To define someone else’s identity
Do we believe in magic? Jolyon Maugham QC again:
To construct an argument around that because a man raped a women in a women’s prison it follows that trans women as a class pose a risk to women in prison is plain and simple bigotry of a type applied to eg black men, gay men, rape victims, jews etc etc
No it’s not – TW are male – we want to exclude males from female only spaces like prisons. Unless it’s bigoted to have any female only spaces, any female only anything.
Jolyon QC:
That’s what, sadly, so many of these replies come to. That you have the right to define someone else’s identity and treat them accordingly. I find it really sad that so many whose self-conception is of protecting minorities and disadvantage find themselves arguing as you do.
When and why and how did clever people like QCs become so convinced that “identity” is such a magical category that everyone is required to take everyone’s word for her/his “identity” no matter what the identity, what the circumstances, what the details?
There is no such magic. You’d think lawyers of all people would know that, since they must have to deal with lying and liars and lies all the time. There is no magic that requires us to treat other people’s claimed “identities” as sacrosanct and forbidden to question.
Women are not “defining” a man’s identity by recognizing him as a man. They’re just heeding the evidence of their senses and their years of experience. There is no moral rule that says women have to take a man’s word for it that he’s a woman. People are working hard to invent such a rule and make it binding on everyone, but we still have room to resist.
Perhaps the prisoners should self-define as “innocent,” and then the judges and QCs would let them out of prison?
And all these trans activists are defining women’s identities as “you don’t count.”
Well, if we argued as you do, people could identify themselves as a minority, or disadvantaged, and you’d just have to take their word for it.
(Bold mine.)
So he acknowledges that transwomen are men, then? Or is he no-true-Scotsman-ing here and saying the moment a transwoman does something bad they become retroactively un-trans? It’s not quite clear, but I’m going to go with the first one, and assume that he has slipped up and admitted that transwomen are men.
That’s the power of the label “trans”: a man can put it on anytime at no cost — it’s free for the taking, no strings attached — and it automatically confers him the status of “disadvantaged minority,” and so powerful is the empathy that comes with it, even a violent opportunistic predatory rapist is talked about like he’s a lost child who needs to be coddled.
Even when people acknowledge that the “trans” identity group contains sympathetic men and unsympathetic men (just like the male population as a whole does), and as Jo Maugham is apparently doing here, they dismiss the risk the unsympathetic men cause in a way they never would do if we were talking about any other subgroup of men, or about the entire population of men in general. I don’t think most people would say it’s unfair to exclude males in general from female-only spaces, on the grounds that it’s unfair to the sympathetic males.
Transvestites are a subgroup of men who are also vulnerable in the male prison population, and guess what? They are visually indistinguishable from transwomen — the only difference between a transvestite and a transsexual is their declared inside feelings. Yet we aren’t rushing to their defense, insisting transvestites should be allowed in women-only spaces. (OK, well actually, Stonewall is doing exactly that! But nevertheless…) People don’t think being a transvestite is sympathetic in the way they think being transsexual is (Stonewall excepted), even though by and large, transvestism and transsexualism are just varying degrees of the same psychological phenomenon.
It’s the massive amounts of sympathy that trans identity engenders (ha!) combined with the total removal of qualifying criteria that makes it so particularly hard for people to understand that trans rights are a threat to women.
So that means Mauugham thinks it is wrong for trans people to define our identity as “cis”? Oh, wait, it only works for the trans to get to identify their own identity. If you were born a woman, someone else gets to identify for you.
Perhaps we could define prisons as “penis-havers” and “vagina-havers”? After all, I imagine trans men have a very hard time in men’s prisons too. It’s revolting to reduce people to their genitals but that hasn’t stopped health care providers describing us as “people with a cervix” or “menstruators”.
Of course, you could also address the very real problems of men’s prisons being awful, terrifying places where rape and sexual abuse are common, but nobody seems very interested in that.