The same rights as others
Maya Forstater notes how confused about human rights some core human rights organizations are:
Stonewall was set up to defend the rights of gay and lesbian (and later bisexual) people. Its charitable objects are to promote human rights as set out in the Human Rights Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the laws which protect everyone’s rights. But in 2015 it adopted the “trans rights” cause and since then has been enthusiastic about ignoring and undermining women’s rights.
Stonewall has called for ‘gender identity’ to replace ‘gender reassignment’ (the idea of transition) as a protected characteristic in equality law and to “remove exemptions, such as access to single-sex spaces”. In other words it has argued for women to be denied female-only spaces to wash, change or use the toilet at work, in school, hospitals or public places (as well as female-only specialist services like women’s refuges, hostels and prisons).
It has surprised quite a few women how quickly and easily, in fact eagerly, much of the left has simply dumped women’s rights overboard, as if we and we alone were sinking the ship.
Stonewall has explicitly refused to acknowledge a conflict between trans rights and women’s rights.
Stonewall argued to do so “would imply that we do not believe that trans people deserve the same rights as others.”
But that’s bullshit. The rights that trans activists demand are not the same rights as others, they’re new and peculiar versions of “rights” that require stomping other people’s rights into the mud. Trans “rights” are such items as the “right” to be validated as who you say you are, which of course can’t be a right because it would license fraud and theft and every kind of absurdity. Another claimed trans “right” is the right to force other people to treat you as what you are not, which again is a “right” that is in tension with the rights of other people to trust their own senses and judgement.
None of these human rights experts say what they mean by “trans rights”. And the weird thing about their responses is that conflicts of rights are commonplace. They are part of the human rights framework, and human rights experts all know this.
That makes sense, because trans activists seem to be experts in nothing but trans activism.
When there is a conflict of rights we don’t normally throw up our hands and say that no one must speak of it. It might have to go to courts to decide, but we can also talk in more general terms about what the rights are and how organisations can balance everyone’s rights. This is the role of human rights organisations and official bodies like the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).
It used to be. Now it’s all decided by trans activists. That is their right.
When Stonewall first included transgender people in its mandate it talked about “trans equality”. Trans people have equal human rights with everyone else. I agree with Stonewall on this. But more recently the call mutated into a demand for “trans rights”. Stonewall, Amnesty and Liberty never quite spell out what “trans rights” are. But their idea seems to include:
The “right” to compel others to pretend to share your belief that you are a member of the opposite sex
The “right” to share intimate spaces with members of the opposite sex without their consent.
Of course these are not “rights”. They are demands.
Peremptory demands, backed up with threats and ostracism.
The “right” to demand sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you.
It’s mystifying how gender identity disorder became the lone delusional disorder for which the accepted therapy is affirmation of the delusion. And it’s not just affirmation in the presence of the disordered—that I could at least understand as the result of an excess of empathy and a deficiency of stoicism. That the delusion must be affirmed at all times, to all people, and in your own mind is beyond perverse.
The issues are starting through the court systems in the US right now. And if Trump gets a second term, I don’t think things look good for the trans cult in the long term. Even if Trump loses, there is only so much people can take about being forced to worship at the altar of transgenderism before there is a backlash.
As someone who doesn’t think or feel in any of the ways required to qualify as either “man” or “woman” according to gender ideology, what I want to know is this:
• Which toilet am I allowed to use if there are only two and both are reserved for people who think or feel in ways that I don’t?
• Which sporting events am I allowed to participate in if they’re all reserved for people who think or feel in ways that I don’t?
• How am I supposed to fill out all those forms that require me to tick off a box for either “F” or “M” if this is for all relevant purposes equivalent to asking an atheist to tick off for either “Mormon” or “Sikh”?
On a more positive note, I guess I can’t go to any jail…
Seriously, though, I think the best way to deal with these people is to take them at their word and point out that by their own criteria they are pretty much the only “people of gender” around while pretty much everyone else would have to be classified as agender. After all, the whole point of redefining “man” and “woman” in terms of thoughts and feeling is to justify putting biological males who get some kick out of imagining themselves as the opposite sex in the same box as biological females. If the biological females are taken out of the box, they back to square one.
This is not spin by the way. There simply isn’t an identifiable way of thinking or feeling that “cis women” and “trans women” have in common while being different from the ways of thinking and feeling common to “cis men” and “trans men”. Also notice the double standard: If biological sex is messy and not everybody falls neatly into either the “biological male” or “biological female” category (as You’d expect when dealing with physical reality rather than pure mathematics and idealized Platonic forms), that pretty much invalidates biological sex as a category. But if the supposed “gender” differences they’re talking about are so vacuous and ill defined that most “genderists don’t even try to come up with a non-circular definition, that makes them more firmly established than the laws of thermodynamics.
The far right STILL wants to equate homosexuality with pedophilia. Nobody else buys that these days. But, back in the day, NAMBLA tried to insinuate itself into the Gay Rights movement. And managed to find a few dupes.
The misogynist edge of the trans world has succeeded where NAMBLA failed.
A “right to be validated as who you say you are” would also run into absurd conflicts. Gender-critical feminists identify as the feminists who get feminism right; Choice feminists identify as the feminists who get feminism right. They disagree with each other on trans issues, but they’re both right. And both wrong.
When a policy entails a logical contradiction, there’s something fundamentally wrong with it.
If I may nominate Bjarte’s comment for a guest post, I do.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The same rights as […]