All right to continue
We restart.
EJ: please sit. Kate Harris are you all right to continue?
KH: yes
MG: I apologise if I said something upsetting. I’ll put the question in brief way for a yes/no. You’d accept others use words such as SE differently to you. Or lesbian for that matter.
I don’t know what the E in SE is an abbreviation for; it’s not in the list of abbreviations at the top. Expression doesn’t make any sense and I don’t know what else it could be. I don’t know why it’s not SO for sexual orientation. Anyway, the important thing is Kate Harris’s response.
KH: my good friend Allison Bailey said the word lesbian is taken. The word is taken by us. I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world. We love other women. We will not have that stolen from us.
There have always been men who say feel they’re a lesbian tee hee hee. Always jocular. Lesbians often a laughing stock. We will not be. We will not be erased and no man with a penis will tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.
Bam!
MG: when you talk of tee hee, different than Paul Roberts.
KH: Paul Roberts is far more offensive. He had no interest in lesbians. In particular, the 4000% increase in girls who think they are trans. I felt indifference from him about these phenomena while running an lgbt Consortium.
Almost as if the G and T matter more than the L. Almost.
KH: Contempt in this ideology that ignores women and lesbians. We formed LGBS because we were not prepared to see lesbians erased. I’m proud to speak for lesbians attracted to human females. A lesbian is attracted to another biological woman full stop.
MG: You set up lgba to fight that?
KH: It was set up for children…we were concerned about children growing up fed a tissue of lies about the myth that you can change sex. You cannot change sex.
MG: That’s political.
I guess the background idea is that a charity can’t be political? Since that’s what this hearing is about? At any rate it’s so absurd. It’s not “political” – not inherently. It’s been made political by all the political bullshit about men who are really women because they have a feminine soul.
KH: You keep trying to make me agree without [discussing] what lies behind it which is the safeguarding of children.
Our primary concern is that children should be given facts, education and the ability to make decisions as they get older. They have a fundamental right of going through puberty. You’re trying to suggest we’re a political campaign in a vacuum. We’re driven by concern for children.
And the concern for children has to do with the extremely political campaign to impose gender ideology on everyone and punish all dissent. If you think gender ideology is not political you might as well go the the store for a new brain, yours is broken.
Jumping ahead a few lines.
MG: The language you use is prejudicial. You don’t talk about Gender Critical.
KH: We don’t like the term. We use ideology as it has crept like Japanese knotweed through the media, education, the BBC. Its overwhelming influence means the public is being misinformed. Adults are able to work through it. Our biggest concern is that children are lied to. That’s a red flag.
MG: When you say evidence based, you’re fully convinced.
KH: We were once the only voice saying this, and now we’re seeing NHS changes, the Cass review, people sitting up, parents raising concerns. There is more light on it. You may say it’s extreme to use ‘ideology’ but we’ve seen how it’s used around the world.
…
MG: You say children are lied to?
KH: yes..I’d love it if SW said look at what Anne Fausto-Sterling said about Gender Identity as not being helpful anymore. Let’s look at mass info and 4000% increase. We hope people are looking under the radar at what has been happening over the last few years.
MG: the phrase new phase of working and accusing someone of lying to children. That’s deliberate.
KH: yes deliberate, that’s why we’re so pleased that one leader has said we need to look at it. Does anyone remember the South Sea Bubble and everyone went crackers? This is a similar sign of madness.
The madness of crowds, to be specific. See also: aliens; recovered memory syndrome; Freud; Jonestown; Heaven’s Gate; Jesus and Mo.
Can’t emphasis how many intelligentsia people have lost their minds on this issue. We heard a lot of being kids and may be a lot of people have overcorrected. It’s a new homophobia that they think they’re being kind. Just falling for a myth.
God ain’t that the truth about the intelligentsia people. The “skeptics” in particular.
MG: I want to clarify. I said lied to and you say they believed. It can’t be a lie if they believe.
KH: can’t it?
I go back and forth on this question all the time. It’s a real question. The way I answer it for myself is generally that there are some things people have no right to believe. “Right” in a metaphorical sense – literally speaking of course they do have the right. There are claims that are just too absurd for anyone over the age of 5 to believe.
MG: happy to engage in debate by accusing of lying?
KH: We want people to look at the social phenomenon of young girls on a medical pathway, mastectomies, on 2 for 1 in America. Well worth looking at, and charities like Mermaids, Stonewall and the LGBT Consortium…I’d ask why aren’t they bothered. I’d say to all we need to look at evidence.
MG: you don’t retract the word lie?
KH: cannot handle dishonesty. Sorry if offensive but it’s a lie for children to be told they were born in the wrong body.
Which is more offensive? Telling children they were born in the wrong body, or calling that claim a lie?
Bullshit. Human inability to change sex is as political as gravity. The only thing that’s become “political” is the right to speak this truth. MG’s retort solidifies in two words exactly why LGBA is needed. It’s the very myth Harris is talking about in action. It’s that very lie she’s fighting against. Keep digging MG, keep digging.
So Mermaids and Stonewall aren’t political? And the latter’s whole protection racket thing is okay too? Next to them, LGBA is pretty small beer.
“I’d rather be rude than a fucking liar.” – Magdalen Berns
“I guess the background idea is that a charity can’t be political? Since that’s what this hearing is about?”
A charity cannot exist purely for the purpose of lobbying. MG has come back to that indirectly again and again, he is attempting to have all of LGBA’s activities to be deemed as advocacy in one form or another, directed toward legislation or regulation. There are two pillars to what he has been trying to do – one, to establish that LGBA is lobbying and nothing else, and two, to establish that the objective LGBA serves is not a legitimate charitable purpose, a purpose in the public benefit.
The public benefit test is not defined in statute, but it is possible to be found offside. But the advocacy element is easier to establish, and can have the same effect – removing the tax-advantaged charitable status from LGBA, as well as rendering LGBA ineligible for a wide tranche of government funding.
https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/8-633-4989?transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)&firstPage=true#:~:text=Charities%20in%20England%20and%20Wales%20are%20principally%20governed%20by%20the,jurisdiction%20with%20respect%20to%20charities.
SE = Sexual Expression.
As usual in this sort of thing, the sneaky move is denying an inconvenient sense of a word. In this case, MG attempts to give the impression that lying requires deliberate deception. The irony, of course, is that this impression would be false and thus constitute a lie.
(via Merriam-Webster)
It is possible that ‘misinformation’ is a better choice than ‘lie’ in that specific use case, as it has the same meaning there without the confusion over contextually separate meanings. But Harris is saying this while being interrogated, and she is still correct.
SE should be SO (for sexual orientation) – Tribunal Tweets tweeted to correct the typo yesterday evening.
I’d call it sophism a.k.a. sophisticated lying. People are good at compartmentalising and “communities” even more so. So you can believe something when it’s convenient and not believe it when faced with the evidence. Just don’t think about it carefully, or at all. See motte and bailey, Donald Trump, etc. etc.
I think it’s right to be blunt about what we are up against. “Misinformation” or “sophism” are euphemisms for what is really going on, and using euphemisms allows others not to have to face the facts. This is calling a spade a spade. The entire structure of GI is built on the sand foundation of subterfuge, obfuscation, and gaslighting. In a word: lies. The emperor has no clothes. That needs to be stated without ambiguity: these are lies.
Naif in #3, thank you for showing the UK version of this issue. I live in the US, where I knew a lawyer Kurt who would advise an organization setting up a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization (for education, public charity, or religion) and/or a taxable 501(c)4 organization (for lobbying). He told me it is common to set up a tax-exempt 501(c)3, then step a toe over the line into lobbying. He told me that in practice “everyone does it” and a 501(c)3 seldom gets caught.
I support the LGBA 100% and I’m glad Kate Harris seems to have won the high ground of truth and morality versus MG. But my amateur mind still worries about a legal interpretation. Her moral victory (by itself) might still be seen to justify the LGBA as a charity or a lobby. I worry whether her moral victory put enough charity points on the scoreboard to win the game. I imagine the LGBA submitted other material that argues that case, but I have not followed this case closely.
I agree. LGBA has nothing to hide, and nothing to aplogize for.
If puberty blockersare are not reversible, if they are not a “pause button” (which implies a resumption of whatever was happening before it was pressed), then claiming that they are is a lie.
If people undergoing “gender reassignment” surgery are being told that this will change their sex, this is a lie. The same with the use of wrong sex hormones hormones. Humans cannot change sex. It is not hateful, or shocking, or transphobic to say this. There are no drugs, surgeries or treatments that can accomplish this. If they are not being told that such procedures will likely result in sterility, and loss of sexual function, that is a lie of omission.
Reading the tweets of the examination, I’m amazed at how often consel for Mermaids are trying to paint basic facts as somehow evil and bigoted. Lesbianism is same sex attraction. Trans identified males can never be lesbians because they can nevr be females. It’s as if MG is expecting to shame Harris, or draw Butterworth Gasps from the judge. This might not be as effective as Mermaids & Co. might hope. Outside of the Twitterverse, these statements are not bigoted or hateful.
If there’s anything these past few years of wokeness have made abundantly clear, it’s that the (cry) bullies’ first goal is almost always extracting an apology. Apologies give them power: over the wrongdoer, over their employers, over anyone and anything with whom they associate. Apologizing signals that you’ve done something worth apologizing for, which implicitly elevates the bullies’ standing and justifies both their beliefs and actions. Unnecessary apologies result in cognitive dissonance, which can pull you to restructure your beliefs in order to retroactively justify your admission of guilt.
If you haven’t done anything worth apologizing for, if you haven’t done anything wrong, if you haven’t violated your own morality, then don’t apologize.