In the shoes
It’s odd to see a human rights lawyer admitting that it didn’t occur to him to think about the trans issue from the point of view of a woman.
I am a human rights lawyer and professor at King’s College London. Until 2018, I supported all the demands of the transgender-rights movement. But since then, I have changed my mind.
Why? Because I finally understood that some demands conflict with the rights of women and are therefore unreasonable.
That’s quite the admission – that it took him a long time to realize that some trans demands conflict with women’s rights. It’s not as if we’re a tiny niche demographic, like Shaker biracial left-handed Indigenous lesbians or something. Women are quite noticeable in the population, and yet still men forget to look at things from our point of view.
I assumed that whatever the transgender community demanded must be reasonable.
They knew what they needed. It did not occur to me, as a man, to put myself in the shoes of a woman, encountering a “legal woman” with male genitals in a women-only space.
That’s so odd. It’s good that he admits it, but it remains very odd. Why are we so invisible? How do even human rights lawyers forget to take our views into account?
Is putting oneself in a woman’s shoes the best figure of speech here?
@Colin Day FTW
It’s nice that Wintemute came around
It took an awfully long time for that penny to drop.
Well you see, women wear high-heeled pointy shoes and men can’t get their big manly feet in them, let alone dance while going backwards, so it’s impossible for a man to put himself in women’s shoes.
Seriously though, great he came around, eventually.
Reminds me of those surveys about women in the workplace, where, when women speak 30% of the time, the men in the group think that women took up more than 50% of the speaking time. Women are not only invisible, we are inaudible as well. I mean, it’s not like plenty of women haven’t said, “Under T dogma, you’re letting fully intact males into women’s spaces where we are vulnerable. How do you think we feel? A good number of us have already been violated by males, and even if we haven’t, we are always keenly aware of the danger; we are conditioned to that fear and situational awareness since infancy. How do you think we feel? It’s exactly why intimate spaces are divided by sex in the first place.” It’s not even “in one ear, and out the other.” It’s the proverbial tree-fell-in-the-forest; if the words didn’t fall from a man’s lips, they made no sound. Didn’t even register. “Never occurred to him” that women are actual people. Astonishing, and yet not.
Alternative (or supplementary) explanation to “women are invisible”:
Progressive norms of rights discussions have trained many people that it is not their place to speak or even think about things that are outside their personal intersectional domain. Asking someone to demonstrate understanding of such a topic amounts to asking for a recitation of doctrine and dogma. To actually think rigorously about what “nonbinary” even means would be a sinful act of domination, appropriation, colonization, etc. The immediate thought that terminates comprehension is some variation of, “It’s not my place.” We see it all the time when people are confronted with a request for an answer to, “What is a woman?” We see it here in the phrasing, “They knew what they needed. It did not occur to me, as a man, to put myself in the shoes of a woman.” Note the implicit and absolute endorsement of standpoint epistemology. Trans demands and claims were to be accepted uncritically as certain knowledge, because they knew what they needed. It didn’t occur to him to actually consider the veracity of such claims, because as a man it wasn’t his place.
And yet they can speak and speak and SPEAK about trans people and trans rights and trans rage and trans awesomeness.
Not to mention all the young white wokesters speaking about what it’s like to live in a colonized country – or in this country with skin that is not white.
They put themselves ‘in the shoes’ of others all the time. It’s only women’s shoes they refuse to don.
Sure we’re supposed to be glad that someone has come over to “our” side. Yipee. Good for you. I still have to wonder why you weren’t on women’s side from the start?
Let’s turn this around. You assumed that women’s resistance to the demands of the transgender community must be unreasonable.
Why?
On one side you have women who predicted and documented the potential and actual harms that the demands of the “transgender community” would and did cause women. On the other side, this “community” claimed there was “NO CONFLICT” between their supposed “rights” and those of women. They also insisted on “NO DEBATE!” Why did this obvious discrepancy between these positions not pique your curiousity? Why did you not look at the comparative strengths and trustworthiness of the claims they were making? Who was telling the truth?
Both sides made it easy for you, each in their own way. Uncharacteristically, the transgender side made a specific, factual, categorical claim, saying that there was “no conflict” between the rights they claimed, and those that women were defending. This simple, straightforward claim meant that a single example of conflict refuted it. And women provided not just one example, but scores and hundreds of examples of such conflict, in countless venues and forums. Many of them were shunned, threatened, and fired for doing so. Finding these many examples out would not have been difficult. In fact avoiding them would have been nearly impossible. You have heard of J.K. Rowling, right? How about Maya Forstater? Alison Bailey? The treatment these women received put the lie to the claim of “no conflict.” Again, who was telling the truth? Not the side you chose to believe, through a willing suspension of disbelief.
YOU ARE A LAWYER. A HUMAN RIGHTS lawyer. Your JOB is to help adjudicate between competing, conflicting human rights claims, to ascertain the truth of a situation. How could you not know of legal decisions being made in your field? Forstater? Bailey? Here were clear examples of conflict between trans “rights” and women’s rights. The truth was that the cases against them were in large part deliberate, abusive punishment for defending women’s rights, for saying “No” to the oh-so-reasonable demands of the transgender “community”.
Sure, but did you bother to find out if what they wanted was an actual need? In determining the nature of the “rights” being demanded, that would be important, no? If I were to tell you, as a lawyer, that I, as your client, need a million dollars and a private jet, would take my word for it, because “I know what I need?” Would you see that as “reasonable”? I doubt it. Why then, in your professional capacity, would you not evaluate the claims of this particular interest group, rather than surrender your judgement at their whim and command? Why deny women the benefit of the doubt? Why question their needs, and impute their integrity?
Jesus fuck. Seeing the grotesque injustice and danger to women in this should have required no leap of imagination, no herculean stretch of empathy. Prisons. Hospital wards. Changing rooms. Sports teams. I don’t have to imagine what that would be like to see it’s WRONG, to know that women are entitled to have spaces free from men, even if it’s just a goddamn lesbian dating app. The leap of imagination was in believing TWAW. That’s what you bought into, and not just as an interested bystander or an “ally” being “kind.” You could not qualify your support, or express uncertainty about the implications of your stance by tagging it with IANAL. This was in your bloody wheelhouse, and you should have practiced due diligence before you nailed your colours to the mast and joined in the destruction of women’s rights. Millions of women were saying this was wrong and harmful. They weren’t asking you to put on their shoes; they were asking you to listen. But all you heard were men. You decided that those women were lying, that their resistance to trans demands was unreasonable, and that your sympathy and professional efforts belonged to the men you believed without hesitation, or question.
You’ll have to pardon me if I don’t immediately kill the fatted calf.
‘It did not occur to me, as a man, to put myself in the shoes of a woman’. And yet, as a ‘cis’ person he was perfectly capable of ‘putting himself in the shoes’ of a ‘trans’ person. So I guess he was well aware that the ‘trans’ people he was ‘putting himself in the shoes of’ were male people and therefore ‘as a man’ it was perfectly sensible for him to do so.
I regret to suggest that it might have been easier for Mr. Wintermute to put himself in the shoes of trans-identifying men than of women because they were closer to his size.
It is just astounding, isn’t it. Props to him for admitting it but jeezus fuck – what a thing to admit.
I’d think that he had no idea that there was women’s resistance to “the demands of the trans community”. Whatever resistance there was had been hidden or attributed to right-wing bigots. Most people I encounter on the political left have no exposure to the kinds of news stories and opinions that we discuss here regularly.
Consider “the demands of the Black/Hispanic/Jewish/indigenous community”. Sometimes those demands are also unreasonable, but are initially assumed to be reasonable by well-meaning but naive people. Opposition to those demands is assumed to be the work of conservative zealots. It may take some time and further information to recognize that maybe some of the demands are unfair or excessive.
Kara Dansky has an op-ed at The Hill that I think is relevant here:
With their trans stance, Democrats are pushing women right out of their party
That’s not so much an “and yet” as it is an “and so”. Speaking ad nauseam about trans divinity is something they’re permitted and encouraged to do, like saying a rosary. There’s no understanding in it. It’s recitation of received wisdom. It’s profession of faith.
Sackbut #12 :
The thing is, I used to support “trans ideology” as well. I think a few of us here used to. For every “Gender-critical” person like Ophelia who was against the ideology from its beginning, I’d say there are at least two “Gender-critical” people who used to support it.
And part of the reason I did, was because most of the women I knew were either pro-trans or indifferent to the trans issue. I didn’t know any “gender-critical” people at the time. Certainly, around the time TIME magazine ran its “Transgender Tipping Point” story in May 2014, the feminists I knew said this issue was just like LGB rights and all people sympathetic to feminist should support the trans issue.
Indeed, when Germaine Greer expressed strong gender-critical views on the BBC in 2015, the feminist women I knew at the time expressed anger at Greer, calling her “stuck in her ways”, “hopelessly out of touch” and “ruining her feminist legacy.”
In sum: It took me a long time to realise that the “transgender ideology” was false and harmful. Part of the reason was that it deliberately hid its true aims from the public (remember the “Denton’s Document” ?)