The right to hold gender-critical views
Liberal Voice for Women tells us:
Doubts about the legality of the Liberal Democrats’ “Definition of Transphobia” (published in September 2020, but never approved by Conference) have finally been put to rest by the publication of a second set of legal advice by a KC.
Earlier this year, the Lib Dems commissioned Guy Vassal Adams KC to provide a legal opinion on the lawfulness of the Definition of Transphobia. When that opinion remained unavailable to the membership, a second opinion from Karon Monaghan KC was sought by a member of the Federal Board and published by us here.
Now the first opinion, that was unavailable, has been made available.
While Karon Monaghan was dismissed by party trans activists who accused her (wrongly) of being biased in favour of the gender critical position, the two opinions are not in conflict. In fact the opposite is true. Vassal Adams writes: I have been asked to identify any point of disagreement or significant differences that may be relevant to the Party’s decisions on these issues. For the avoidance of doubt, I agree with Ms Monaghan’s analysis and I cannot discern any significant difference between her advice and my own.
The conclusion of both sets of advice is that the original Definition of Transphobia is inconsistent with the right to hold gender-critical views under the Equality Act and Human Rights Act. If the Party were to take disciplinary action based on these examples it would be engaging in unlawful discrimination against persons with gender-critical views.
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It is a feature of this debate that trans rights proponents will readily label as transphobic any speech which causes them offence. Gender critical views such as ‘trans women aren’t women’ are offensive to trans people, but freedom of expression includes the right to express views that other people find offensive.
Especially, one would hope, when the view “offensive to trans people” is the utterly humdrum and basic factual statement that trans women [aka men] are not women. It’s like finding it “offensive” to say “rain is wet” or “horses and dogs are quadrupeds.”
Some people, rather a lot of them actually, find it extremely offensive to say that human beings are a species of ape.
Of course, those same people find it offensive when anyone says ‘we are descended from apes’, which is a compromise position which, by being just wrong enough, manages to piss off the same people who wish to believe in a fantasy, and those on the side of science who want our education system to be reality-based.
So it is with the gender religion. The True Believers will never accept the fact-based position that humans can’t change sex, and gender critical people won’t go along with the idea that we can. And both sides are furious at those who say “OK, so humans can’t change sex, but let’s pretend that some of them have done so, to be kind”.
Just because there appears to be two sides to an issue doesn’t mean that the truth lies somewhere between them. Actually, I have no idea why that notion is so popular, as I have learnt over the decades that in any dispute over reality one side’s position is totally correct, and the other is utterly mistaken.
The universe has been around for thousands of millions of years. Our planet is an oblate spheroid. We are apes. Mammals can’t change sex. Phlogiston doesn’t exist. Telling people that they are breaking laws which don’t exist, however much you may wish they do, sets them up to fall foul of actual, existing legislation.
Sorry for nitpicking, but I’m not sure I follow you here. If you are referring to the idea that “we’re not descended from apes; we share a common ancestor with the apes”, I’d say it’s just plain wrong. Of course we didn’t evolve from any species of apes that exists today, like chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, or orangutangs, but our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos was also an ape in every relevant respect, as was the common ancestor that humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos all share with gorillas etc. To say that gorillas and chimpanzees are both apes while our common ancestors with them were not implies that apes evolved more than once. As much as I now despise Richard Dawkins as a person, he does know a thing or two about evolutionary biology, and he made the same point when so many skeptics were repeating the “descended from apes” vs. “sharing a common ancestor with the apes” trope. Anyway, don’t hesitate to correct me if I’m misunderstanding or misrepresenting your position.
(On second thought you seem to be criticizing the idea that although we descended from apes, we are no longer apes today. If so, I fully agree)
Bjarte, your second thought is correct. Too many people want us to be something special, even if they don’t believe that we were created by a god a handful of millennia ago. We’re just a kind of chimp, really.
In my Biology classes, I try to resolve that conundrum by referring to chimps and bonobos, and when I refer to apes I include us.
Just like I am constantly irked by the “humans and animals”, when it is properly “humans and other animals”, the formulation I prefer to use.
Of course I also believe men cannot be women, so what good are my ideas anyway? I’m just a TERF.