Trans equality identifies as equality
Stonewall responds to the EHRC:
Today’s statements from the EHRC are an attack on trans equality and undermine EHRC’s core purpose of regulating, promoting and upholding human rights.
What is trans equality? What does that mean? In what way do trans people not have equality? It’s not part of “equality” to identify as something you’re not and then force the world to accept your self-identification.
The two statements – in response to plans to legislate for a ban on conversion therapy in England and Wales, and Gender Recognition Act reform in Scotland – effectively seek to exclude trans people from improved rights and protections.
But the putative conversion therapy isn’t conversion therapy, and it’s not a right for people to identify as other people and take all their rights.
We are deeply troubled by the approach that the EHRC is taking to trans people’s human rights. Their approach appears to focus on pleasing a noisy minority of anti-trans activists, rather than promoting human rights for all LGBTQ+ people.
But the “trans people’s human rights” in question aren’t rights. They impinge on other people’s rights, and they’re not a defensible right in themselves.
The EHRC is also a UN-accredited National Human Rights Institution, and as such is expected to operate according to the ‘Paris Principles’, which include the commitment to promote and protect all human rights and to contribute towards a world where everyone, everywhere fully enjoys their rights.
Women can’t fully enjoy our rights if men are given “rights” to usurp our spaces and sports and jobs and prizes.
It strikes me that “equal rights” has become a slogan similar to the word “discrimination”, in the sense that each has taken on some broader connotation. People hear “discrimination” and think “bad!”, for example, but being a discriminating person and choosing among alternatives about how one wants to live one’s life is a good thing; hence “discrimination” is not just universally bad. Similarly, “equal rights” has taken on a sort of holy grail aspect, as if the idea is fundamentally good. There’s nothing good or equal about allowing men free access to women’s private spaces, though, or vice versa. As you say, such “rights” are not rights at all if they impinge on the long-recognized free rights of other people.
Well, not all that long-recognized in the case of women. Might be better to say “long fought for”. There were a lot of rights that were not recognized in all states as recently as 1973.
James, it’s the extension of the problems faced by lawyers, doctors, pretty much any profession. Very specific terms of art rapidly become jumbled in the minds of the general population with the different, and often changing, meaning in colloquial use. Non-experts insist their interpretation based on nothing is correct and experts are wrong. over time the discussion becomes so jumbled even experts and informed people who don’t pause to think very critically become confused and begin to use the colloquial meaning. ‘Discrimination’ and ‘rights’ are excellent examples of this.
Rob,
I’m making a list. I’ve been busy so I’ve only added two today: ‘rhetoric’ and ‘bimodal’.
latsot, you could add ‘theory’ and ‘vagina’ to your list.
Re #3
It is certainly a problem where the contexts get confused; when a lay user expects an expert’s use of the term to refer to or be consistent with the colloquial version. I often notice this conflict in over-reaction, where people are saying don’t use this term in a colloquial sense at all, for fear that it might be interpreted as the technical term. I do think that’s an over-reaction, but I have no practical alternative to suggest. Biology seems almost a generator of such terms: bug, insect, fly, evolve; and psychology is no slouch, either: insane, crazy, depressed, delusion.