The basics
The language of this dispute is so corrupted and twisted and inside-out that reporting on it is inevitably a tangle of weeds and thorns. The Telegraph does not escape this trap.
The Liberal Democrats are at war over trans rights after the leadership defied its members and banned biological men from taking women’s posts in the party.
But what are trans rights? Who says? What happens when they cancel the rights of other sets of people? Specifically, the rights of half the population? How do we know the purported rights are rights at all?
On Tuesday, the party banned trans women from taking women’s positions following the Supreme Court’s ruling on biological sex.
Because trans women are men. Men don’t have any right to take women’s positions.
The party’s LGBT+ group condemned the decision as “trans-exclusionary” and an “attack” on one of the country’s most marginalised groups.
Is it a group at all? Who says? What are the criteria? In what sense is it marginalized? Is it more marginalized than women? Who says? What are the criteria?
In other words this stale sloganeering is based on a slew of unexamined assumptions. All those assumptions are bullshit. Let’s delete and start over.
The issue prompted a row at September’s party conference after the group Liberal Voice for Women tried to call a vote to change to party rules that would bring the Lib Dems in line with the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman.
However, delegates voted not to even debate on the motion, indicating they were happy with the rules as they were.
The original rules allowed those who “self-identify as women” to stand for party posts set aside for women, which gender-critical activists said diluted the chance that biological women could reach the top of the party.
Because of course it does. If you let some men stand for party posts set aside for women then there are fewer party posts set aside for women. That’s how that works. If you replace some peaches with bananas, then there are fewer peaches.
After receiving legal advice, the party published the new rules on Tuesday, stating that quotas would be applied to people according to their sex at birth, not with their preferred gender identity.
…
The new rules sparked anger among members of the group LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, writing on X that they “condemn our party’s decision to base internal gender quotas on sex assigned at birth”. It said: “This trans-exclusionary decision is an attack on one of the most vulnerable groups in our society.”
Pampered. The word you’re looking for is “pampered”. Men who pretend to be women are the most pampered group in our society.
The Lib Dems said its rules would also change to ensure that at least one trans person should sit on all its larger committees.
A spokeswoman for Liberal Voice for Women said: “It is good to see the party has taken on board legal advice and is now changing its quotas following the Supreme Court ruling to ensure quotas for women are reserved for women.
“However, we are concerned that the new quota guarantees those with a trans identity at least one place on every committee over 10 people, despite the fact trans people are only 0.5 per cent of the population, alongside the fact there is no evidence they are under-represented on Lib Dem committees.”
Ahhhh but you see they are The Most Marginalised. It says so right here.
My advice? Join the Greens.
‘Self-identify’ means that anybody can claim to be a woman, and if anybody can then everybody can. I doubt that ‘everybody’ really qualifies as ‘the most marginalised’.
Condemning it on what grounds? If they were gender identity quotas the group may have a point, but they aren’t so they don’t.
How is this decision “trans exclusionary?” TIFs and female NBs aren’t excluded from women’s posts in the party. Are they not members of the trans community?
Ah, but it would invalidate their identities.
Of course they are happy, because they don’t have to face the truth if they don’t debate. What’s frustrating is that people will not accept that the roots of gender are based on suppression of women, due to the biology of childbearing and sexual dimorphism. One does not simply walk into smaller shoes and say they fit perfectly.
That is what politics is about after all: increasing the political weight of some sectional interest or other, out of proportion to its actual size in the community concerned.
Here in Australia, the conservative vote was historically split between capitalists of the major cities and the rural interests of both farming/grazing and their suppliers in the country towns both large and small. The result was the introduction of the preferential voting system, which allows the voter have an unsuccessful vote (on the first count) passed to his/her next-preferred candidate, and so on until one candidate emerges as the winner; with the most preferences (not to be confused with ‘preferred pronouns’) passed ‘down’ to him/her/it from other candidates. It is far better and more democratic than the first-past-the-post system used in most elections elsewhere in the world, both at national and more local level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting