What law is that exactly?
What law=trans women are women? What kind of law would that even be? Laws are not statements of fact, they are laws. They don’t take the form “rabbits are shoes” “beech trees are teapots” “men are women.”
She’s an MSP ffs. You’d think she’d know what laws are.
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9 responses to “Actually the law”
To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, if the law says a dog’s tail is a leg, that doesn’t mean a dog has five legs. A legislature declaring something doesn’t make it so.
If it’s just a law, then it can be revised. And should be, given how foolish such a law would be.
It’s also very weird for anyone claiming to be part of the LGBTQ community to adopt the view that “whatever major institutions say is true.” Like, a decade ago, laws and state constitutions were declaring that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” and a few decades farther back, homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder by some medical authorities.
As if anyone’s to heed anti-blasphemy laws…
Not just an MSP but Minister for Older People and Equalities!
Via Wikipedia:
So not just wrong and ill-informed, but dangerously so because of her position.
I’d interpret “but TWAW is the law” to mean any and all of those laws that require people, organisations and governments to treat self identifying or GRC holding “trans women” AS women, at all times, no exceptions.
Which of course is the line that Stonewall and others push. As well as the advocacy pushed whenever calls for input are made by governments. As well as the culture that’s quietly developing. It’s that last that worries me more than the first two: laws can be revised and advocacy rejected, but culture is much more imprecise, vague and harder to shift.
From that thread:
Emphasis mine. Just bringing attention to this as evidence that these people really do use the phrasal verb “to identify as” synonymously with “to be”.
It can more or less mean that, and used to mean that before it got so hijacked. It used to be used to mean “reportedly” “she says she is” “we’re told” etc – just a signal of what kind of knowledge it is. It could also mean a morally neutral form of choice – “she identifies as southern even though she left the south at age 10” – that kind of thing. It wasn’t a bludgeon, so it wasn’t crazily politicized and it definitely didn’t always imply falsehood or magical substitution.
That’s a really interesting example. I doubt the men in question consider themselves abusive. Was “identify as” used as parallel construction, or does this person actually equate “identify as” and “is”? If the later, what about the men who are abusive but don’t consider themselves to be so?