The bosses
His view.
But then Luke Easley is denying Maya’s reality, and not only Maya’s but many other people’s too, many many many other people’s. Furthermore he’s denying an objective, material, factual reality, and furthermore again he’s denying an objective reality that is at the root of the fundamental human inequality, that between women and men. That’s a lot of reality-denial for a guy who wants to banish women for denying an eccentric new fantasy-based “reality” about being Born In The Wrong Body.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
iiii, I like “reality is that which, when you kick it, it kicks back.”
I just can’t imagine an employment tribunal viewing this attitude well. It almost feels to me like an executive and organisation that is prepared to lose, pay whatever the financial cost is, so they can then proclaim how wonderful they are that they took the moral high ground at such cost.
See my earlier rant about ‘identity’ vs ‘idenniny’.
I don’t think the issue necessarily is about actual observable material reality, I think it’s about what states are prepared to say is true about us.
Now, clearly I think that states should only be allowed to make assertions about us that are true and based on observable material reality, but I think that’s a different issue.
This is an argument about the protections we all deserve in certain areas of public life. Maya was fired for saying something about people (in the abstract) that her own government is at great pains to record and certify, so that we can be granted those protections. The fact that what she said was also true is of fundamental importance in general but I’m not sure it’s the only or even necessarily the main point here.
Or to put it another way, the fact that the Equality Act exists at all and that sex is a protected characteristic in itself surely has to mean that we’re allowed to – and in some cases compelled by law to – take account of people’s sex. That would be true even if sex were not obviously and importantly real.