Please to take a different approach
Well doesn’t that just sum up the whole problem.
MPs seek assurances from UK equalities watchdog over gender ruling
Exclusive: transgender activists concerned that a literal approach is being taken to supreme court decision
Boom. Literal. A literal approach. A literal approach to the law is a bad thing. What we’re supposed to do is take a metaphorical approach, a fairy tale approach, a daydream approach, a play along with my fantasy approach.
Wrong. Wrong wrong wronigitty wrong. Life is literal. Sex is literal. Bodies are literal. Fantasy and fiction are very good things in their place, but the law is not that place. Laws need to be literal. The supreme court decision was not a bit of poetry or a chapter of a novel; it was literal. There is no non-literal approach that can or should be taken.
A cross-party committee of MPs has written to the UK’s equalities watchdog to seek assurances that its guidance on how organisations interpret the landmark supreme court ruling on gender issues does not ignore the needs of transgender people.
What needs are those? You mean like the need to shove women aside and steal all our rights? That’s not a need, it’s a misogynistic outrage.
The letter from the Commons women and equalities committee to Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), also urged her to extend the two-week timetable for people to submit views on how the EHRC’s code of practice for organisations should work, saying this should be at least six weeks.
It follows concern from transgender activists and a number of MPs that Falkner and her organisation have thus far taken an overly literal approach to last month’s supreme court decision, which ruled that “woman” in the Equality Act refers only to a biological woman.
We have been seeing for the last ten years or more that if you don’t take a “literal” approach to this question of who is which sex then you get a grotesquely fictional approach that literally destroys women’s rights. The “literal” approach is the whole point. Men are literally not women. Next stupid question?
While ministers have welcomed what they called the “clarity” of the ruling and guidance, a number of MPs have raised worries about the implications for transgender people, for example whether people who had lived as women for decades would suddenly have to start using men’s toilets.
People? There’s the Guardian carefully doing the same old obfuscation. The Guardian doesn’t mean people who have lived as women, it means men who have pretended to be women. Women don’t “live as women”; women are women. It’s only men who have to avail themselves of the silly childish “live as” trope. It would be nice to see the Graun just stop the sly dishonest wording and nudging and manipulation.
And men who “lived as women for decades” remain men. It doesn’t matter if they “live as women” for centuries; they’re still men.
Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the women and equalities committee, has said many transgender people were “anxious and unsure about where this ruling leaves them”.
So much for chairing the women and equalities committee, eh? Women should just shut up and sit down and let the men do the womaning, right?
Yes, and? Men using the men’s toilets: what’s wrong with that? What are they afraid of?
One consequence of having made the last 10 years a fully open campaign of transgenderism, promoting the visibility and ubiquity of men LARPing as women, is that everyone now knows what “trans women” look like. They’ve made the weirdness “normal.” So these men should have no trouble in the men’s bathroom, particularly if they take their black pampers friends with them. The black pampers can use their drums, bullhorns, and flags to menace the other men in the bathroom, and protect the poor “trans women” in the men’s bathroom. If the T lobby were as passionate about the safety of trans women as they are about threatening and shutting down women who want to meet or talk, there couldn’t possibly be any danger to trans women in men’s bathrooms.
I find it telling that we don’t know the names and stories of every trans woman harassed and beaten up in a men’s bathroom. Surely these would be the stories told in hushed and somber tones at every trans event, made into memes, reels, videos, training days at work and charities? Where are the hashtags to #neverforget? The vigils outside the bathroom where a trans woman was hurt? And yet I don’t know even one such story.
‘Yes, and? Men using the men’s toilets: what’s wrong with that? What are they afraid of?’
Someone pointed out a while back, apropos the NHS legal cases where male doctors are using women’s changing rooms, that this sentiment might possibly tug some well-meaning heartstrings if we’re talking about public bathrooms used by strangers, but it’s ridiculous at best and defamatory at worst to pretend any harm might come to men in men’s toilets or changing rooms at a workplace. Are this guy’s actual male colleagues threatening him with physical violence? If so, that’s an immediate matter for HR.
I don’t think we know the names and stories of any TIM harassed and beaten up in a men’s bathroom.
Unfortunately, the dishonest word games have been written into the style guides and baked into the journalist subculture.