We told you three times
Now we go from Edinburgh students to Cambridge students:
A Labour councillor of 10 years and former deputy leader at Cambridge City Council has resigned over a motion on transgender rights.
The motion, brought by the Liberal Democrats to a session of the full council on Thursday (October 22), began with the words: “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary individuals are non-binary.”
In other words the brainless reality-denying mantra that people are being forced to agree to or be shunned and possibly fired. This situation is grotesque – that people are being forced, on pain of losing their jobs and facing persecution, to say they agree with a stupid reality-denying lie.
The mantra being forced on people is not “Nobody should be shunned or fired or bullied for failing to obey gender stereotypes.” The mantra being forced on people requires them to agree that men are women and women are men. It’s like something out of a crude satire.
The ruling Labour group supported an amended version of the motion, which started with the three same sentences and received majority support.
Kevin Price , who represented King’s Hedges for the Labour party, said he could not support those words, saying they would “send a chill down the spines” of “many women,” and saying it is “foolish to pretend” there are not widely different views or concerns about women’s rights.
He said he has not voted against a Labour motion in his 10 years on the council, and said he did not intend to break that “principle”, and instead announced his resignation to the meeting, saying there are times when conscience “must be weighed against the pull of party”.
He also said that obviously trans rights are human rights.
But he added: “The inclusion of the first three sentences of this motion will send a chill down the spines of the many women who believe there is a conflict of rights and who want to be able to discuss those in a calm and evidenced-based way, as indeed was shown by world rugby in its recent decision to exclude transgender women in those areas of the sport which it controls on the grounds of safety and fairness for women.”
Dude’s been listening. Good man. I wish more would.
He said it is “foolish to pretend that there are not widely differing views in the current debate or that many people, especially women, are [not] concerned about the impact on women’s sex-based rights from changes both in legislation and within society and who fear, not only that those rights are under threat, but that they are unable to raise legitimate questions and concerns without a hostile response. The treatment of Rosie Duffield and JK Rowling has made clear that those concerns are well founded.”
By all accounts he was an excellent councillor, who got things done.
Lib Dem councillor Markus Gehring said: “I feel very sad that Cllr Price had to decide to resign rather than supporting what is a fundamental right, what is a human right for all people. I’m not fully understanding his motivation because I think inclusiveness is all over this motion.”
It is not a fundamental human right to force people to agree that you are what you are not. It was not the Inquisition’s fundamental human right to force Galileo to recant, and it’s not anyone’s fundamental human right to force people to agree that men are women if they say they are.
Then comes an absolute torrent of patronizing stupid:
Labour councillor Dave Baigent said he was in favour of the motion but expressed sympathy for those who struggle with change.
He said: “I respect people and listen to people who have difficulty with change, so I appreciate my comrade who has just resigned from the Labour Party for doing something because he wasn’t prepared to vote against what the Labour Party was suggesting, nor would I.
“That trans men are men and trans women are women is something that comes automatically to me because I have spent 30 to 40 years of my life fighting for people’s equality.”
It’s not about equality. The mantra is not “trans people have a right to equality with everyone else,” the mantra is transwomenarewomen and transmenaremen. Those are different claims; they are different kinds of claims. The first is political or philosophical, the second is ontological.
He said he has seen a range of changes as different groups battled for equality during his lifetime. He added: “It’s a very difficult area when things change in your life and your whole belief system is changed, so I understand people with difficulties over trans change, because I watched in 1965 when people said that black people were equal and people around me just couldn’t believe it, and I found that very hard at that time and I find it hard now that people have difficulty, but people do have difficulty.”
ARRRGGHH. Not the same. Price is not saying trans people are not equal and he’s not “having difficulty” believing trans people are equal. Pay attention.
It’s a damn tragedy that he had to resign.
The language used by ‘The UCS’ LGBT+ Officer Frankie Kendal’, as quoted in Varsity, is horrifying – and blatantly narcissistic and sociopathic.
And this:
In other words, they aren’t asking for equality, or even safety (because they already have those); they want supremacy. They have won so many concessions, so quickly, that they already feel safe in saying so.
Snap. I saved that part for another post, and railed there about exactly those items. The narcissism is OFF THE CHARTS.
Isn’t it? It’s astonishing! And absolutely terrifying.
(I think you posted a minute after I made the comment above yours – we must have been thinking alike!)
Yep, that absolutely gives the game away with no room for ambiguity.
I first had my eyes opened to this flavour of argument even discussing World Wars with an American, who was voicing the standard complaint that the US isn’t given sufficient credit for stepping in, blah blah. It was a real Eureka! moment to realise that no, he didn’t just mean the usual poppy-wearing, wreath-laying remembrance stuff that we do every year for all Allied soldiers equally; what he expected was SPECIAL RECOGNITION. And here we go again. Equality really isn’t enough; it’s deference or die.
I was just thinking this morning about how tired I’m getting of that patronising ‘clearly you have that opinion because you’re just not as knowledgeable/caring/intelligent/experienced as I am; if you were/when you are you’ll have the correct opinion.’ I occasionally read this in the feminist social media I currently hang out in–here’s the one from this morning:
‘I can understand being indifferent towards it if you haven’t given it much thought before’
I have actually given the topic the writer is writing about much thought, and am still indifferent to it, and reject the implication that anyone who had given it much thought would automatically agree with the writer.
Is this patronizing, or is it unavoidable when dealing with truth claims? When someone has an opinion I’m pretty sure is wrong — the earth is 6,000 years old, the moon landing was faked, homeopathy works, Trump is a great President — my default assumption is that they’re sincere, but wrong because they lack knowledge, are indifferent, have trouble knowing how to reason, or are inexperienced. But that’s all fixable. They can change their minds. The problem isn’t them, meaning their being a generally sh*tty human being. It’s epistemic.
I think “Your opinion is incorrect because you haven’t understood the issue” is insulting only when the issue involves an actual opinion with no right or wrong about it, like “who’s the best band” or “does pineapple ever go well on pizza.” Otherwise, it’s a problem with tone. Someone could agree with you and be condescending.
This is true. However …
TWAW and TMAM are about equality, just a different equality. Price is saying that trans people are not equal, not that they are not equal.
When speaking of rights and fairness, equality is a normative precept. “All men are created equal,” is not a descriptive statement that ignores obvious inequity in form and capacity among people. It is a normative notion, proclaiming that all people are equal in their intrinsic value. No person qua person is born imbued with greater value than another.
When it retreats to the motte, TWAW/TMAM masquerades as a normative precept, but out in the bailey it refers to a descriptive equality. The normative claim is the motte: a transperson is endowed with the same intrinsic value as any other person. The descriptive claim is the bailey: transwomen are literally women; transmen, literally men. The bailey claim clearly ignores obvious inequity in form and capacity among people, but this denial of reality is obfuscated by the motte claim. Because the two claims are conceptually intertwined, people subconsciously retreat to the unassailable motte when confronted with the contradictions in the bailey.
Unfortunately, most people are not equipped with the cognitive and metacognitive tools to be aware of the phenomenon. Most people—even those of considerable intelligence—have a hard enough time merely grasping the distinction between normative and descriptive in the first place. Just consider how commonly one hears a descriptive critique of “all men are created equal”, despite being as clear an example of category mistake as is possible.
I don’t think so; I think you’re over-complicating it. I think it’s cruder than motte and bailey. I think Baigent just grabbed the word “equality” left over from the anti-racism he remembers, without pausing to think about what it meant.
It’s the laziness of the trans movement. They grab buzzwords that other people have done the hard work for. Women fought for equality, so they are fighting for equality. BLM says black lives matter, so they parrot trans lives matter. They reference slavery, the holocaust, anything awful enough to get sympathy when they compare themselves to it, and never worry that these were people who suffered enslavement, beatings, death, and other things, not just being called by the pronoun that fits their body type. No, they must be the most oppressed, the most downtrodden, the most most.
They leach like parasites onto movements where they have done none of the work, movements where people fought and suffered and died…LGB, BLM, Women’s rights…these were not people who dogpiled on Twitter. They went out into the world and made people listen, but to do that, they went to jail, they were beaten, they were in some cases killed (in the case of Jim Crow and black equality, in lots and lots of cases killed).
LGB rolled over and let them add a “t” to the alphabet soup, then a string of other letters, making a mockery of all their hard work by the tail that is wagging them. They expected women to be the same way…just let us add a cis, okay, sweetie? Make me a sandwich, that’s a nice uterus haver. They are shocked and angry that a large percentage of women simply won’t play.
They managed to convince the LGB that they were in the same category. They have not been able to convince women that they are in the same category, and women are obstinately resistant to centering non-women in the women’s movement. We’re funny that way. Uppity, aren’t we? Good. I believe in being uppity.