Mermaids and the fox killer
A judge will consider an appeal by the trans rights charity Mermaids on Friday against the Charity Commission’s decision to award charitable status to the new gay rights organisation LGB Alliance. It is understood to be the first time one charity has attempted to strip legal status from another.
The highly unusual hearing will focus attention on increasingly fractious debates over sex and gender identity, and the legal definitions of same-sex attraction and sexual orientation.
I for one hope it will also focus attention on what people mean when they talk about “rights” without ever defining them. What does it mean to call Mermaids “the trans rights charity” as Amelia Gentleman does in the first paragraph? What are “trans rights”? We’re never told. Journalists mention them but never define them.
Mermaids, which supports transgender, nonbinary and gender diverse children and their families, launched an appeal last year against the Charity Commission’s grant of charitable status to the LGB Alliance. It argued that the group was set up primarily to lobby the government to restrict the legal rights afforded to transgender people.
What are trans children? What are nonbinary children? What are gender diverse children? What are we talking about? What are the legal rights afforded to transgender people that the LGB Alliance is supposed to be lobbying to restrict? How are we supposed to be able to understand and have an informed opinion on this subject when it is so drastically and absurdly undefined?
Perhaps we get a little bit of definition in this bit:
The legal discussion will set the LGB Alliance’s position that there are only two sexes and that gender is a social construct against Mermaids’ position that transgender people’s gender identity should be affirmed.
A little bit, because what does “transgender people’s gender identity should be affirmed” mean?
The problem is, as always, that the underlying ideology is absurd, which may be why it never gets spelled out in reporting. What are “transgender people”? People who have a socially encouraged delusion that they’re not the sex they are. What is “gender identity”? The delusion that one is not the sex one is. What does it mean to “affirm gender identity”? To encourage people in a delusion.
I wonder if it will spread to other categories. Perhaps people will start to say they identify as cars, apples, rabbits, planets, and there will be new vocabularies for all these new delusions, and new claims of “rights” and “affirmation” for all of them.
Mermaids’ legal papers also claim that LGB Alliance has campaigned to stop Mermaids from advising schools and other government bodies on transgender rights.
But what are “transgender rights”? Are they genuine rights? How do we know? Do they conflict with existing rights? How do we know? How can we figure all this out when the core ideology is protected from having to explain itself?
In its preliminary submissions, LGB Alliance sets out its position that same-sex attraction should be defined by biological sex (male or female) not by gender identity, at a time when many mainstream charities have shifted to a different definition of same sex-attraction, based on attraction to someone’s gender or gender identity, rather than someone’s biological sex. It says it was founded in part to disrupt a narrative that critics of Stonewall were homophobic.
What an incoherent idea that is – “many mainstream charities have shifted to a different definition of same sex-attraction, based on attraction to someone’s gender or gender identity, rather than someone’s biological sex.” So in other words gender or gender identity is the opposite of someone’s sex? So many mainstream charities are defining same-sex attraction as not same-sex attraction?
The idea is, I suppose, that most people’s “gender identity” matches their sex, so gender ideology isn’t really throwing lesbian and gay rights out the window, it’s just driving a big truck through them. Somehow I don’t find that very reassuring.
KGB Alliance? I had to google that. ;)
Gender is not a social construct beyond the superficialities. Gender is defined as biological sex, it is a direct synonym, or at least it used to be. It’s no more a social construct than sex is. Sex specific medical treatment, according to biology doesn’t recognize “performative” head tilts or other such affectations.
That’s not quite true, “gender” is used as a term of art in sociology and related disciplines to mean the rules and/or habits that define and limit the sexes. It’s also used in the vernacular as a synonym for sex, so that’s confusing.
And that confusion is often intentionally exploited (much as what happens with the word “theory”) to make the TRA arguments sound progressive and persuasive.
I still don’t see it as a social construct. Even if “…“gender” is used as a term of art in sociology and related disciplines to mean the rules and/or habits that define and limit the sexes.” it still falls within the bounds of the sex binary, either M or F. Even gendered language is considered M or F, which refers ultimately to biological sex. I think the trans rights people would like us to think it’s a different thing, and maybe I’m stuck with an old dictionary definition, but I don’t see how they would be able to turn gender into a social construct, only existing because of social agreement, like money. People are not what they are because we agree they are, they are either sex M or F, or gender M or F if one prefers. It’s not like gender would disappear without some general agreement on what it refers to — it is what it is. Money would become bits of paper and metal if we didn’t agree, as it is a social construct, for it would lose all meaning, but M or F gender isn’t like that, whether it’s just a presentation or not, it always refers back to biological sex. Transsexual, a term not used much anymore, means someone who wishes to be or presents as, the opposite sex. I don’t see how using transgender instead of transsexual changes that in the least. I think one would have to interject sexual preference to make any distinctions between the two, but there again, there is only the binary, same sex attracted, opposite sex attracted, neither or both, but still the binary, always. I’d like to know if I’m wrong about this, and maybe I haven’t delved into gender theory enough to think of it differently than I do, but I honestly don’t think it’s possible to move the concept of gender far enough away from biological sex, and the ontological differences between the two, to make a coherent socially constructed concept of gender (and still have gender mean something).
I know things are different in the UK but this is a lot like a forced birther group trying to strip the status of a pro-abortion group. Which is bullshit.
@twiliter #5, I’m not a sociologist, but I often use “gender norms” to refer to things like 1) dress and mannerisms (skirts and head tilts)–signifiers of sex that can easily be uncoupled from it, and 2) personality traits that are widely thought of as typical of one sex or the other.
So “gender” is attached to sex, but it’s attached (mostly) by convention–thus it’s a social construct. (I say “mostly,” because there seem to be some evolved behaviors that are far more common, though not exclusively so, to one sex or the other.)
Trans activists SAY that sex and gender are different things, and gender critics agree, but then TRAs go on to muddy the definition of sex, define “woman” and “man” as “genders,” and drag in DSDs for good measure. It’s crazy.
Lady M, I suppose it’s useful to make that kind of distinction to argue the claims, either for or against, but where I have trouble is how some theorists have already accepted, as a given, that gender isn’t real in the way biological sex is. I think it concedes too much. For example, lets say there’s a transwoman who does such a remarkable job of transitioning, that he would fool anyone who didn’t have prior knowledge (which is what I think they strive for) — The trans allies push for the acceptance of him as a biological female (TWAW), with gender critics in disagreement. My argument would be that not only is he not the biological sex he appears to be, but he is also not the gender he appears to be, despite any behavioral affectations or appearances. He is not gender F, therefore sex F (the trans dogma); He is gender M (hence the ‘trans’ modifier), therefore sex M. But if he appears (to the uninitiated) to be gender F, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t also appear to be sex F. Again, I don’t think we should accept uncritically the idea that gender is it’s own thing, apart from biological sex or removable from it. Unless we can accept that his gender is actually F, and he is not transgender at all, which I’m not inclined to do.