This piece was inspired by human-rights barrister, Adam Wagner’s tweet about the Maya Forstater case, expressing his belief that the gender-recognition act did not create a “legal fiction” but, apparently, caused the holder of a gender recognition certificate to change sex.

If it was a legal fiction it would in effect be saying that a person hasn’t really changed sex but the law will behave as if they have. I appreciate that may be some people’s views but I can’t see any support for it in the case law. See e.g. Goodwin pic.twitter.com/LE6CjnWBdm

— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) December 19, 2019

 

For some reason this put me in mind of the section in Catch-22 where it becomes easier for people to believe that Doc Daneeka is dead, even though he is clearly alive and interacting with them, than believe that the bureaucracy may be wrong and a mistake has been made.

I started writing a response to Adam in the style of Joseph Heller, but it kind of drifted into being something else, partly about the absurdity of Wagner’s statement and part my own questions about the GRA.

The characters are not based on Wagner or Forstater, nor is the dialogue based on her case.

“It’s nothing, it’s just gender recognition reform,” snarled the lawyer, “Don’t think it means anything, because it doesn’t, it just means we’re changing the legal process allowing people indicate they’ve changed sex, that’s all.”

“If it means that they’ve changed sex then why is it called gender recognition,” she asked.

The lawyer turned to her, “Sex and gender are the same thing,” he informed her, haughtily. “How can you have a sex without a gender? Or a gender without a sex? All gender recognition reform does is reform the recognition that sex and gender are the same thing!”

“How can they be the same thing,” she argued. “Proponents of this theory tell me that there are an infinite number of genders, but the act recognises only two, which match exactly the two sexes. If gender is the same as sex then the act allows people to change sex and fails to recognise all but two of the endless genders. That doesn’t sound like nothing to me!”

“Of course it doesn’t…to you,” – he paused, to preen to the gallery, who hung on his every word – “Because your sex and your gender are already the same. What about those poor souls whose gender isn’t the same as their sex? Don’t they deserve to have their sex changed to match their gender?”

“Couldn’t the gender recognition act change their gender to match their sex?”

He snorted, as if she’d suggested building a bridge to the moon. “Change their gender? How would we do that? A person’s gender is an innate quality. It’s a fundamental part of their identity. It’s not something that a legal document could ever change. You might as well suggest that we could bring in a law mandating people be happy.”

“If the law can’t change a person’s gender then how can it change their sex?”

He rolled his eyes in faked exasperation. “What is sex,” he asked, and then cut her off as he saw her mouth start to open, “Why, I could ask a hundred people to define ‘sex’ and get two hundred different answers.” He adopted mocking tone, “It’s about genitals. It’s about chromosomes. Ooo, let’s all be defined by biology.”

Spotting her opening, she interrupted. “If sex doesn’t have a definition then how can the gender recognition act change it? What is it changing?”

He grabbed his copy of the act from his desk and rounded on her, holding the document aloft in his right hand, as an exorcising priest might hold a bible.

“The law,” he paused and then repeated himself, “The law says that a person with a gender recognition certificate becomes the given sex for all purposes. All purposes,” he placed heavy emphasis on the words.

She didn’t reply. This seemed like a non sequitur.

“What purpose,” he asked, “Could be more fundamental than identifying their sex? At its very heart a gender recognition certificate allows us to recognise sex. As I said, they are the same thing. You cannot define gender without sex, nor sex without gender.”

“But that’s absurd. What about me? I don’t have a gender recognition certificate, how would I prove my sex?”

The lawyer turned back to the gallery and spoke to her half over his shoulder, so that the observers could see his smile. “Well,” he said, “You seem like a nice person, and probably not a danger to others. If you say you’re female then I’m sure we’ll be prepared to take your word for it.”

He whipped back around, to face her and, in harsher tone, added, “A courtesy you yourself have refused to extend to others!”

Someone in the gallery started applauding but stopped when nobody else seemed keen to turn the show-trial into a play. The lawyer flashed the smug, self-satisfied smile of the deliverer of a coup de graceless.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, her temper rising, “I’m not refusing anybody anything. People’s lives are their own. They can live as they want, dress as they want, find love with who they want. I have never called for anybody to lose a single freedom, I just do not believe that it is possible to change sex.”

“And that’s your philosophy, is it?”

“My philosophy is that objective facts are true, yes.”

The lawyer shook his head, sadly. “So here, in this courtroom, here, in this temple to law, you ask us to believe that the law is guilty of creating some sort of grubby conspiracy, a falsification of the facts, a deception, a…,” he paused, to rearrange his features into those of weary sympathy, “A lie. A fiction. Is that your claim?”

“I believe that the gender recognition act creates a legal fiction, yes.”

“You ‘believe’…that is what we’re testing here, is it not? Whether your beliefs are serious and worthy of protection, but what you seem to believe is that the law is the party on trial here, that the law is a liar and you are the sole arbiter of truth. How can you ask the law to find against itself and in favour of you?”

That’s when she knew it was over. The trial continued and, of course, the lawyer had a lot more to say, but it was over anyway. She was, she realised, amongst people who would not simply argue that black was white, but would fight for to their last breath for the law that said it was so. They would stare at the darkness and proclaim that it was dazzling. They would consider themselves heroes for championing women’s rights, and no less heroic when they advocated making everyone a woman. They were lost in the clouds, flying only on statutory instruments.

She would lose the case.

She would continue to be right.

Obviously we’re all upset by Labour’s crushing defeat last Thursday. We were all blindsided and never considered the possibility that a party that had lost council elections, European elections and one other general election could lose this general election. There was simply no warning, if you don’t count them other elections, and all of the polling that said he was least popular opposition leader ever.

Now the Labour party must struggle to find a way to continue Corbynism without Corbyn (assuming he ever gets around to leaving). Who else can continue his strategy of making sympathetic noises about the poor, the hungry and the homeless, while actually championing middle-class give-aways, like cheaper train tickets for commuters and free broadband for the nation?

Perhaps best to view this election as a sacrifice. A strategic chess-move, to make your opponent believe they have you on the ropes, lull them into over-confidence and pressing their advantage too hard.

The only answer is that, like good little pawns, the poor must die.

What Corbynism needs now is total Tory ruthlessness. Benefits slashed further, a big dose of Brexit recession, mass unemployment, a repossession bonanza, perhaps a new 50% tax rate for charities. Maybe those things will be enough to give the country the shake it needs to realise that the socialism of the Oxbridge upper-middle classes is the only viable alternative.

Not at the next election, obviously, that’s too soon to rebuild from the scorched Earth of Thursday’s defeat, but definitely the election after that. Or the one after that, latest. Anything sooner than that would be too soon to deviate from the master-plan to something that the public actually want to vote for. You have to give these things time.

And time is firmly on the side of Corbynism. If it actually mattered that life was getting worse for people ranked lowest in the social order then Jeremy Corbyn would have gone when his MPs said they had no confidence in them. If it was genuinely important to have a return to a government that helped people then he would have gone after losing to May’s disastrous 2017 campaign. If the real goal was to stop life being miserable for people then he’d have exited the stage after Labour crashed at the Euro elections, or when the polls resolutely failed to turn in his favour.

But he didn’t, because a true grand-master knows that those pawns must be lost in order to finally win the game. Why cry over the loss of a foot-soldier when delicious check-mate is just 20 moves away?

Let them die, then. Let the first fall on this cold and wet night, in a soaking sleeping-bag on a metropolitan street somewhere. Let them die joyful in the knowledge that they are but the foundation layer in a mountain, atop which a red-flag will one day proudly wave.

Those who form that dreadful mountain may rest peacefully knowing that their suffering was a consequence of Conservatism, but a necessity of Corbynism. That they died to preserve political purity against the harsh beating of electoral compromise.

Perhaps they’ll get their names engraved on a statue to Jeremy fucking Corbyn, the man who saw it all as a game on a black and white board.

“Not all men” has become such a ubiquitous social media response over the last few years that it’s now largely become ironic. Yet, still, wherever a woman takes to social media to say something negative about men (or even just a man), you stand a good chance of seeing a straight-up #NotAllMen appearing in her mentions, like a drunk with a pizza stumbling into an episode of Autumn Watch.

To be honest, as a man I see the appeal of NAMing. I belong to the sex that is responsible for most of the violence against women, almost all of the sexual abuse in the world, and at least 104% of the general, everyday creepiness. Who the hell wouldn’t want to set themselves apart from that?

Unfortunately, because of a few hundred billion isolated and unrepresentative incidents over the past ten thousand years, women have formed the opinion that, collectively, men aren’t to be trusted. Individual men can, of course, form relationships with individual women and, one-by-one, earn their trust, but none of us gets to flash a smile, say, “Hey, not me. I’m a nice guy,” and claim their free pass.

For some this bar to automatic acceptance has gnawed at their soul. They cling to the belief that all men should be seen as benign, until their actions prove otherwise, like they cling to their Lolicon pillows.

Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with believing that our first instincts should be to trust each other. It’s a nice thing to believe, a fragile glass ornament of human connection in a cynical world.

Thing about glass baubles is that you really don’t want to be holding one when it gets crushed.

If you’ve already done as much picking shards out of your hand with a pair of tweezers as you’re going to then you might start to get a little concerned that, over the past couple of years, social media has seen a real fashion for bearded men, who’ve never previously expressed any interest in Feminism suddenly take a pronounced interest in feminist discourse. Suddenly they’ve gone from claiming to be feminists, in the transparent hope that it would make them seem desirable, or at least less threatening, to being arbiters of what is and is not feminism and which women are, or are not, feminists.

Transgender politics has been the crucible of their conversion, even though none of them seem to be trans themselves. Instead they’ve declared themselves allies, and this has given them a slogan, “Trans-women are women”, and a goal, creating a world where the only requirement to be a woman is to say that you are one.

This goal is usually expressed through the progressive- and technical-sounding call to reform the Gender Recognition Act, the process by which one can become, in the eyes of the law, a different gender to that which you were at birth. This is a goal which would open new doorways to men, all of them marked “Women only”.

So successful has the call to reform the GRA been, having been picked up as a stated policy objective of several major political parties, that it’s been joined by campaigns to call out women for “gate-keeping” womanhood; demanding that the smooth road of transition from male to female is policed by the speed-bumps of surgery, hormone treatment or a requirement to look feminine.

These demands, like the erstwhile demands that unknown men be presumed benign, have come cloaked in the fabrication that they are a basic requirement of being kind and inclusive and, like their predecessors, they have been shown, time and again, to be only a single rejection away from becoming abuse and threat, plus-size ça change.

But this time they’re making headway. The people who said “Not all men” have discovered that the magic words aren’t, “I’m a nice guy”, but “I’m not a guy”.

Women are having their protections stripped away, and nobody seems ready to fight their corner. Certainly not all men.

Here’s a question for anybody who’s ever watched any of the incarnations of Batman – how much did the Bat-cave cost?

Even if the cave already existed – which it may have done, the geology of Gotham isn’t my strong point – then you still need to have power hooked up, computers wired in, secret tunnels tarmacked, slidey poles installed, etc.

Then you need it done by workers who are willing to travel there every day in secrecy, and never talk about what they’ve seen and done. The secret building of the underground drug lab in Better Call Saul is nice comparison. A crew who don’t know where they are, held incommunicado for months, highly paid but never knowing who they’re working for, or what the ultimate aim of their project is.

All of that costs a lot.

How about the Bat-mobile? Imagine the cost of dozens of people designing a car, with military-grade technology, without any of them having an overall view of the complete project. That is some seriously expensive project management there, on top of designing a car from the ground up…and let’s not even start on the Bat-copter.

All of this is fine, because Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, which is comic-speak for him having a limitless amount of money, so let’s change the question slightly. Who is Batman’s greatest enemy?

The Joker? The Riddler? Penguin? Two-face? There are plenty in need of a swift KA-POW!

Except that, at a fundamental level, they’re not Batman’s enemies, they’re his enablers. Their existence justifies his methods, and excuses any amount of collateral damage. So long as they represent evil he is by default good, just for opposing them. The two sides of the battle feed off each other, constantly perpetuating a reality that spirals around the psychological problems and dubious personal motivations of pantomime villains and heroes.

The real enemies of Batman – well, I don’t think they’re even allowed to exist in the comic-book world. They are the people who see the infinite amount of time, energy and resources that Bruce Wayne is prepared to throw at ‘fighting crime’, grab him by the shoulders, shake him and yell, “For God’s sake, man, do something useful instead!”

In fairness, the comic where Bruce Wayne doesn’t have a car with a jet-engine and, instead, spent the money on community youth projects is probably dull as fuck, and when The Joker is poisoning the water-supply, or Bane’s threatening to detonate a nuke in the middle of Gotham, it’s probably pretty hard to see the big picture and not go along with Wayne exorcising his upper-middle-class demons with a spot of punchology.

“Sure, I’m not wild about vigilantism, and that Bat guy has obviously got some serious problems, but if you don’t want Scarecrow’s psychedelic gas released into the atmosphere then he’s the only viable alternative.”

Which, via the DC Universe, brings us to our own reality, and the election.

This is the election that Johnson and Corbyn dreamed of; each of them faces a cheaply printed caricature of their opponent; Immoral Oxbridge-boy vs The Beardy-Weirdy Leftie, each of them prepared to throw billions at vanity projects, both of them telling the country that they are the only alternative to the other. Both of them believing that they are Batman, when they’re actually both Jokers.

If the election ends with neither of them winning then we have a window for one side or the other to back us out, into a world that isn’t based on moral black & white and three-colour printings of good and evil.

The other side will resist, because you can’t maintain a comic-book fantasy when only one person is caped-up, with Lycra and a mask – look at how hard the Labour out-riders went after Rory Stewart during the Tory leadership election to see this in action – but if the outcome of this election is inconclusive then we’ll be asked to pick again before too long.

If that comes to pass then remember that the choice shouldn’t be about who is viewed as hero and villain in a world where everybody else exists, without agency, only to be a victim of crime or an innocent saved from it, it should be about a choice between serious candidates, with the intelligence to understand that the problems of the nation aren’t solved with a hi-tech cave and a convenient can of Shark-repellent bat-spray.

Don’t reward parties that won’t give you that choice.

In the past couple of weeks the ever-growing sphere of trans-rights activism has intersected with the public consciousness in three particular battles; one new, one old and one on-going.

The old battle has been the final conclusion of the British Columbia tribunal hearings, brought by Jessica Yaniv against beauticians unwilling to provide waxing of her genitals. The case hasn’t exactly been a towering success for Yaniv, with paragraph 109 of the judgement openly saying that the motivation for bringing the cases was personal financial gain and racism.

The battle that’s been rumbling on for a while surrounds abrasive and abusive cycling champion, Rachel McKinnon. Several sources were ratio’d to hell when they reported her winning a world record spring time in women’s cycling.

The new entry came from across the Atlantic, from the New York Democrats. A rule that required districts, electing two members of the state committee each, to elect one man and one woman, was changed to a requirement for two people of different genders. This rule was proposed by 20-year-old Emilia Decaudin, who came out as non-binary 3 months ago and was, as many people noticed, very happy to be there.

In each case public opinion wasn’t so much against trans ideology as genuinely flabbergasted that any of this was being taken seriously. And yet, still, trans-rights activists leapt to the defence in all cases. Even racist scammer, Jessica Yaniv, was defended by prominent trans-rights activist, Morgane Oger, who blamed lawyers in the case for digging up dirt on Yaniv.

Why defend these cases? Nobody hearing about these issues for the first time this week is likely to think that Yaniv is a nice person or that McKinnon, who is well off the pace for a man of her age, setting world best times in women’s cycling is fair, or that a political party electing two white men, one of whom dresses unconventionally for their sex, is increasing inclusivity. Why not accept some battles as lost, move on, and try to win the war over public opinion?

The answer is “Trans women are women” – the “Four legs good, two legs bad” of trans-activism.

Trans women are women – TWAW – isn’t just the slogan of the trans-right movement, it’s its most fundamental and axiomatic core. Should trans-women be allowed into women-only spaces? Yes, because trans women are women. Should trans-women be allowed on women-only shortlists? Yes, because trans women are women. Should trans-women be allowed to define feminism? Yes, because, etc.

As bedrock goes, it is feeble. The assertion doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. The only hope that it has of supporting not only a movement but also huge and sweeping social changes is for it to be unquestioned. By design or by accident it has almost succeeded. You can easily get yourself called any number of hurtful names by saying that trans-women are not women. Any attempt to pick at the logic of the statement which, coupled with the push towards uncritical and uncontestable self-identification, does literally say that men who have uttered the magic words “I am a woman” are women, will have you added to block lists and, if you’re an actual women, bullied and vilified.

TWAW must be sacrosanct, or else the house on which it is built falls, and it cannot be so if it has exceptions. If trans women are women, except in sports, then why not also except in bathrooms? If trans women are women, except when they’re forcing women out of politics, then why not also except on all-women short-lists? Trans women are women is a fabric woven of desire and fantasy, any exception is a frayed edge, which can be pulled to unravel everything.

So, instead of any sort of constructive efforts to deescalate the increasing tensions between the gender-critical and the trans-rights activists, we get the latter fighting ridiculous battles, to support the most extreme edges of their movement. Then, to justify this, the same extremism has to be projected onto the gender-critical movement. Women who have been fighting to overturn gendered expectations and make sure human rights apply to all for decades are accused of wanting to erase trans people and of being either fascists or in league with them.

So divergent from reality is this projections that the only way it can be maintained is to stop women speaking about gender-critical issues; to protest when they meet in public, to hide them away behind bans and block-lists on social media, to lobby when they hold roles with any public voice. Women are silenced to support a lie, built upon a fantasy, shored up by a nonsense slogan.

As Orwell warned us, once the sheep have learned your chant, and you can defend the indefensible, then the war is over. When women have been silenced or cowed into submission, when their rights have been taken, when they have been pushed out of politics and public life, well, that’s when you can say, “Four legs good, two legs better”.

I enjoy a good debate/argument/slanging-match on Twitter as much as the next person, but recently I’ve been feeling a little under-endowed in these intellectual intercourses.

Because of my serious medical condition (bone-idleness) and my religious beliefs (that homework is a sin) evidence of my formal education extends only as far as half-a-dozen O-level certificates and a trail of teachers who’ve been through mandated anger-management training.

Normally I don’t let my lack of qualifications bother me. I don’t dribble (much) when I talk, I can use a knife & fork and even make a half-rhyme work, but when I’m debating against people who are doctors or even professors I do feel that I don’t measure up.

Hence, I’ve decided to award myself a PhD.

Since floating the idea I’ve discovered that so-called “real” doctors are hateful bigots, who discriminate against people who want a clever title, by acting as gatekeepers. They throw around big book-larnin’ words, like “accredited institutions” and “thesis” and “misrepresentation” in a shameful attempt to protect their turf from doctors like me, what is probably just as clever as they is.

This bookological essentialism serves to show how little these PhDers actually understand what they claim to hold so dear.

Scans have shown that there’s no chemical difference between the brain of a so-called real PhD and me, who has to look up which letters are capitalised in PhD every single time. In fact, taxi drivers who have studied The Knowledge have the most advanced brains^[1].

Also, PhDs are entirely social constructs. Many indigenous peoples in Africa, the Americas, India and Scotland had no word for ‘doctorate’ before imperialist white colonisers arrived. If you’re insisting on the definitions of ‘educated’ or ‘literate’ that they imposed on those minority groups then you’re no better than they were, which in part explains why so many people with a post-graduate education are far-right Nazis^[2].

We even know that the world is not split into a simple binary of having/not having a PhD. There’s very much a spectrum, ranging from “Learning your letters” through to “Having letters after your name”. The existence of this spectrum automatically means that anybody can place themselves anywhere on it^[3], and nobody has the right to question them.

Anyway, I think the important thing is that other people with doctorates educate themselves (see above) and support me in joining their ranks (which is really quite a compliment, when you think about it^[4]). Me declaring myself their intellectual equal doesn’t take anything away from people with a “real” PhD, and all I’m asking is that they don’t make fun of me when I don’t “pass”, by not knowing long words…and also that they don’t exclude me, by talking about academic subjects that I don’t understand…and that they never, ever suggest I don’t have a real PhD, just because mine is printed in black & white, because I was out of yellow toner…and that they make room for me on their grant applications…and that I’m considered equal to them when jobs professorships are being handed out.

So, really, it’s just a little bit of give and take from all sides.

I’m really thrilled to be joining the ranks of academia/the educated, and look forward to high profile interlectuals supporting my cause (hint, fucking hint, Professor Roberts). I’m sure this is going to be a learning experience for all of us.

Citations^[5]
[1] Sure I saw a programme about this
[2] Somebody on Twitter said so, et. al.
[3] Well, it just makes sense, dunnit?
[4] As long as you don’t think about it too hard or too long
[5] Fucking get me!

“Do better” is the fucking worst.

“Do better” is a conclusion without a debate, an argument without facts, the enforcement of an agreement that you never signed up to.

“Do better” is pomposity itself, astride its highest horse, telling you that your opinion is worthless.

“Do better” is “Be more like me” wrapped in a cliched ‘inspirational’ poster to hide that it’s blushing from the sheer fucking effrontery of claiming to be the arbiter of absolute moral truth.

“Do better” is “Right side of history” for right now, by people who think they get to decide which way history twists.

“Do better” is “You’re shitty” for people who will, at the end of the day, pat themselves on the back for building people up, instead of tearing them down, then lull themselves to sleep with the thought of what a good person they are. Don’t trust anyone who’ll flat-out lie to their own fucking face like that.

“Do better” is condescending, patronising, self-serving double-think for those who’ve learned to stop their train of thought before it leaves comfortville.

“Do better” is the “Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all just be nice?” where the speaker defines “nice”…and probably “all”.

“Do better” is what those who are doing nothing say to those who are doing something.

“Do better” is the motto of the dogmatic, the bête noire of reason.

“Do better” is the fucking worst.

If you can’t do better than “Do better” then just do one.

 

This is a response to this piece, by Luke Roelofs, which turned up in my TL this morning, hailed as “One of the best things I’ve read […] on why GCF arguments are both bogus and conservative”.

It’s certainly a lengthy work, running to more than 10,000 words. I’m not a professional philosopher, so I’m going to try to keep my reply under 1,000 words – in the hope that people will actually read it.

Roelofs’ novella has three threads of investigation:

1. Do trans-people reinforce gender stereotypes?
2. Are people being pressured to transition?
3. Does admitting trans women make women’s spaces less safe?

Roelofs helpfully tells us in the title of each of these sections that the answer is “No”.

I’m going to tackle the sections out of order, to suit my own, warped, gender-critical agenda.

Actually, I’m going to dismiss section 2 entirely, because it’s an area I freely admit to not knowing much about. As Roelofs spends most of this section talking about diagnosis of gender dysphoria and having to live for a period as your assumed gender, both barriers that GRA reformers seek to remove, then presumably he does know much about it either. Indeed, given his verbosity, spending a mere 1,500 words on the topic is presumably his version of “No comment”

Section 3 barely takes more dealing with, as he doesn’t even attempt to answer the question that he himself raises. Instead of proving his own assertion that, no, admitting trans-women to women-only spaces does not make them less safe, he instead argues that the topic is not worth debating because enforcement is impractical.

If there is no enforcement of sex segregated spaces then predatory men can freely enter them, and if there is any sort of official or unofficial enforcement then we enter some Orwellian nightmare, where people always have to carry their papers when they want to pee. Anyway, he argues, if there’s enforcement then women will feel that they have to present as feminine in order to use those spaces, and other women will force them to do so, by reporting anybody who isn’t girly enough and making them suffer the indignity of having their papers or pants checked (yes, he really does argue this).

I don’t know much about professional philosophy, but I’d always kind of assumed that the line between it and hand-waving lunacy was wider than appears to be the case.

Anyway, we end section 3 not with the conclusion that no women were harmed in the making of this self-identifying bathroom, but rather that there’s no solution, so we gain nothing from discussing it.

And so we reach section 1, and the argument that I enjoyed the most.

In summary, he battles against the idea that gender-identity is based on the boys-like-blue/girls-like-pink stereotypes. The bad feminists get the blame for this idea existing at all. They complain about trans-women radiating “male energy” (by which I assume he means observations that some men who claim trans-womanhood don’t even bother to shave their beards off), and they joke about the appearance of non-passing trans-women.

These hurtful comments drive trans-women to feminise their appearance, which then opens them to accusations that they see feminism only in terms of stereotypes.

The core of his argument is that if gender-critical feminists argue that women shouldn’t have to behave or appear in a manner which conforms to their gender then why should trans-women have to?

The only philosophy I know anything about is the kind that turns up towards the end of your sixth pint of Foster’s, but here Roelofs seems to have overlooked a huge philosophical point – if womanhood isn’t defined by biology, and isn’t defined by behaviour and dress, then what is womanhood?

The gender-critical view, that women are born into second-class citizenry, because of their biology makes logical sense, but I can also understand the logic (albeit regressive) in saying that if you look like a woman then you should be treated like a woman. What I can’t see is what womanhood means if it’s neither of these things.

The non-biological, non-gender stereotype kind of woman that Roelofs is arguing is the ‘natural’ state of trans-women does nothing other than render the term ‘woman’ meaningless.

In fact, all a man seems to gain by declaring themselves a woman is that access to women’s spaces…and apparently we couldn’t stop them doing that anyway.

OK, enough philosophy.

The title of the blog is, Dear Philosophers, You Can Trust the Feminist Consensus: Gender-Critical Radical Feminism is Bogus, and there are two final comments to make on this.

In the title, and in the body of the piece, Roelofs states that the majority of feminists are accepting of trans-women, but makes no effort to support this assertion. Given that he counts himself as a feminist perhaps he just has a particularly wide definition of the term.

Speaking of terms, ‘bogus’ is also worth a look. As he himself says:

I decided to believe what seemed like the consensus among feminists, that GCRF is bogus, even though I had trouble articulating why clearly to myself. I trusted the judgement that seemed to be held by the great majority of people I knew and respected for their views on this sort of topic.

And he even helpfully defines exactly what ‘bogus’ means:

‘Bogus’: both intellectually valueless and hateful. They’re saying that rather than gaining something from engaging with it critically, we’ll actually lose something: debates about gender are made worse by having this perspective represented.

In other words, underneath all of the philosophical highfalutin and engorged word-counts there’s just another woke man, pulling ideas out of his arse to justify his desire to tell women to shut up.

Great work, Luke Roelofs, take a seat with all the others.

981 words (including these ones)

Out in British Columbia a lone Twitter account, @goinglikeelsie, (account locked at time of writing) is covering three linked cases being considered by the province’s human rights tribunal.

The plaintiff in all three cases is ‘JY’, and the tribunal has ruled that coverage of the cases may not reveal JY’s identity, or provide enough information to allow JY to be identified.

The identity of JY is, nevertheless, widely known. They are male-born, but since starting to identify, at least part of the time, as female they have become infamous for bringing legal cases against 16 female beauticians who have refused to provide them with genital waxing services. It is JY’s contention that those who have refused to provide the service are guilty of discrimination on the grounds of gender identity, a protected characteristic with regards to the provision of services under Canadian law.

Elsie is tweeting her notes on three of these cases, that the tribunal are hearing as joined, with a single decision that the end.

You can read the story so far here

With no disrespect to Elsie, she is not a journalist. Her notes are confusing, as she tries to navigate the restrictions around what can be made public, she has to back-track and correct herself and even complains that she has no notes at one point because her pen had run out.

Yet she is a hero.

She’s a hero because, without her, nobody would know what was happening, or probably even that the hearings were going on.

These hearings are a first step in determining if there is a hierarchy of human rights. Can a man’s right to say that he is now a woman override a woman’s objection to intimate handling of a male body? Does it override a woman’s right to assert that her religious or moral beliefs say that she shouldn’t be touching a man in that area? Does it override her professional concern that she is not trained to provide a potentially painful and injurious service to somebody who has male anatomy?

In short, Canadian law has said that everybody has the right to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, and it must now decide whether that also gives them the right to be universally believed, irrespective of the beliefs of others or evidence to the contrary.

And there’s nobody from the press covering the case.

What seems even stranger at first glance is that yesterday a trans-rights activist called on other activists to mass-report Elsie’s Twitter account, to try to get it closed down.

When she’s simply reporting – without editorial comment – the events of a tribunal which is fundamental to the rights of trans people in Canada, you might think that they’d want her voice amplified, so that the world can watch.

They don’t because they don’t want the world to hear about JY because, according to them, JY doesn’t exist.

JY doesn’t exist, because the cornerstones of their argument for an easier path to gender recognition in the UK are that it doesn’t cause any problems, men will not abuse easy self-identification of gender, that men choosing to transition aren’t motivated by fetishism, and that the rights of women are not diminished by trans rights.

My god, JY must be embarrassment to them.

Aside from the 3 cases being considered together, JY has brought numerous similar cases, either being paid off by beauticians worried about expensive legal cases, or backing down themselves if the defendants have obtained legal representation.

JY also has a well-document fetish related to tampons and has, in the three cases presented, asked if genital waxing will be possible while they have a tampon inserted. The tribunal has already ascertained that JY has male genitalia, and does not also have female genitalia. They appear not to have questioned too closely where JY is planning to insert the tampon. This may be for the best.

The tribunal has also establish JY’s pattern of approaching the female service providers initially from their social media account with a male photo, then asking for the same services from accounts with female profile pictures (not of JY).

In his view, JY is fighting for LGBTQI+ rights, a campaign they pat themselves on the back for even when composing fake threats to themselves.

In the cold light of a court it looks a lot more like JY is using the law for personal gain, both financial and reputational, and mainly to bully women, especially minority women. Fighting in court to push back their personal boundaries as to what they believe, what their religion permits, what they are qualified to do.

JY is standing there, living proof that self-identification is enormously problematic, and that the rights it affords aren’t a game where everyone can win and nobody loses. JY is a man playing the system for their own gratification and amusement, and the world needs to see the problems.

Instead, we’ve got a single, brave, woman, tweeting her imperfect notes while trans activists attempt to tear her down.

We need to listen to her.