Please place the following on your News Services:
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Dear Colleagues,.

GIRES' Recent Work on an Intersex Issue

Please publish this letter via your service if you think that would be
appropriate.  In any case, a copy is being sent to the people whom GIRES
knows have an interest in this matter.

GIRES has thanked the commentators individually for their reponses to the
consultation process it initiated on an intersex issue.

It is now timely to inform them and people generally throughout the trans and
intersexed communities about the main lessons from commencing that
consultation process and whether the charity now proposes to undertake
further work on this issue.

1 - The process was started far too soon.  I should first have established
agreement with the representatives of the intersex organisations that they
did wish:

a - to make use themselves of the special opportunity which I believe exists
this year to be heard and heeded by the British medical profession, and

b - GIRES to play some role in that communication process.

2 - Producing a draft for comment at the outset of the consultation process
and placing it immediately in the public domain was rightly seen as, to say
the least, presumptious.

3 - The previous link between Press for Change and GIRES made the charity
seem to be exclusively interested in trans issues, an impression that was
heightened by my use of PFC News as a medium for communicating with the
intersexed community.  It has not been well enough publicised that GIRES'
objects, set by the PFC activists who founded it, are to advance education
into Gender Identity and Intersex Issues.  Hence the work GIRES was proposing
was mistakenly seen to be in furtherance of a trans agenda, particularly to
change the present birth certificate regime.

4 - The organisations supporting intersex people and their parents are
rightly protective of their members and were suspicious of my reason for
approaching them. My pushing to establish a dialogue with them merely
stiffened their resistance.  Separately I have apologised to AISSG for being
importunate towards them.  I must leave it to them to decide what part of my
recent correspondence with them to make public.

I have already expressed my regrets to ISNA and CISAE for their having been
misled about GIRES' claims and intentions.  I hope that my previous responses
and this latest message will give them all the reassurance they need.

No further work on this project will be undertaken by GIRES unless it is at
the invitation of the intersexed community.  If asked, we will of course be
glad to assist.

With kind regards and best wishes, Bernard Reed, Chairperson, GIRES.
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