Mandatory respect for fantasy identities
Naturally the reporting on Maya Forstater’s appeal has to be dishonest. Robin Moira White and Molly Mulready in the Independent:
Maya Forstater is at the heart of a controversy about transgender people, free speech, and harassment at work. Her view is that transgender women are men and the law should protect her right to say so at work, including if a transgender woman happened to be her work colleague.
Forstater wants to refer to that woman as “he”, regardless of the pain that would cause.
That’s a deceptive way of putting it though. Maya isn’t appealing for the freedom to call trans women “he” at all times no matter what, she’s appealing for the freedom to do so when it’s relevant. She has specifically said that. Certainly I think she should be free to at all times, and that all of us should, but that’s not what the appeal is about.
She feels this so strongly that the matter has ended up in court – at her behest. As lawyers who will be personally affected by the outcome of her case – one of us as a trans woman, the other as the mother of a trans child – we have followed it closely.
You know who else will be personally affected by the outcome of her case? Women. All women. All women because all women need to be able to say “That’s a man” in some situations, no matter how strenuously the man insists he is a trans woman. That need is more important than the need of some men who say they are women to be “validated” by actual women. It’s a lot more important. Trans people’s need for “validation” is, when you come right down to it, trivial.
While providing consultancy services to a charitable think tank, the Centre for Global Development (CGD), Forstater contributed to social media discussions about transgender people. She stated “transwomen are male” and that the statement “transwomen are women” is one of a number of “literal delusions”. She made crude references to the body parts of trans people. Her work colleagues raised concerns and when asked about it by CGD she repeated her beliefs about trans women, said she knew her comments were thought offensive but insisted she would continue to make them because they were true.
And? Trans women are male; that’s what the “trans” in “trans women” means.
JK Rowling later tweeted that Forstater had been forced out of her job for “stating that sex is real”. We don’t agree. Forstater claims the right to knowingly cause pain, and not be required to respect the true identity of a trans woman.
No, Forstater does not claim the right to knowingly cause pain; she claims the right to tell the truth when necessary. And when people’s “true identity” is the opposite of their actual literal detectable real-world identity, nobody should be required to “respect” it. The whole idea is childish and absurd. We might as well all identify as the Prime Minister and demand that everyone respect it.
It would also, which perhaps may even concern Forstater, apply not only to beliefs that harm transgender people, but to any controversial belief a person may hold – including, for example, a belief that women are intellectually inferior to men. If Ms Forstater succeeds before the court, a man at work will have the protection of the law to make those statements at work whenever he likes, causing whatever damage he likes to the women he works with. That cannot be right.
Nonsense. The hearing is not about “controversial beliefs” in general. They apparently just can’t make their case without a mix of lies and hyperbolic whining. It must not be a very good case then, right?
If I were dumb enough to engage with their stupid argument I’d posit that a man claiming women are intellectually inferior in the workplace generally does less material harm than a man insisting on using the womens’ locker room and restroom facilities.
If a precondition for acceptable speech is that it not “knowingly cause pain,” quite a lot of everyday speech would be outlawed. “We cannot accept your submission.” “No, I won’t go out with you.” “And the award goes to… [someone else].” “You’re under arrest.”
A major part of growing up is learning to deal with pain caused by other people’s words.
What a Maroon:
And therein lies the problem. It does appear to be the case that many members of the last two generations (Z and millenials) delay the mental transition from childhood to adulthood far longer than those of preceding generations, as attested by the various versions of ‘I’m not good at adulting* that one sees all over social media, and the trans world is, if anything, the most infantalised group of all.
To make matters worse, the old truism that we were taught to help us deal with insults has now been adapted to sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are literal murder.
I never wanted to be one of those old people who moan about the younger generations: they’ve made me do it.
*Verbing nouns really gets on my wick. They can take their I can’t adult / can’t brain and stick them where the sun refuses to shine.
While very much guilty of the noun->verb thing and still mentally feeling like a college student in my mid thirties I’ve noticed this as well. It’s why I don’t really consider the 1990 onwards millenials proper millenials. I know a 31 year old that has the political sophistication of my highschool freshman incarnation and barely interacts with adult responsibilities and expectations.
The other day, I was teaching about stars in my Earth Science class. I asked one of the students if he’d ever tried to count the stars, to make a point about the billions and billions…he said, no, he never went outside.
I cannot imagine such a truncated life as many of the generation are leading.
AoS,
English has been verbing nouns forever. Some age well, and we barely notice; it’s the novel ones that make us bellyache.
I see what you did there.
:^)
We used to have a saying in college: “Any word can be verbed.”
“…a belief that women are intellectually inferior to men.”
Uh, I have heard men express this belief, whether using short Anglo-Saxon words or multi-syllable BS, many times in workplaces. Ah, but when a TIM or TIF has to hear something they don’t want to hear, no matter how it is presented, the Wokerati go for blood.
Sackbut: Calvin and Hobbes for the win.
Especially that last panel. Brilliant.
#5 iknklast, Clifford Stoll (astronomer, mathematician) relates (Numberphile podcast) walking back from dinner with some colleagues (either graduate school or post-doc), and seeing Venus, and saying, look, there’s Venus, and one of his colleagues (another astronomer) says how do you know? And he says, come on, bright star low in the western sky just after sunset; that’s Venus. And his colleague persists: how do you know? Stoll says that’s when he realized that there are astronomers who never look at the sky.
I can easily imagine there are many astronomers who don’t look at the sky very much. It’s a computer problem, a mathematics problem, something to do with copious amounts of data from instruments far more capable than eyes are.
Two musical anecdotes I think yield similar surprises.
One, the Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart was interviewed, and was asked what music his listens to for fun. He said he spends his professional time dealing with music, and doesn’t listen to anything for fun.
Two, the lutenist Joel Cohen studied at Harvard; they don’t have a performance degree program, only academic music areas such as musicology, theory, and composition. A professor was working on transcribing lute tablature, and old form of notation akin to guitar tabs. Cohen said he reads tablature, and would be happy to play the music from the tablature so the professor could hear it. The professor declined; he didn’t need to hear it.
So, I don’t know. People get their joys different ways, I suppose. I don’t pay attention to the sky, and I don’t listen to music very much (despite being a musician), so none of these things are particularly surprising to me, although they were to other people.
Listening to music makes me want to play. Not being able to play at the moment, I get sad when I listen to music. But I still listen to it sometimes, because my husband likes to listen to it much of the time (he is stubbornly unmusical; but that’s OK. Performers need audiences).
Anyway, back to Forstater. Never mind what imaginary harms might result from her winning; if she loses then no-one will be safe at work again, because all the workplace bully has to say about someone who refuses to kowtow to them is that the bully was offended.