job wasn't about sex and gender, but in 2018 the UK government started consulting on its plan at the time to reform the Gender Recognition Act towards self-ID. I worked at a think tank and I thought, well, I should be able to think about this. And so I tweeted about it and quite quickly I got reported to HR. The organization I worked for, the headquarters, is in Washington DC and it was actually people in the US who complained about me. And the organization at first said, oh, well, it's a controversial topic. What she's saying is nuanced. Just put a disclaimer on your tweets, you know, all views my own, which I did. But then they got in some EDI consultants to investigate, and they wrote a report on me. And over the next six months, they gradually decided to get rid of me. So when my contract came to an end, and I was due to carry on working there because I'd been fundraising with them for another big project. They let me go thinking that I didn't have any employment rights, and in fact I didn't think I had any employment rights because I was not on a full-time employment contract. But there were a bunch of Feminist lawyers who were looking for a case like mine, a belief discrimination case, so we brought the case in 2019. That's the belief that sex is real, immutable and important is a philosophical belief covered against discrimination and initially lost in 2019. which was when J.K. Rowling first came into the debate the day after I lost, she tweeted about me. I didn't know she was going to do that and my life kind of changed at that moment because the case became internationally known. 2021, we won the appeal, so that created the precedent that this belief is protected. Since then, there have been 33 cases, I'm told, that have named Forstater as precedent, and then hundreds of other people who've told me, basically, they said my name at work and it saved their job, it stopped the investigation, stopped them being bullied, enables people to stop being discriminated against in hiring venues, and, you know, all kinds of things. And in the course of that, it took four years altogether, the case. And during the course of that, I set up Sex Matters.

Stephanie Winn: So you're basically a 21st century Rosa Parks.

Maya Forstater: I wouldn't say that, but.

Stephanie Winn: I don't know. Her story comes to mind. I mean, she she she stood up for something basic like how about we all get to sit wherever we want on the bus and and and that emboldened a whole movement. I mean, there's there's been a lot downstream. of what you've done, and I'm heartened to hear that. It does make me realize, though, that something I should probably ask you later, because it's not really the meat of our conversation today, but is like, what is up with people in the UK getting arrested over tweets? That is something I would love your insight into, because I don't understand it. We have freedom of speech protections here in the US. But let's get into, because that's your backstory, and thank you for sharing that. And that sort of positions you as someone who's involved in the fight for women's rights and freedom of belief. in the UK. And so, I've known who you are for a while, but decided to reach out within the last couple months because of this recent judgment. Can you tell us about what exactly the recent judgment with Four Women in Scotland entailed?

Maya Forstater: So, Four Women in Scotland's case has been going on for almost as long as mine. They are a grassroots group of women in Scotland who are concerned about sex and gender and they figured out that a way to test what the meaning of sex is in the Equality Act was to take the Scottish Government to court over a quite small bit of how the law in Scotland interacts with the Equality Act, which was over whether the Scottish government had the right to set a policy for basically for kind of quotas of women on public boards that said the aim is to try and get at least 50% of any board of a public institution to be women. but asterisks what they meant by women was anyone who identified as a woman. So Foreman Scotland took them to court over that and won, I think back in 2022. So the court then in Scotland ruled that a woman definitely wasn't anyone who says they were a woman. So then the Scottish government went back and changed their guidance and said, OK, well, a woman is a woman or somebody with a gender recognition certificate. So these are people who've legally changed their legal sex. They've obtained gender recognition. So that wasn't self-ID, but it's still a group of male people being counted as women. And so Foreman Scotland took them back to court again, started the process again. It came up through the courts in Scotland. We intervened in the last round in Scotland and then in this very last round in the Supreme Court. So it's been quite a long road. And eventually the Supreme Court judges were asked to rule on this question of what does sex mean for the purposes of this public boards thing, but actually for the purposes of the whole of the Equality Act. And the Equality Act basically says don't discriminate against people on the basis of race, disability, age, sex and so on. apart from where you can, because there are lots of places where it's the right thing to do to treat people differently because of disability or age, for example. And there are situations where it's the right thing to do to treat people differently because of sex. Because if you don't treat women differently from men, you end up with only male athletes, for example, and you need an exception to the Equality Act in order to provide single-sex spaces, everything from toilets, changing rooms, to women's refuges and programs for women in STEM or anywhere where women have been underrepresented. And all of those things, we've been told for the past 15 years that the Equality Act says trans women are women. We didn't think the Equality Act said trans women are women, but it wasn't clear. And so Four Women Scotland went to court. We came in as interveners, so like an amicus brief, to help the court to understand the legal basis. Our lawyer got an hour to speak and he sort of unpicked the two laws, the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act, and showed the Supreme Court a way through. The problem that they had was that the Gender Recognition Act says on the face of it that it allows a person to change their sex for all purposes. And the question was, well, what the hell does that mean? And a lot of lawyers looked at that and they said, well, on the face of it, that's what the law says. You know, the law can do magic. And we said, well, it can't. And the Supreme Court agreed with us and with Foreman Scotland and with there was one other group of interveners on our side, which was a group of lesbians. and their argument was no one's sexually attracted to a piece of paper. If you're going to define gay and lesbian, which they do in the Equality Act for the purposes of protecting people against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, then you've got to know what a man is and what a woman is to know what a lesbian is. And they made that case very coherently and the court got it.

Stephanie Winn: So in trying to follow along, I'm hearing that a lot of this started with the specific protection that was designed to put an equal number of women on boards. And so, you know, how a woman is defined in that context can affect whether some sort of decision-making body is composed of an equal mixture of men and women or entirely men with half of them identifying as women. So obviously that matters. Can you give us an example of what types of boards was this affected by?

Maya Forstater: I mean, I think anything, you know, sort of National Health Service, investment, education boards, but it was more the principle of it. And also, it was a sort of clever move by Forbidden Scotland because of the detail of how the UK and Great Britain England, Scotland and Wales interact. It's not a federal country, but there are sort of odd interactions between the different nations. There was a very hard link between the definition of sex in the Equality Act and what the Scottish government was allowed to do. And the Scottish government was only allowed to do this board thing if they used the exact definition of sex in the Equality Act. So it was more The reason that For Women Scotland brought the case was to find out what the definition was, as much as to test this board thing. But the board policy provided an opportunity to do that. But it was interesting, you know, when we sort of started on the case, we thought, well, this is not a It's not an immediately attractive place to test this principle. It's not like a rape crisis center or women's sports, where it's really obvious why you need to be clear who the men are and who the women are. But like you say, on a board, even if it's a board that's 50-50, and it's not necessarily about a women's thing, but you have someone on there saying, as a woman, I think this, you know, my experience as a woman is something that I bring to this board, and this person isn't a woman. then, you know, everyone on that board has to kind of politely nod along because they're all there. And this person isn't a woman. They're defeating the whole object of the thing. And obviously, you know, men can be on boards, too. So trans women can be on boards, too. It's not saying that they can't be on a board. It's just saying they don't count as being women. And it was interesting in the Supreme Court that it was five judges, three men and two women. So it was kind of a panel. And you could see, it took place over two days, and you could see the judges kind of going through, you know, peak trans sort of thought process while they were thinking about it. And at one point, one of the female judges said, yeah, you know, what if there was a, you know, there haven't been that many female Supreme Court judges. There haven't been that many female senior judges at all. And she said, well, what if there was a trans woman on the Supreme Court saying, I'm a woman? And, you know, these judges, they're a bit older than me. They've lived through a lot of sex discrimination on their way up, and they understand what that means. And they understand that a trans woman hasn't had that same experience. They might have had other experiences, but it's not the experience of being a woman in a man's world. And they sort of got that as a panel.

Stephanie Winn: It seems like there were moments for people involved of making that shift in thought process from this sort of utopian view that I think many people, a decreasing number of people, but some people still hold, right, that we can give so-called trans rights, whatever that means, to trans people and it doesn't take away anything from anyone. Sort of that shift from what's the harm to Wait a minute, that's, that is a man claiming to speak for me, for me as a woman, in a situation where actually my perspective as a woman matters and I would have a lot more trust in any other member of my sex to represent our interests.

Maya Forstater: Yeah, absolutely. And when I came into this in 2018, the government was consulting on gender recognition reform, so giving out more of these certificates more easily. And the whole argument of the other side at that point was, well, it's only admin, it doesn't make a difference. You know, it's not going to give us the right to be in women's spaces or to do anything. It's just personal admin. And then it turns out, when we went to the Supreme Court and we proved that actually it is just admin, it doesn't give you a right to all these things, they said, hold on a second, we think it does. So there was a sort of bait and switch going on. And, yeah, this idea of, well, you know, why don't you give them what they want? It's not going to cause harm. And now that we are able to claim back the right to women's spaces, to women's names, to women's voices, it's clear that, you know, rights are pie, as they say. You know, they used to say to us, rights are not pie. You know, you can have it all. But once we want it back, it turns out there is a conflict.

Stephanie Winn: sort of that idea that there are no solutions, only trade-offs and this sort of shift in thinking that tends to happen for most people as they mature of realizing that life is full of trade-offs. So what does, so besides board membership, what does this accomplish? What rights does it give, what rights and protections does it give women and people in general, and what does it not? So, um,

Maya Forstater: As I said, the underlying structure of the Equality Act is don't discriminate and it has a whole kind of rationale to it, which is you're thinking about different groups of people who have different shared experiences and whose vulnerability or disadvantage has something in common. And so the core thing they said was men and women are two different groups. In order to recognize their experience, their potential disadvantages, potential unfairness is in society, you have to recognize these two groups. So that's the bedrock. And then you apply that to, well, we have something called the public sector equality duty, which requires that any public body in setting a policy thinks about how its policy affects different groups and makes sure that it's not unfair. But the problem was, because people had already included trans women into the category of women, every time they thought about a policy where there'd be a trade-off between women and trans women, they'd say, well, it's good for trans women, so it's good for women. So, I mean, that's huge. Resetting that and saying every time you think about a policy where there's a trade-off, you now have to understand that trans women are men. They're in the men's side. Women, including trans men, including non-binary people who identify, I mean women who identify as non-binary, you know, the female people are a group and you have to think about those people in every time you spend public money, set a law, set a policy. And then specifically there are these exceptions about when you're allowed to have single-sex services, when you're allowed to have single-sex sports, When you're allowed to employ somebody into a job as a woman, you know, most jobs are for a man or a woman, but if you're going to employ somebody in a rape crisis centre, for example, you can say, that's a job for a woman. And we've had in Scotland, there was a man who identified as a woman running a rape crisis centre. you know, it sort of turns organisations inside out and back to front when you put a lie into the heart of the organisation. It turns an organisation that's supposed to be protecting women against male violence into an organisation that's coercing and bullying women. So there's a big reset going on right now and lots of organisations are resisting it because for the past 15 years they've told themselves and told the rest of the world that the law said something else. So it's a huge kind of cross-society big reset on the meaning of sex and the fact that women's rights matter.

Stephanie Winn: Sounds like it's going to be messy in some ways that are similar to what I see happening in the US right now, where the Trump administration is aligning policies much more with how us gender-critical biological realists want to think about these particular issues. Never mind whether you're a liberal, conservative, pro or anti-Trump on any other issue. If you look at what the Trump administration is doing with regard to this issue, a lot of it is in alignment with what gender critical people have been advocating for. And yet, just because the government says this particular thing, especially when you live in such a polarized country as ours in the US, It doesn't necessarily mean that all these ideologues working in jobs that receive some public funding or that should theoretically be impacted by these laws doesn't mean that their worldview is going to shift. It doesn't mean that they're just going to cooperate. A lot are kind of looking for ways around it, trying to evade things, or maybe even engaging in what they think of as a noble act of resistance. So it seems like, you know, we have our struggles here in the U.S. where I hear about something that I think, well, wait a minute, that's now illegal in our country. You know, like schools shouldn't be hiding kids' so-called identities from their parents anymore, for instance. Or there's parts of the country where, you know, so-called gender affirming care for minors is now illegal. And you think, OK, that shouldn't be happening. But it is happening because of the culture, the mentality, these things that are slower to change. It sounds like you're saying that similar things are happening in the UK where now you have these legal definitions and protections and some organizations are going to be very quick to get on board because they've been waiting for those protections, but others not so much.

Maya Forstater: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, quite quickly after the judgment, we had quite a few of the big sports organizations, netball, cricket and football, soccer, all went right. Yeah, single sex is single sex and they came out with good policies. Lots of employers and organizations are saying they're going to wait for more guidance. We have a regulator called the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and the regulator is working on new guidance. So lots of them are saying they're going to wait for guidance. But the thing with the law is, when the Supreme Court ruled, what they ruled was this was always the law. It's not a new law, this was the law since 2010 and in fact it was the law since 1975, which was the Sex Discrimination Act, which then got rolled into the Equality Act. So this has always been the law and women who said things, who lost their job, were losing their job just for saying what the law is. So, you know, whether organisations step in line slowly or quickly, I think they're going to have to step in line, but I do think there are going to be more court cases.

Stephanie Winn: So tell us about the meaning of a gender recognition certificate. What did that mean? What does it now mean? What does it accomplish for someone who holds it and what does it not accomplish?

Maya Forstater: The Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004 and it was passed, the UK resisted enabling people to change their birth certificates for a long time and they were eventually forced into it by a court case. So they were taken to the European Court of Human Rights by a trans woman called Christine Goodwin, who was a man, a father, a grandfather, who transitioned at the age of 50, I think. And in the UK, kind of similar to the US, it's not a very coordinated system. So you can change your passport, you can change your driving license, you can change your healthcare records just by changing them. They're not all linked together. Whereas in countries like France and Germany, it's all very linked together. So the only thing that you couldn't change at that point was your birth certificate. And sometimes, you know, when you go to open a bank account or go get insurance or something, especially in 2004, kind of pre-digital, they'd say, you know, bring in your birth certificate and your electricity bill and your passport, you know, into the office so that we can work out. that you are who you say you are. And so Christine Goodwin said that when he had to bring his birth certificate into the bank to get insurance, it revealed that he was male. I mean, I've seen video of Christine Goodwin. There was no doubt that he was male. They might have been being polite, but it wasn't a secret that was revealed by the piece of paper. But when you go to the European Court of Human Rights, which is a sort of court of appeal you've exhausted the national courts, you don't give evidence. It's all lawyers. So I'm not even sure if the judges saw Christine Goodwin. All they saw were the words on paper. And so they saw this was a woman. This was a woman who was being outed by this piece of paper. And this piece of paper was, you know, government issued and was the only thing that would let somebody know that this person wasn't born a woman. and the European Court of Human Rights said that was a breach of Article 8, which is the right to privacy, private life, correspondence at the European Convention on Human Rights, which is a, it's an important right, but it's a limited right. You know, the government breaches your privacy all the time, every time it asks for your information, every time it records your information. and if it's a lawful reason they can do it. But because this was an analogue piece of paper and the only way to show it was to show your sex, even if they don't actually need your sex for you to get the insurance, they said that the UK government was outside of its commitments in terms of human rights so they had to legislate. So then they brought in the Gender Recognition Act. Oh, and one thing I'd say about the Goodwin case was what the European Court of Human Rights said was Christine Goodwin was a post-operative transsexual and had been operated on by the National Health Service. So the argument was basically, well, the government has done this to you. You know, the government has enabled this treatment of your body with the expectation that you're going to be able to live as the opposite sex. Well, now they have to follow through on the deal. So it was, you know, medicine and law. And that's what we've seen all the way through is this kind of passing the buck between medicine and law. And so they said, well, the government has to do something. So then it was Labour government at the time, and they passed a law which was sort of at the forefront of gender law. And they said, well, you don't have to have surgery. They didn't make that a requirement. You just had to have a diagnosis and you had to have lived for two years in that gender, which meant having pay slips, electricity bills, whatever, with your name and identity on it. And so they allowed people to then get a new birth certificate or what looks like a new birth certificate showing that they were born in the opposite sex. And this law said, changes your sex for all purposes. And when they did that, they sort of said, well, we've been legislating about sex and gender for hundreds of years. There are so many laws about sex, it would be too much trouble to go through each of them and say which one does and doesn't get changed by the certificate. So just for the purposes of neatness and coherence, we'll say changes your sex for all purposes. But it turns out that you can't change someone's sex for almost any purpose. And so even when they passed the Gender Recognition Act, they already put some exceptions in. And the exceptions they put in were quite male, I'd say. So they put in an exception for peerages, you know, hereditary peerages, anything to do with inheritance. You know, if something was going to pass down the male line, it's still going to pass down the male line. Even if, you know, even if the sister gets a gender recognition certificate and becomes a man, she doesn't get to be the baron or whatever. Wow. Yeah, so they put that in. They put in an exception for sex crimes because in English law or in UK law, rape is a crime that can only be done by a man by penis. And so they put in an exception for sex crimes and an exception for parenthood. So if you're a father, you're still a father. If you're a mother, you're still a mother. So quite big areas of life they already put in exceptions for. And then when they brought in the Equality Act, there were other exceptions which weren't The Equality Act didn't talk about the gender recognition certificate at all, but it had other exceptions that said you're allowed to discriminate against somebody on the basis of gender reassignment in areas such as sport and single sex services. So you had these two laws that didn't quite match up. And the Supreme Court, when we got there, had to think about, you know, how do these two laws work together? And what they did was they went through the whole of the Equality Act, they went through every place in the Equality Act where sex matters, and they tested out what would it mean if woman meant female people plus males with a certificate and men meant male people plus females with a certificate. How would our equality law work and how would it work if those two groups meant old-fashioned men and women? And every place they tested it, they said, well, the one that works is the old-fashioned definition. So that must be what Parliament intended in 2010 when they passed this law.

Stephanie Winn: I'm trying to follow along I was I was so struck by what you said because it's like there is so much entitlement and shifting of goalposts and other problematic behaviors in the trans rights lobby. and this idea that men should count as women when they want to steal our trophies and beat us in competitions and have access to our naked bodies. But if a woman wants to identify as a man to gain an inheritance, well, that's not allowed, right? So it's this one-way thing. Okay, so… So you kind of took us through the timeline of these shifting definitions, but where things stand now, what does, so if a man has a gender recognition certificate and maybe at the time he was told that this meant this makes you count as a woman for all purposes, right? Like, what does that mean? Does that entitle him? to have women approve of him in their spaces? Does that entitle him to other people perceiving him the way he wants to be perceived or just to other people lying to him? Anyway, so, you know, it's kind of a hilariously vague phrase, but at one point, gender recognition certificate means you are entitled to be seen this way for all purposes. And what does it mean now, now that some limitations have been put on it?

Maya Forstater: Well, we know from the Goodwin case, because the specific things that Goodwin pleaded was that for the time there wasn't same sex marriage. And so Goodwin said he couldn't marry another man. I mean, in fact, he was heterosexual. He didn't want to marry another man, but he didn't have the right to marry another man. And so we know that gender recognition certificates count for marriage. So if, you know, if somebody changes sex and now, I mean, now you have same sex marriage, but some people you know, some people are religious and they don't believe in same-sex marriage, but they do believe that if someone has a certificate, then that's an opposite-sex marriage. I mean, you know, that's mind-boggling to me. But in any case, you know, the terms on which you're married depend on a gender recognition certificate. Pensions, because that's what Goodwin pleaded when he went to court. but now pensions are equalized. There used to be a different retirement age for men and women, but now that's gone. So there really isn't very much that a gender recognition certificate does, and it allows you to change your birth certificate. But the other thing that was in the law was a bit of it called Section 22, which what they were thinking of was that there would be some people who really change sex or as close as possible to change sex. and that they would blend into their new life in their new sex and that they wouldn't want to reveal the fact of their birth sex. And so they put these quite strenuous conditions around sharing that information. So if you find out through an official channel, so employment or you're providing a service to someone or you you know, work for the tax office or whatever, you know, if you have access to someone's files and on that basis you find out that they've got a gender recognition certificate, you're then not allowed to share that fact or the fact of their sex with anyone else and it's a criminal offence if you do. And although no one's been prosecuted for this criminal offense since the beginning, it makes organizations terrified because you can't, you know, it's like kryptonite. You can't put this piece of information into your computer system that your employees might trip over. It might not know anything about Section 22 and then tell somebody and then get prosecuted for. So, which is why, um, Only around 8,000 people have gender recognition certificates. We don't know how many people identify as trans, but it might be like 100,000, so many more than people with certificates. But a lot of organizations, what they did was, because they were so worried about tripping over this kryptonite information, they treated everyone as the sex that they identified as, rather than even going anywhere near who's got a certificate and who doesn't. So we have, you know, the law as it is, which is the Gender Recognition Act exists. It's much less powerful than people think it is, but it does exist. And then we have the law as organizations thought it was, which was self ID. And that we're now in this kind of, you know, it's like Roadrunner running off the cliff. They've all been running really fast in that direction and they've got to pull back and reassess what they've been doing.

Stephanie Winn: It still boggles me that changing birth certificates is legal anywhere because it's the falsification of a historical document. Yeah. As if there is a single human being that has ever been born that, you know, on the day that they came out of their mother's womb, they were like, excuse me, I was given the wrong set of genitals. Like, Right. I mean, you were a baby. This imposition of an ideology that people adopt with their adolescent or adult brains, and then to say that that means I was different when I came out of the womb because I've decided now that it does. And it seems like these sort of loopholes make it so easy for people to What am I looking for? Not exactly commit identity theft, but to conceal their crimes, to, you know, just seems so obviously problematic.

Maya Forstater: Yeah. And the other thing, the thing that sort of people haven't really thought through yet, and I think we will get there, is It's not just the laws that say sex on them, where it's really obvious, you know, if you've got a law that says sex, like we have a law on searching, like when you're searched by the police, you're only allowed to be searched by an officer of the same sex as you. So we've got a case on that at the moment. suing one of the police forces to say sex means sex. But there are lots of other laws and policies and areas of practice that don't say sex on the face of them, but they say risk, or they say due diligence, or they say safeguarding, or they say anti-money laundering or identity. And all of those things get broken when you pretend that someone can change sex because because people can't, you know, and, um, you, you know, you give someone a brand new identity basically. Um, and you tell all of the professionals that are dealing with that person, with that family, um, in every situation that they can't believe their eyes. And if they see a risk, they can't do anything with it because they're afraid of, um, you know, one of being called a bigot and the transphobe. and two, potentially, of legal implications which they don't understand, but which they've told are very scary and powerful. And all of that, like you say, that culture is still there. That's not gone away, but the legal misunderstanding that allowed that culture to build up is gone.

Stephanie Winn: Many of you listening to this show are concerned about an adolescent or young adult you care about who's caught up in the gender insanity and therefore at risk of medical self-destruction. I developed ROGD Repair as a resource for parents just like you. It's a self-paced online course and community that will teach you the psychology concept and communication tools the families I've consulted with have found most helpful in understanding and getting through to their children, even when they're adults. Visit ROGDRepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code SUMTHERAPIST2025 at checkout to take 50% off your first month. That's ROGDRepair.com. Maybe this is a good moment to get to that question I mentioned I had for you earlier, because as an American, I'm so accustomed to freedom of speech, freedom of belief. Doesn't mean I haven't faced cancel culture. You know, I've been hit by the internet mob. I've had people try to come after my therapy license, which I talked to your colleague, Helen Joyce, about in episode 11 of my podcast. There's a, you don't worry about going to jail for saying the wrong thing, right? Unless, I mean, there are very specific things that you could say, and they basically amount to threats of violence. That could get you arrested. But, you know, short of threats, short of credible threats of violence, In America, we do have we're accustomed to that freedom of speech and belief now cultural issues are another matter But I don't understand what is going on in the UK with regard to people getting Arrested for comments on social media. I keep hearing that this is a thing I saw someone the other day say it was like upwards of a thousand people who had been through this and I'm trying to understand what What in UK law even allows for people to get arrested for wrong think? And how does a case like yours, which determined that, you know, officially in the law, holding gender critical beliefs is protected. How does all this work?

Maya Forstater: I mean, there are a bunch of laws about speech which relate to the same thing you're talking about. It's basically about credible threats, threats to groups of people or threats to individuals, harassment, malicious communication, which is Originally, it's like making heavy breathing phone calls to somebody. On the old landline, this used to happen. If you make heavy breathing phone calls or if you send somebody obscene, threatening mail, that's misuse of the telephone system and the mail system and you can be prosecuted for that. But a lot of that's been weaponized as being kind of, you hurt my feelings, therefore you threatened me. And I mean, I was under investigation by the Metropolitan Police for 18 months on about half a tweet. I did a tweet about a doctor who had transitioned, a male doctor who transitioned, and who had been interviewed by a bunch of Newsweek and various magazines and had been given an award by the Doctors Association and so on for being stunning and brave. And he'd said that his patients who were mainly Muslim women allowed him to do intimate examinations on them when they wouldn't have done when he was a woman, and quite clearly he was a man. I'm not even sure if it's true, you know, the whole thing may have been a fantasy, but all of these magazines quoted this thing as being, you know, isn't this great and wonderful, And so I tweeted that he enjoyed examining women without their consent, because that's, you know, informed consent means informed consent. And he reported that to the police and they called me up. They didn't arrest me, but they do this thing of they call you in for a voluntary interview, which if you don't come, then they put out a warrant for your arrest. So How voluntary is it then? Well, it's not very voluntary. I mean, you know, they're probably not going to put the resources on to come and arrest you. But if you try and leave, you know, if you try and leave the country, it might cause, you know, pop off the computer or something. So it's like, you know, and also you just you don't want to be arrested randomly. It's better to get a lawyer and go in and do the interview. So I did that. you know, just a complete waste of police time. And it took 18 months before they said, yeah, no further action. And, you know, there's lots of that. And then there are people who, you know, the people who've gone to prison for, I mean, actual threatening treats. But there's a question about whether, you know, how long would be a reasonable amount of time if at all. But a lot of it is the chilling effect of the police turning up at your door. I mean, like you, I'm so cancelled that you get to a point where it's sort of slightly water off a duck's back. But if you've got a normal job, that, you know, it could destroy you. And people who are able to weaponize that and deploy that are able to silence debate quite effectively. And that question about whether a doctor should be able to intimately examine women who've said they want a female doctor is a serious question that still hasn't been answered.

Stephanie Winn: So if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, it's that the system has been abused and misused to make out things that most free thinking Americans, at least from our sort of cultural perspective, except for the far far left ones, you know, like we would think of as freedom of speech, freedom of belief. That's your opinion. I may or may not agree with it. I might even think that your opinion is terrible, but it's your opinion. Our American value system would kind of tend to analyze things that way, but in the UK, it gets more easily misinterpreted as if your opinion is really threatening someone, and that's sort of the justification.

Maya Forstater: Yeah, although I think, I mean, I think it's partly just the underlying legal system. So on the other hand, you know, we have much stronger employment rights. So, you know, in the US pretty much everyone's on an at will contract and they can be told to clear their desk. And that, you know, if that can happen to you, then that's a big chilling effect. You might have the freedom of speech, you know, you've formally got freedom of speech, but you want your job, you want your health insurance, and so you're gonna say whatever it takes to stay in that situation. Whereas, you know, because we have quite strong employment protections and discrimination protections, and because we've used this, it's religion or belief discrimination, was the protected characteristic that I came under and it protects you against being discriminated against because of your beliefs and because of your lack of beliefs. So it's quite powerful and actually You know, a lot of times when they try and shut people up in authoritarian regimes, it's not necessarily that they arrest you and send you to the gulag, it's they take your job. And so having protection for your job, for being able to say what you think on the internet, turns out to be quite powerful.

Stephanie Winn: I've never been to the UK, but I do get the sense that We Americans are more entrepreneurial. Like, I mean, for me, I think, you know, I was I was a punk teenager and I was like very anti-American when I was maybe 16 years old. But the older I get, the more I kind of realize I'm actually like very American, even in my anti-authoritarian sentiments, that's pretty American too. So I think my response when they came at me was, I guess I better become uncancellable. I don't want to, even though the trans rights activists did not succeed in taking away my license to practice psychotherapy, there was, as you say, that chilling effect. that it had where I now felt I'm on eggshells with regard to anything further that I do as a licensed therapist. So the only way that I felt comfortable kind of looking out for myself was building my career in a direction that if they come at me again and next time they succeed, well, I have other income sources. So, you know, I started doing things as a coach. And I'm still a licensed therapist, but I'm saying, hey, we're doing coaching. And that gives me so much freedom. And I know a lot of people, maybe because of the type of company that I keep, that I think have that mentality to create some independent income sources so that they don't feel as easily threatened by people who would try to take their careers away. But I really do get the sense that In the UK, as much as you have those protections for your employment, it's also harder to just go out and build something on your own. And so people don't have that kind of psychological safety net of, well, if they cancel me, I'll just build my empire on my own over here. Yeah.

Maya Forstater: I mean, I think everywhere it depends what kind of job and profession you've got, both in terms of protection against cancellation, because it's all well and good having employment rights, but if you're in the kind of industry, if you're in the arts or journalism or anything where it's your reputation and it's sort of, you know, freelancers, then you haven't really got protection. But if you, you know, if you work for a big company, or you're a teacher or you're a doctor or something, then, you know, that's a different, that's a different kettle of fish. But no, I think that I think that's right. And I'm an American, but I live there. My parents are American.

Stephanie Winn: Your parents are American. So were you born in America then?

Maya Forstater: No, I was born in the UK.

Stephanie Winn: But you have dual citizenship? Yeah. Oh, okay. Have you spent any time living here?

Maya Forstater: A bit. My family's from Philly and New York, but I came over as an exchange student when I was 16 and lived in Oklahoma.

Stephanie Winn: Oklahoma, of all places.

Maya Forstater: You know, if you come as an exchange student, you get picked by the family and you go where you're picked and it tends to be the Midwest. It was great. I loved it.

Stephanie Winn: You like corn?

Maya Forstater: Yeah, corn and cows, marching bands and cows and rodeos and country music.

Stephanie Winn: It's a novelty to you as a Brit.

Maya Forstater: Yeah, I mean, you know, most people don't see that part of the world. It was great. And, you know, just very different from where I grew up in North London. You know, I went to Baptist Church in Oklahoma and, you know, just a completely different world than the one I knew. And they were good people.

Stephanie Winn: There's something else you said I wanted to circle back to. You talked about medicine and law passing the buck and how the NHS being run by the government, if the NHS is going to do things like fund so-called sex reassignment surgery, even though we know that the rate of success, excuse me, the success rate of sex change operations is 0% because BMS can't change sex, but we have these things called, for example, sex reassignment surgery or whatever. And so, okay, so the logic goes, as you were describing it, the NHS funds SRS or HRT or whatever you wanna, And then they say, well, now that we've done this, we have an additional responsibility to this citizen. Now we have to roll out the red carpet, pave the world for them, because we've transitioned their gender. I put that in air quotes. So now we have to do everything else way beyond our you know, purview. And I mean, I just I guess I want to chime in on that because there's this role that my industry plays as well, the mental health industry. And we're part of this passing the buck. And it's why I've said in a previous interview, like, we need to talk about this because it's our fault. It's our fault as therapists that this madness has proliferated. But I do feel like passing the buck is a very good way of thinking about it, because the message to therapists is simultaneously, you have this responsibility to diagnose and treat gender dysphoria by adhering to this philosophy that If your patient meets these criteria and says these things about themselves, then you rubber stamp the identity, you rubber stamp the social and medical transition, if that's what they want to pursue. And that's your role as a mental health provider, even though what you're actually doing by doing that is you're saying there are no further stones to turn over here, nothing to see here, no other reasons psychologically that this might be the case. And you're also going way beyond your scope as a mental health provider by saying, oh yes, I know that this is what will be best for this person, that they should pursue these life-altering medical procedures. Why as a therapist would I know about what that really entails? Yes, I'm saying that they should go for it, right? So on the one hand, they're saying you're the gatekeeper, but also don't gatekeep because you shouldn't stand in the way. So your role is just to affirm, right? So then therapists are sent this mixed message, put in this double bind, and then they're scared either into avoiding, you know, for the ones who are just, they see what's wrong with it, but they want to keep their income. and their professional standing, they just avoid working with that population. I know someone who not only carefully screens all her patients but won't work with anyone under the age of 25 just to be safe. So, you know, therapists either avoid it or they're true believers or you know, cowering in fear, right? And then we're passing the buck. We're signing off on these letters, sending them to medical professionals. I mean, in many cases, they don't require these letters anymore. But, you know, saying, oh, yes, I agree that this is what's best for this person, which how the hell do you know? Like, do you have a crystal ball? Can you see where they're going to be at in 10 years?

Maya Forstater: And do you have the the, you know, the license to tell society that they have to accept this promise that you've made? I mean, the therapist, the doctor thinks about the person in front of them, but they're also telling them to go out and kind of go on safari in the women's toilets. You know, I mean, then that's how they, I don't know if they still do, but that was what they used to say is, you know, like, go into the shopping center in town. and ask somebody where are the where's the toilets and see if they point you to the men's or the ladies you know and if they point you to the ladies then then you're a woman um and you know none of none of that was done with consent of the rest of us

Stephanie Winn: Yeah, it's one of the reasons that we can't talk about this issue, psychologically speaking, without talking about cluster B personality traits and behaviors, because there's such an entitlement in that, right? That teaching people to feel entitled to being treated a certain way and to interpret others' unwillingness or reluctance to treat them that way as some kind of interpersonal violence. So it's sort of this message from, as you said, therapists who work with the individual, doctors who work with the individual. And I think, as you said in your trigonometry interview, doctors can become really narrowly focused on their area of specialty. They've gotten all excited about what they can do with modern technology to make a man look more like a woman. So they become narrowly focused on this issue, just like therapists become narrowly focused on the individual. And then somehow these professionals rubber stamping this are making decisions on behalf of everyone else and sending the patient. I mean, it's almost it's there's like an omnipotence in the attitude of therapists and doctors who participate in this. Which I think we do. As therapists, we have our own kind of shadow, and there can be some grandiosity in that. A lot of therapists get their personal gratification out of feeling powerful. I mean, we all need to feel powerful. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have a little need for power and influence or a little grandiosity. Not everyone with any of those traits is a full-blown narcissist. It can fulfill a healthy function, but as a therapist, you at least have a responsibility to kind of be self-aware of where some of your motivation is coming from, that it's not all this selfish or, excuse me, selfless you know, angelic saintly place that you're coming from, that sometimes you want to experience something selfish for yourself out of the importance that you feel that you have for a patient. And I think that's such a massive blind spot with the therapists who participate in this stuff. I'm not saying it's not a blind spot for those of us who are opposed to it, like we all have our shadow, but there's this like grandiosity and omnipotence that it's almost as if the therapist is sending the message to the patient, like I will, follow you around and, you know, sprinkle the ground with roses in front of you. I will make the world a better place for you. And like, who are you to do that? Yeah.

Maya Forstater: And and it's interesting, you know, we've talked about this kind of passing the buck or the linkage between medical and legal processes. And when they originally passed the Gender Recognition Act, they had this role of the two doctors giving a medical report on the person and on their psychological state. Part of that was for them to say, you know, this is the right thing for this person to do, but part of it was explicitly to screen out people who were fetishists, autogynophiles doing it for the wrong reason. Um, that, you know, that was explicitly at the time they said, you know, that there are transvestites and there are transsexuals and they are two different populations. And the role of the doctor, um, in the gender recognition act was to, to differentiate between the two. And now they, you know, they'll deny that any of that exists. or that there's anything wrong with it if it does. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, and so that was seen as being, well, that's a safeguard. And the people who kind of pass through that safeguard are in some way sexless, either, you know, physically or mentally or whatever. But, you know, the risk of what you're actually doing is giving license for a group of men who are known to be enacting a paraphilia to go out into women's toilets, women's changing rooms, women's sports, boardrooms, and play that out with their colleagues and with strangers, and that women's rights in all that didn't matter at all. And I don't know if any of the doctors and therapists that were involved at the time, sort of thinking they were signing up to that, feel any regret about what it is, you know, the sort of Pandora's box that they've opened. I think some of them thought they were doing something for this very small group of people that they could identify who really, really did need to change sex. But once you sort of untie law from reality, all kinds of weird things happen.

Stephanie Winn: With the current laws that have been passed in the UK, what recourse do women and girls have if they feel that their rights are being violated? So, you know, with regard to girls with boys on their sports teams, female inmates with men in their prisons. I mean, the bathroom thing is like, it's like such a brief passing and like it's hard to imagine some like brief passing interaction in a bathroom would result in a legal thing but like it is and it isn't i mean you know if you work with somebody or if you know i mean there are you know there are kind of random interactions and then there are

Maya Forstater: repeated interactions. True. And, you know, I think a lot of people have said bathrooms and pronouns are, you know, they're kind of easy things to give away as an accommodation very early on in thinking about this. And I think, you know, most people, me included, when I first started thinking about this, I wasn't really thinking about pronouns and bathrooms. I thought, you know, what's the big deal? But actually, if you can't enforce rules at the level of bathrooms, and if you can't expect people to follow rules at the level of bathrooms, then you kind of give everything away. And the same with pronouns. I mean, if you look at any kind of profession, any organization where you have power, and you have people who are vulnerable. And we're all on both sides of that divide in different places. You know, you have traffic rules, you have all kinds of rules to keep people safe because we're in great big systems. And those rules are not perfect. You know, like a speed limit, it could be a bit higher, it could be a bit lower, but it is what it is. You know, police officers are supposed to wear a particular uniform, and that's to show that they are people who follow rules and that you can trust. And yet, So one of the rules for police officers is they can't wear very strong makeup and they're not supposed to wear colored nail polish. But a trans police officer is allowed to wear quite garish makeup and colored nail polish because otherwise you can't actually tell that they think they're a woman. If you've got a police uniform on and no makeup on, you know, you just look like a man. And so then you've got a police officer who's allowed to break the rules. And then they're signaling to everyone, well, I'm a person who's allowed to break the rules. This is an organization that looks the other way when someone breaks the rules. What other rules can be broken? And So even kind of little things that you think are little things like bathrooms turn out to be important.

Stephanie Winn: Just to clarify my point, because I don't want anyone misunderstanding me, I do think bathrooms are a big deal. I was just like, my mind was going like, you know, and I think you pointed out correctly that if you work with someone, then that same man is coming into your bathroom day after day. Because I was thinking about all the times I've like, seen someone in passing and I'm like, if I wanted to do something about this, what would I even do? Right. So it's not to say it's not a big deal. But I guess my question is more about like what what recourse legally do people have now?

Maya Forstater: So so there are kind of two things. One is discrimination claims. So this I mean, one of the funny things that people have said about this judgment is, oh, well, it only affects the definition of sex in the Equality Act. as if the Equality Act is this really small thing. But the Equality Act covers employment, it covers education, it covers service provision, so like private businesses, public businesses, it covers membership organizations, trade unions, so really any part of the public realm that you come into contact with, you have the right not to be discriminated against. And obviously you can't sue everyone all the time. I mean, sex matters, you know, the number of times we've been refused service for something or other and I've had to pick up the phone and say, have you heard of the Equality Act? You might want to look up my name, you know, where it's been belief discrimination, but What this definition opens up is sex discrimination. So it's already been shown that, for example, not having sufficient women's toilets or not having women's toilets that give women enough privacy is a form of sex discrimination. So if in your work you have a trans woman in the women's toilets, which is what has happened to a nurse called Sandy Peggy up in Scotland, who encountered a male doctor who identified as a woman in the women's changing room, said, I feel uncomfortable. Several times he refused to leave. He ended up reporting her for harassing him, and she ended up in employment tribunal. So you have recourse to law, but obviously not everyone can do that. It's public, it's costly, it takes a whole lot of your life, but you only need a few people to do that for the message to get through. I mean, it's taken a while, but the message should get through to employers and service providers not to do this, not to risk a court case. And then the other one is judicial review, which is if it's a public body, you can take them to court for breaking the law. It doesn't even have to be against an individual person. You can just say, this is a public body, why is it not complying with the law? That's why I say we're going to be back in court, I think, quite a lot before this is done. The good thing about going to court is they can't run away. You know, they can't say, oh, you're so offensive. I'm not talking to you. You know, I mean, it's the one place where we get to have the argument is when we drag these people to court.

Stephanie Winn: Let's take a quick break and when we come back I want to talk about what you are up to next at Sex Matters because there's some sort of future-oriented stuff we talked about before we started recording. Are you a therapist in need of continuing education that's not over-the-top woke? Check out my colleague Lisa Mustard's podcourses. All of her podcourses are approved by the National Board for Certified Counselors. Right now, Lisa is offering my listeners an incredible deal. Get all 27 podcourses for only $44. That could meet almost all of your continuing education needs for the year. Visit lisamustard.com slash podcourses and use code sometherapist to take $5 off of her $49 podcourse bundle. Again, use code sometherapist at lisamustard.com slash podcourses. I'll include that link and coupon in the show notes for your convenience. All right, now back to the show. So we're back. And before we started recording, you had said the next big issue that Sex Matters is working on has to do with digital identity and data. You said it's a big mess. So what did you mean by that?

Maya Forstater: Like I said, in the UK, people have been allowed to change their personal data in official public systems through a series of ad hoc decisions, not even laws or decisions by government, but just decisions by administrators, some of them lost in the midst of time. So, um, uh, it was back in the 1960s when they first started allowing people to change their sex on a passport. And the reason they did it was because people were going off to Casablanca to go and have a sex change and they couldn't, you know, go as a man and come back as a woman on the same passport. So they'd give them two passports to allow them to do that. Um, and you know, this was a tiny number of people that were doing that and the passport office thought, well, where's the harm? But what that means is, once you've allowed people to change the sex on their passport, which they can do just by filling in a form, they need to get a letter from their doctor, but just their family doctor. They can go in, have a seven minute consultation, and basically say to their doctor, I'd like to transition. And the doctor signs a letter saying, I know who this patient is. As far as I know, they're telling the truth. but there's no diagnosis there. Or they write their own letter saying, I'm a cross-dresser, I've been cross-dressing for a long time, and now I've decided to live in my female identity. They can change the sex on their passport. And the passport office hasn't historically even kept a record of who's done this. And so what that means is that no one's passport is reliable. So my passport says F on it, but you can't tell from my passport that I'm not a trans woman. And we don't have a national ID card system. We don't have a national identity number system. We have these different systems. So we have driving licenses, we have passports, we have national health service records, and none of them speak to each other. And that's quite nice for privacy. You don't necessarily want each bit of government speaking to each other about you. But having inaccurate data in all of those places means there's nothing that can be used to prove what sex someone is. On one hand, it's quite a trivial question because when you see someone face to face, generally you know what sex they are. But if you're having an argument with people as we are now about what sex person can use this toilet, come to this rape crisis center, apply for this job. It's quite helpful to be able to point to something and say, well, there you go. The government says I'm female. You know, the government says you're not. Sorry, you can't, you know, I mean, Imani Khalif, the Algerian boxer. I mean, obviously that's not a trans issue, but the IOC at the time was saying, well, it says F on her passport. but it says XY in his chromosomes. So, you know, not having any official documents that anyone can rely on sort of breaks officialdom. And now the government's in the process of developing a system of digital identity. So instead of having to show your passport or show your driving license or, you know, two bills and your birth certificate, you'll be able to use an app on your phone to show, for example, that you're over 18 to buy alcohol in the pub. And it's a privacy-protecting thing, so you unlock it with your fingerprint, it shows your photograph, it shows you're over 18, doesn't show your name, doesn't show your date of birth, you know, all that kind of information which you would reveal if you were using an analogue document, it keeps that private when you don't need to show it and you're just showing you're over 18, which is a good thing. You know, if a young woman in a pub needs to show she's over 18, doesn't necessarily want to give the barman her name, for example, it's a good thing. If we had accurate records of sex, this would solve the privacy problem that Christine Goodwin said was the one that led to the UK government breaching his privacy rights, which was having to reveal his sex when he didn't need to. If you had your sex accurately recorded in digital identity, you could share it when you need to. You're signing up for a sport, you're joining the gym, you're signing up for healthcare or social care or something interpersonal where the other people need to know your sex. But if you're renting a car or even buying a house, for example, and you don't want to reveal your sex or you don't want to be put on the spot and it makes you feel awkward, then you don't have to. All you need to show is that you are the person who owns this identity, this bank account. You're not money laundering. but you don't have to show your sex. So it could be the solution that solves the privacy problem, which is a minimal problem, but it is a problem, and which gets us back to a situation where every public system that records sex records it accurately. And that's really important for things like safeguarding. you know, when you've got a situation with children and adults, you want to know what sex they are. You know, we have Girl Guides, for example, allows, it says it's a single sex organization, but it allows men who identify as women to volunteer as Girl Guide leaders, and they will tell you, no, they're women. and they're not, they're men. But because there's no, you know, it's been left to every single organization to have to say whether they defend truth or not. And it turns out almost no organizations do defend truth, not having a kind of bedrock of computer says no truth, you know, computer gives you the gives you the answer, means you're relying on kind of bravery and an integrity of organizations, and it turns out they don't have very much of it. So we're trying to get the government to see that either they solve this problem with digital identity, or they repeat the problem that already exists with passports, with driving licenses, with NHS numbers. And that means basically they'd be doing self-ID, which they haven't done in law, but they'd be giving people a government-endorsed official ID that they can carry on their phone, that they can hold up and say, look, I'm female, let me in. And then, you know, the receptionist, the security guy, how are they supposed to be able to argue against that against somebody with a government verified female ID? So this is a kind of rubber hits the road thing.

Stephanie Winn: There's been so much document falsification as it is, given that people have been allowed to not only obtain this so-called gender recognition certificate, which symbolizes their change in status, supposedly, but to be able to falsify historical documents, to be able to go back and change a birth certificate from, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago is just insane. So, I mean, and then you say that the offices that handle passports haven't been tracking those changes. So, how would you propose going about cleaning up this mess?

Maya Forstater: Well, so, The one thing you can't change is your actual birth record. So a birth certificate is really a certified copy of the birth record, which is, I mean, I think it's digital now, but it was like they wrote it out in a pen in the registry office when you were born in the UK. And you can't change that. And so what they're giving people when they're giving them a new birth certificate, it's not really a birth certificate, they modelled it on adoption. So when you are adopted, you get a new certificate, but at least in the UK, there are two kinds of certificates, there's a short one and a long one. And the short one, you can't tell it's an adoption certificate, it looks just like a birth certificate. But the long one, which includes your parents and a bit more detail, says it's an adoption certificate on it. So it's sort of saying this is, you know, it's recognizing a legal reality, but it's not changing a historical document. Whereas what they did with gender reassignment was you can't tell the difference between a gender reassignment certificate and an actual birth certificate. But if you go back to the birth record, you can. And so, you know, like you say, changing historical document is a huge, is a huge imposition. And it's an imposition on everybody else, because like, you know, as with my passport, my birth certificate says female, but you can't tell I'm not trans woman from my birth certificate. you can tell I'm not a trans woman from the birth record. And because that's now been digitized, and the digital system is going to be about different bits of government sharing people's data with their consent, you could now say, okay, ping the birth register. I'd like you to verify that I'm female. And you can do that by pinging that original record from your birth, which hasn't been changed. That's the one historic record that hasn't been changed. And obviously there are other ways of verifying someone's sex. I mean, you could ask their doctor to tell, you know, to give you a truthful, your doctor knows what sex you are. If somebody's playing in sport, they can do a cheek swab test and you only have to do it once in your lifetime. And then, you know, if it's put on your record, that's good forever. So, you know, it's not that it's technically difficult to know what sex people are, but what you need is a system that keeps good records and bad records separate from each other. Because if you test someone's sex with a cheek swab, but you also allow someone to change their sex in that same data field, then the cheek swab test has become worthless because you could falsify it. And they know this for other things. Dates of birth, you cannot change your date of birth. You can have a birthday party on a different day, but you can't change your date of birth. And they're quite careful of like, you know, American dates are written differently from European dates and they want to make sure, you know, they don't get your month and your day muddled up and they don't treat you as an anti-money laundering risk or a fraud risk because they got the days muddled up. So, you know, they're very careful of that. with dates of birth, they need to have a system of being just as careful about sex. And there's only two values, so it's not that hard.

Stephanie Winn: With the birth records, is there any risk that woke parents can opt out, you know, if they're like, well, I don't know what my baby identifies as yet? Is there anything where they can opt out of having their baby's sex recorded?

Maya Forstater: Not yet. And I mean, it's interesting that There have been a lot of trans rights cases where they've tried to push different parts of this thing. One of these cases was a trans man who got pregnant, had a child and wanted to be recorded on her child's birth certificate as the as the father and the government said no, the registrar said no, you're the mother, you have to be recorded as the mother and so this person took the government to court for that, said you know I should be able to be recorded as the father and the court said the mother is the person who gives birth and the reason why is because when a baby is born You might not know who the father is, you know who the mother is. The mother is the person who is there, who can take charge of that child, who can make decisions, who can protect that child from the state. If you don't have the connection between the mother and the child, that child is at risk. And then people get married, they get adopted. There are different ways of making a family. But at the point where a child is born, that child has a mother. And if that child's mother has a gender recognition certificate, which this person did, doesn't make a difference. They're still the mother. And the UK government has also defended against a Californian, non-binary Californian called Ryan Castellucci, who came over to the UK with his a Californian gender recognized as being non-binary and said he wanted a non-binary gender recognition certificate. The UK government said no. He's trying to go to the Supreme Court now. I think he's been through three rounds of court saying he wanted a non-binary recognition. and the UK government has so far dug its heels in. And partly what we're saying to them is, and every time the UK government wins on these cases, what they say is, that person has Article 8 rights, privacy rights, private life rights, but that has to be balanced against the ability to administer a state, administrative coherence, which you need in order to keep people safe, in order to have fair laws and they always say our system is we only have two sexes or two genders and therefore you can't be non-binary. And what we say to them is well if you're going to defend administrative coherence you're going to need to have administrative coherence and right now you don't. I mean that's why the problem of the For Women Scotland judgment is causing so much problem because the law is clear but there isn't administrative coherence. All of these organizations have been operating outside of the law and so they're feeling the pain of having to kind of get back in line with the law. But if the government doesn't want to be pushed into adopting non-binary gender recognition. And like you say, parents who don't want their children's sex recorded and mothers who want to be recorded as fathers, they're going to have to defend the principles of administrative coherence about sex and the fact that sex matters.

Stephanie Winn: So if I'm understanding you correctly, the UK is already moving in a direction where people can use an app as a form of digital ID. And in any given instance where they need to share some identifying information about themselves, they can choose to share only the relevant information. So I'm imagining that this app would have sort of different settings or modes or features where, you know, for this instance, I only need to demonstrate that I'm over 18. For this instance, I need to demonstrate what my name is. And the app would So this is already underway and what you're trying to do with sex matters is ensure that the way that people's sex is listed in this app is coherent with their birth record.

Maya Forstater: Right. Except it's not just one app. It's the ability of the private sector. There can be all different kinds of apps, but it will have like a government trust mark on it. and so what we want to say is if it's got the government trust and that's the bit that hasn't yet been enacted so that we've got the private sector apps and we've got a law going through to enable the government trust mark to be put on them um you know which is how the government want the They don't want to enact a national ID card system, but they do want people to be able to prove who they are online and via apps. And so what they're doing is providing the kind of trust layer to any private sector player that signs up and that follows the rules. And what we're saying is, well, you've got to make sure those rules guarantee that sex is accurate. Otherwise, you're creating a huge mess. You're creating security risk, safeguarding risk. And because the rules are hard, as in you have to comply with them in order to have the app to use the information, it's going to make, if they don't solve the problem, it's going to make it worse. Because right now, if you know that passport is not reliable, you can, you know, as a women's refuge, if a trans woman says, I want to come, you know, I want to be referred to this women's refuge, look, I've got a female passport. You can say, well we know but we understand that passports are not reliable, but this identity app is not going to say this sex data came from a passport, it's just going to say this sex data is accurate. And if you are, I can imagine it'll go into kind of computer networks, like, you know, everyone uses MailChimp or everyone uses Facebook, you know, as the sort of identity layer. This will be the government endorsed identity layer. And so people will want to use it because that's how you refer people around your service with a government trusted trust mark. But you won't be able to say, what their actual sex is. If a women's refuge is referring somebody from one location to another, they'll have to ring up and say, oh, this person really is female because there's no way of recording it on the computer in a way that you can prove that it's accurate because the government would have trust marked the inaccurate data.

Stephanie Winn: Sounds like the problem is partly policy and the motivation of the people responsible for making these decisions and partly technological troubleshooting?

Maya Forstater: Yeah. And partly cowardice and partly motivation. You know, people can see that this is a it's not a technically difficult problem to solve, but you have to be, you know, brave enough to say that men are not women. And we know that causes trouble. So I think there's there's a lot of cowardice in government institutions. And then I'm sure there are people who have seen this as an opportunity to promote self-ID and are quite happy for it to get pushed through. And Stonewall, in fact, the organisation that was the big LGB organisation is now the big LGBT organisation. said publicly that we tried to get amendments put into this law to guarantee that sex would be accurate, and Stonewall said they were the ones who lobbied to make sure that that didn't happen. And they did that without putting out any kind of public statements. We were publishing, you know, here's the research, here's the arguments, here's the human rights, let's talk about it. And they just said, well, we had some quiet words in back rooms and we killed that. But I mean, this is a problem that's not going to go away. And we're going to try and make sure that the government solves it one way or another.

Stephanie Winn: Okay. Well, are there any loose threads we left hanging from any of the many things we've talked about today that you wanted to circle back to or tie up?

Maya Forstater: I think one, I mean, when we were talking about therapists and, you know, the medical legal thing, We're still getting to grips with what are the implications of this judgment and of the fact that there are two sexes and when it comes to single sex services, sex means sex. I think that is going to have big implications for therapy and for child gender medicine in particular. because you just can't promise these children and young people what has been promised to them. You can't promise them that they can play sports as the opposite sex, that they can use facilities as the opposite sex. There is a responsibility on society to accommodate everybody and people have all kinds of different needs, but that's quite a limited responsibility. I think it's going to come down to, well, there are unisex facilities in most big buildings now. People can say, mind your own business about what their sex is, both digitally in terms of digital ID, and practically in terms of which facilities they use, but everyone can use their eyes and, you know, come to their own conclusions. And so that promise of being able to disappear into the opposite sex just can't be made anymore. And what that means, I think, for the ethics of this whole project is you know, still to play out, but it's big.

Stephanie Winn: That's a very interesting point that you raised. And, you know, personally, I met a lot of gender critical people online from the UK, including some wonderful therapists who are on Team Sanity as far as this issue is concerned. But when I think about those sort of activist therapists who I've, you know, I've had much more up close and personal interaction with them in the U.S., but I know sort of, you know, the psychological profile of the activist therapist. And I would love to interpret what you're saying optimistically, and the implications of that would be that even diehard true believers who are therapists would have to say, you know, I'm really sorry, but as much as we can, you know, so-called transition your gender, here are the limitations of what that will mean for you. I wish I could think that, but I think what I'm left to believe is more likely is that those diehard true believers are, if anything, more likely to sort of double down, right? That they will keep sort of coddling the victim mentality. in their patients right that that looks at these judgments and these events as more evidence of their existing worldview which is that we are this horribly oppressed minority who's being discriminated against and everyone hates us and there's so much transphobia in the world and it's such a tough scary time to be this way but this is who I am. And it almost, not only does it enable a victim mentality, but there's almost this false gratification of being on some kind of hero's journey with it. Like, wow, I am fighting such a tough battle. I'm such a strong person. And so I can imagine that those same therapists who want to send the message that I'm going to go out and pave the world for you to make it an easier place for you, you know, that they're still going to be sending that same message. It might have a slightly different undercurrent. It might be more paranoid sounding or, you know, more, we have to be careful. But I guess I find myself not feeling particularly optimistic that this sort of thing would affect how my profession conducts itself. I don't know, what do you think about that?

Maya Forstater: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the big vector in between those two things is schools, because, you know, schools are the place where, you know, other people's rights matter. The institution is looking after a whole cohort of children's welfare. and I mean it's interesting that the Form in Scotland case was about gender recognition certificates and no one under the age of 18 has a gender recognition certificate. So formally it doesn't really affect schools in such a big way but because it's made clear the concept and the categories and the you know the promises that can be made to a child as they grow up. I think that, you know, the big place where we have to kind of win this for team reality is in schools. And then I think, you know, it would be much harder for even the most diehard ideological therapists to tell a child or their parents that they can do something which, you know, is going to mean that they can't be in school. They can't promise them things that a school is not allowed to deliver because it has to think about other people's rights. Having said that, when I first got interested in this topic, one of the things that was going on was the Equality and Human Rights Commission was trying to write guidance for schools. This was in 2018. they still haven't produced that guidance. It was taken on by the Department for Education. There's been various drafts and consultations and, you know, fights about it. They still haven't produced guidance that works. And so teachers are on their own. And often, you know, they're driven by the most activist parents or the most activist teachers in their school. It's a mess.

Stephanie Winn: overall, how hopeful are you feeling about the direction that culture is moving in the UK?

Maya Forstater: Former Scotland was a big win. And I think, you know, that's not going to go back. But we need to win this in terms of culture and institutions. And I think there's still quite a long road.

Stephanie Winn: All right, well, that feels like a good place to wrap things up. So thank you so much for joining me today, Maya Forstatter. Where can people find you?

Maya Forstater: www.sex-matters.org and Twitter.

Stephanie Winn: All right, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy, and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrman, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.