This soup of legal misinformation
Sonia Sodha on the obstinate refusal to accept that men are not women:
A few weeks on, it’s becoming clear that despite the exceptional clarity of a judgment handed down by the highest court in the land, implementing it is a different matter. The rule of law, it seems, depends on most people choosing to follow it.
Some organisations, like Britain’s biggest union, are brazenly flouting it. Unison is allowing a male member who identifies as female to stand for election for its national council positions reserved for women. Last year its president accused a group of nurses from Darlington of “anti-trans bigotry” for standing up for their right to female-only changing rooms at work.
So what kind of unison is that? “All together now: women don’t get to have any rights!”
It’s not just Unison: the National Education Union has called on employers — presumably including schools — to support the rights of people to “use gendered facilities which match gender identities”, which would be unlawful. A train company, Southeastern, has wrongly told employees the ruling does not stop them using facilities designated for those of the opposite sex. Police forces still have policies allowing male officers who identify as female to carry out strip searches on female detainees. Even leading law firms have sent out analysis that badly misrepresents the law.
All this lying and refusing and bullying for the sake of men who call themselves women. Not men who give their all to ending racism or poverty or disease, but men who want to shove women aside and take their place. Why? Why are so many people so enthralled by this destructive counter-reality ideology?
What’s obvious from this soup of legal misinformation is that women are going to have to continue crowdfunding for expensive legal action to enforce their rights in the face of institutions hostile to the judgment. At least the more legal wins they clock up, the more likely it is that insurers will insist on organisations following the law or invalidating their liability policies.
Please also put the refuseniks on the naughty step for a minimum of ten years.
I still don’t understand that part. I think I realised just HOW bad things were with the Forstater case. Having to assert that “women are female” should be protected as a personal belief, like a Muslim supermarket worker who doesn’t want to handle alcohol, rather than just…reality.
It seems to me that a huge number of businesses and institutions were persuaded to join Stonewall’s ranking schemes, and were gaslit into believing that the law in this area was quite different to what it actually says, massively favouring the capricious whims of predatory men over the rights of women.
Along came some very brave (and extremely pissed-off) women, who said “Oi, you lot – that’s not what the law says at all!” Intransigent employers, egged on by Stonewall, refused to listen. So they gathered support and sued.
After a few minor temporary losses in the lowest courts, where equally gaslit low ranking judges also misinterpreted the law, the women’s cases were universally won on appeal – over, and over again – costing the law breakers enormous amounts of money. Still, employers and organisations paid little to no attention; it would seem that they were still adhering to Stonewall Law.
Eventually, having been forced into forming their own organisations, some particularly brave and tenacious women, supported by countless others who are equally pissed-off, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
SC: The women are correct. Sex in the Equality Act means biological sex, and woman means biological sex. Anyone who has been acting otherwise is, and has been, breaking the law.
Most organisations: Dammit, we’ve been had. Quick, re-write and put right everything which is illegal, and hope we don’t get sued.
Some wibbling organisations: How on Earth can we change our policies? We have to wait for guidance from the EHRC!
EHRC: Here’s the interim guidance. It’s out for consultation. The legal advice is sound, but some illustrative examples might need to be changed.
SWO: In that case, we must wait for the full guidance! Meanwhile, we’ll continue to break the law because we’re scared of the cult activists.
Intransigent Employers: So what if we’ve been breaking the law? Nobody has actually sued us yet. We’re more afraid of the cult than women. We’re going to carry on breaking the law.
Have I got that basically right?
Piglet #1
Again, I think cognitive disonnance is a major part of the answer. As I like to point out, I happen to know for an absolute fact that many of these people used to be saying the kind of things for which they would now go out of their way to destroy other people’s lives, in some cases less than ten years ago. They were not always as extreme as they are now. So how did they end up here? I suspect something like the following is not too far off the mark:
1. You make some concessions (TWAW*, being ”man” or ”woman” is about ”gender” rather than ”sex”, the only way to determine a person’s ”gender” is self-id etc.) that might not seem like such a big deal right there and then through some combination of (perhaps misguided, but still) ”good intentions”, sloppy thinking, group conformity and peer pressure, fear of making yourself unpopular, a sense that it’s the right ”leftist”, ”progressive” thing to do etc.
2. Having made these concessions you have a stake in defending them: ”Only a spineless sucker would have made these concessions because of simple peer pressure and ideological conformity. But I’m not a spineless sucker, and I did make those concessions. Therefore it had to be the only defensible thing to do!”. In other words, defending your decisions becomes a matter of saving face.
3. You make up fake reasons (i.e. rationalizations) why making said concessions was indeed the only defensible thing to do.
4. The same fake reasons you used to justify concessions a,b,c make it very hard to resist concessions d,e,f without looking inconcistent or hypocritical even to yourself.
5. But of course you’re not an inconcistent hypocrite (<- cognitive disonnance at work again), so d,e,f it is!
6. Repeat steps 4-5 indefinitely.
* Many have said that when they first heard the TWAW claim, they took it to be implicitly understood that this was a polite ”white lie” to spare the feelings of a small number of severely dysphoric individuals, and not something anyone was expected to literally believe. By the time they realized ”Oh shit! They really do mean it, and now they are holding me to my word in the most literal sense”, it was already very hard to take it back.
Bjarte, that’s a great summary. Some of us do (with help) manage to escape the spiral. Although I have had (and probably still have) a tendency to make a lot of wrong turns in my journey through life, albeit with good intentions, I’ve learnt that it’s always better to backtrack the moment I realise that I’ve gone astray than to carry on hoping to get back on track but actually getting further into being completely lost. One of my mum’s favourite sayings is “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” and remembering that saying is very helpful when making the decision to turn round.
Tigger
Sounds familiar. I believe it was Helen Joyce (?) who once gave the following great piece of advice: Write down where your “line in the sand” (the one you are not prepared to cross under any circumstances) is and put it somewhere visible, where you can’t avoid seeing it every day. Otherwise, your line in the sand is just going to keep receding in front of you as you go, and when you cross the original line, it is just going to be another small step in an endless series of concessions.
On a semi-related note, one of the standard questions cult “deprogramers” ask the subject of a cult intervention is something like “What did you think you were signing up for when you went to that sermon / self improvement seminar / therapy session / yoga class / social gathering etc. Was this what you had in mind? If you had known then what you know now, would you still have shown up?”
Makes you wonder how many of the self-identified trans-inclusive “feminists” would have jumped on the gender bandwagon if it had been obvious from the outset that this required them to deny that biological females even exist as an idenifiable group, let alone have any issues worth adressing in their own right? How many would be defending the inalienable right of male fetishists to invade women’s sports / showers / changing rooms / domestic abuse and rape shelters / jails etc. if this were the first concession they were asked to make? How many would be determined to defend the most extreme medical interventions imaginable on vulnerable children and teenagers – without requiring any proof of efficacy or even safety – and criminalize any alternative to such extreme body modifications as a hate crime if they hadn’t already made too many concessions and burned all bridges behind them?