Legally speaking men are women
A court rules that men can be women.
A court has thrown out a challenge against the Scottish government’s definition of a woman in law.
Even governments can’t make lies true. Even courts can’t make a lie the truth. They can pass laws, they can issue rulings, but they can’t just waves their hands and make nonsense The Truth.
The For Women Scotland group complained about the way a bill aimed at gender balance on boards had included trans people under the definition of women.
Imagine if it were about British boards and a bill aimed at national balance, but England insisted that English people who identify as Scots are Scots despite having zero evidence of any Scottish ancestry. Would Scotland and its government and courts think that was okie doke?
Judge Lady Haldane said that the definition of sex was “not limited to biological or birth sex”.
Sure, it’s all elective. So is species – if you say you’re a rabbit you’re a rabbit. Rabbits can take their place on boards just as wolves and cheetahs can. Things may get a bit bloody when the boards meet, but that’s the price of trans-species rights.
She said it could also include people with a gender recognition certificate after changing their legally recognised gender. The judge also stated that sex and gender reassignment were separate and distinct characteristics but were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
In her decision, Lady Haldane wrote: “I conclude that in this context, which is the meaning of sex for the purposes of the 2010 Act, ‘sex’ is not limited to biological or birth sex, but includes those in possession of a GRC obtained in accordance with the 2004 Act stating their acquired gender, and thus their sex.”
People’s sex is not about physical reality, it’s about the law and government and saying words. There is no physical reality, there are only words.
This is good news: we can cancel climate doom just by saying so!
This is good news: we can cancel climate doom just by saying so!
Of course, a legislature already did this, or near enough.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science-rising-sea-level/story?id=16913782
Tomatoes are vegetables. Whales are fish. Now men are women. Though I will note, it wasn’t because tomatoes identified as vegetables or whales identified as fish; those decisions were chiefly for economic and taxation reasons. That at least makes some sense; money talks.
Why are people smart enough to reach the level of judge buying into bullshit?
It’s infuriating to think that with another judge, the decision could have gone the other way.
You’d think that being on the “right side of history” would require being on the “right side of reality for a start. Holding up a GRC is not really the kind of proof you should be reaching for. It’s like using a license to keep (or hunt) unicorns as evidence that unicorns exist.. That a government issues GRCs doesn’t make the thing it purports to recognize actually possible, or cause it to come into being. If it stopped handing them out, reality would not change, and nobody would suffer. There’s nothing a GRC provides that someone cannot live without. Changing sex is impossible, so a certificate claiming that someone is the sex they are not is pointless and unnecessary. Gender is bullshit, so a certificate that sets out in black and white that you’re “really” the gender you claim to be (whatever the fuck it is,) is more pointless still. Nobody gives a shit, and the pointless piece of paper is a narcissistic exercise in forcing people to care about your religious beliefs.
Quite apart from the inherent, inescapable impossibility of the demand to recognize men as women, it’s an unwarranted intrusion and occupation of the way in which we choose to categorize the world in order to navigate it successfully. We’re allowed to be incorrect or mistaken, but we’ve no right to force our misconstructions and mistakes onto others, demanding that they surrender their perceptions to ours. We don’t get to reprogram other people’s GPS units to force them to go to Oz, or Neverland or Narnia. Ever day. On every trip. We may discuss, debate and argue, but if we agree to disagree, that’s it. We’re done. With reality, you’re not even going to get that far. Now <that's “NO DEBATE!”
There is no need on the part of anyone else for men who claim to be women to be acknowledged as such. The GRC should be abolished. Those who already have one should be allowed to keep it (for what it’s worth; it would be the “kind” thing to do) but no more should be issued. Failure to issue any more licenses to keep unicorns will not bring any unicorns to harm; ending the licenses to hunt them will not save any, either. You can never have what does not exist.