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.
And they ignore the fact that they are establishing a hierarchy of equalities, with women on the bottom.
I’m not clear on what a “hierarchy of equalities” means.
1. It is more or less important to achieve equality (to the baseline) in certain areas than in others.
2. Equality (to the baseline) for group A should not come at the expense of that for group B.
Neither of those seems objectionable. (1) is triage. (2) is a guard against devolution. Unfortunately, I don’t think either of those is what Berger intended. It seems more likely that it’s
3a. It is impossible for group A’s equality to come at the expense of group B’s.
3b. Any opposition to a movement labeled as pro-equality is morally reprehensible.
(3a) is a denial of reality. It renders (2) pointless. (3b) follows from (3a) and gives the phrase its rhetorical force.
But the only reason there are “challenges” is because the new proposals are in tension with women’s rights. If there was no tension, there would be no difficulty – the new category can simply take up the same protections already won by the LGB campaigners.
Not Luciana Berger’s finest hour, by any means. But politicians are not used to being questioned on these issues, so when that happens they will respond by spouting the party line, even if it is nonsensical. They haven’t needed to consider what “trans rights” mean in practice, and how they conflict with women’s rights. If discussion does start to focus on on what trans rights really mean for women, politicians will have to think much more carefully about their responses. It’s only very recently that these matters have started to impinge on the public consciousness – see for example this excellent article by Jenni Murray in the [London] Times. (It’s behind a paywall but I believe non-subscribers can view one or two articles free.)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/politicians-are-betraying-women-in-the-rush-to-support-trans-rights-xzvhcf7m8
#4:
Why the fuck not? Politicians should not be making policies, either at party or governmental level, if they haven’t the will or the wit to understand the potential effects of those policies.
There are too many people in positions of power who are either so desperate to appear ‘woke’ (pardon me while I gargle), or so desperate for votes, that they’ll give their knee-jerk support to anything that’s sold to them as progressive, even something as regressive as eliminating women’s rights, without a second of thought.
I suspect that “even” should be an “especially”. I think this gives a lot of people the right to eliminate a lot of women’s rights while still appearing progressive.
[…] Jolyon Maugham QC commented about this wrongthink about self ID. (More on this post.) […]