Justified
How does this work in actual life?
Requiring women to call men women “is justified to avoid harassment” of men who call themselves women. The harassment of women who are just women, and who just are women, comes in a very distant second to the harassment of men who say they are women.
This is a judge telling women we have to call men women if the men claim they are women. Not should, not could if we want to be especially kind, but have to.
It feels very churchy, very 16th century churchy, very swear the oath or we light the fires.
I’m trying to figure this out. “Requiring the claimant to refer to a trans woman as a woman is justified to avoid harassment of that person” means that not doing so is an insult to the trans woman, it’s automatically “harassment” — or that not doing so leads to other people harassing the trans woman by, possibly, committing violence?
Presumably the first, since the judge appears to goes on to say that not saying a transwoman is a woman “ necessarily harms them.” Why “ necessarily?” What if trans women agree they’re not women? Some do. They’re biological men who prefer to live according to the female gender, and see no shame or irrationality in that.
Or what if it annoys them, or miffs them, but doesn’t actually harm them? Would a trans woman saying “well, I consider myself a woman but really, it’s no skin off my neck if someone says I’m not” become a logical contradiction? Or have they failed to notice their own oppression?
This ruling doesn’t just put a lock on what women are allowed to say, it seems to tie transgenderism firmly to a particular dogma. In which case, transgender mavericks who don’t accept the dogma are being oppressed, too. Which might cause more concern than if it was just women.
I hope Maya Forstater appeals.
If you did a cost-benefit analysis, using actual available data rather than the hyperbolic statistics quoted by TRAs, which would turn out to do more harm: harming transgender women by calling them men? Or harming women by allowing men unlimited access to women-only spaces?
No one cares much about harm to women, though, do they? Only if those women happen to actually be men.
I think people have just completely internalized the idea that the size of a group is inversely proportional to its need for protection (and place in the queue for special treatment). As there are fewer trans people than there are women, trans people are David to women’s Goliath.
Nonsensical, yes, but that does really seem to be the underlying mechanism.
Oh, and it doesn’t even have to be the absolute group size—experiential group size stands in quite well. (See people who cry “Islamophobia” because that one Muslim they know is nice.)
This could get exciting (and potentially deadly) if this rule is mandated in medical settings. And I can’t help but wonder how mandatory it will be to call women who think they’re men men. (Still waiting for a transman to go to court for their right to attend Eton or inherit a peerage.)
Surely this will be appealed. The judge says has basically said the belief that sex is immutable is unscientific (based purely on trans ideology presented in evidence). I’m going to suggest that’s a big call and probably not one a judge should be making.
Actually I’m wrong. The judge insinuated it was probably unscientific but was nevertheless “cogent”.
The judgement also transcribes trans dogma into the Common Law (for now). Concepts like “assigned at birth” and “cis-gender” are used in the judgement as thought they’re settled truth.
Well, the group “women” is also larger than the group “men”. That means men are more entitled to protection than women.
Voila. Women are the oppressors by sheer argument from size of the set.
TRAs don’t seem to realize that this means that the government will very soon be in the business of deciding who is, and who is not, “authentically” trans. That they lack the imagination to foresee this, and also to foresee why this is a very dangerous thing for trans people, is at once unsurprising and quite dispiriting.
@Seth;
I’m not following your reasoning here. It looks more to me like the judge, and therefore the law, has completely handed over all the definitions and framework to the Trans Activists in order to eliminate the “harassment” and “harm” of expressed views which are “ incompatible with human dignity.” From whence then is the gatekeeping going to come?
The scientific evidence for an innate gender identity only provide vague and conflicting hints that transgender people have some brain similarities with the sex they identify with, and that this might have occurred in the womb. There’s no scientific test ( nor likely to be.) It’s still self-reports and warnings that their mental state is easily destroyed. That seems to give every individual a carte blanche to declare themselves authentic, with no gatekeeping. Where is the danger lurking for this?
J K Rowling tweeted:-
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033
Gotta love JKR. She’s now getting an equal amount of TERF and Great! in the replies.
Nullius @ 4 – no, I don’t think that’s it. You don’t see a comparable effect with, say, people from tiny Pacific islands who immigrate to Australia or the US or similar. You also don’t see a comparable effect with trans men.
It seems to me to be some kind of crazed calculation by which they multiply women x trans and thus come up with a larger sum than any other oppressed group can possibly claim, forgetting that they really don’t get to multiply women x trans for trans women, because it’s one or the other but not both.
But that’s the core of it, isn’t it. They don’t get to claim the oppression of women along with the oppression of trans people, but they think they do, however many times we say they don’t. This is one of the major items wrong with the whole “movement” and belief system.
Meanwhile Amnesty International (!) tweets an infantile “Trans rights are human rights” 6 times.
No-one wants to deny transpersons human rights.
What I say 3 times is true.
https://twitter.com/AmnestyUK/status/1207683758725509121
Ophelia @ 13&14: You’re exactly right. It’s that combination of
1. tiny group size (i.e, extreme minority)
2. inherits all oppression/marginalization from LGB…
3. inherits all oppression/marginalization from mental health
4. inherits all oppression/marginalization from woman
1–3 combine to make people feel like they have to accept 4, for some reason. Like, if they don’t accept it, they’re complicit in the others. And once all four are combined, it’s like it becomes some kind of marginalized Voltron.
Marginalization LOTTERY JACKPOT
KB Player – complete with four smack-face emojis.
The injustice of it should be obvious by merely reversing the roles. Would the TRAs support a ruling that made it impermissible to speak of anyone with their preferred rather than biologically appropriate pronouns? Or to state that sex is not binary? Or to refer to cis-men and -women?
Could not a nonbeliever claim that such speech acts contribute to a hostile, humiliating, hurtful environment not congenial to their human dignity?
It should certainly be possible for a woman to claim that; after all, they are degrading women every time they post about how the hardest thing about being a woman is figuring out what to wear, or talk about their woman-brains, woman-feelings.
I don’t know what it’s even supposed to mean to have a brain more similar to the opposite sex, because the evidence of gendered brains is so inadequate anyway. There isn’t any such thing as a man’s brain or a woman’s brain; there is only a human brain.
I mean, seriously, would people accept it so easily if Dolezal had claimed her brain was more characteristic of a black brain than a white brain? Or if someone claimed their brain was more like Jewish brain than a Gentile brain? Women’s brains = human brains.