Can we be clear on what that means?

The Express covers Nick Robinson’s conversation with Luciana Berger:

Host Nick Robinson said: “Turning to equalities which is the subject of your launch, one part of that is respecting the expression of gender identify. Can we be clear on what that means? Is it now the Liberal Democrats view that if I identified as a woman, you want the law to treat me as a woman?”

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Ms Berger said: “Yes. There will be many people who will share with you their very personal experience of being born with one identity and actually experiencing as another.

“For anyone who has to go through that very difficult experience, they should be respected.”

But “respected” meaning what? And before we even get to respecting that very difficult experience, what exactly is it? What does it mean to be “born with one identity and actually experiencing as another”? What, especially, does it mean in such a clear and peremptory and undeniable way that we have to base law and policy on it, and in fact diminish other people’s rights for the sake of it? It’s a bit like saying “I find life more painful and stressful than others do so I get to have special new rights.” Nobody knows how “difficult” that “very difficult experience” actually is, because we can’t know how difficult anyone’s experience is. The subjective is the subjective.

Mr Robinson asked: “Yet there are plenty of people who will say to you that there is a conflict of rights here. The rights of trans people and the rights of woman, hard-fought over many decades. Rights for example that sex offenders can’t demand to be housed in a woman’s prison. Rights that there is a demand for privacy in places where woman undress. Why are the Liberal Democrats choosing to oppose women’s rights?”

Ms Berger responded: “I don’t think they are in competition. I think there are some challenges we have to work through. But in the same way we fought for equalities with sexuality, for people from ethnic minority backgrounds. There shouldn’t be a hierarchy of equalities, it’s a challenger but we’re working through it.”

 

Well, that’s a sadly lazy and non-responsive response. No, there shouldn’t be “a hierarchy of equalities,” but there also shouldn’t be wack new “equalities” that aren’t equalities at all but narcissistic demands for Special Status.

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