Return of knowledge v belief
Still refusing to report the subject accurately:
A woman who lost out on a job after tweeting gender-critical views is to get a £100,000 payout after a decision from an employment tribunal.
She didn’t “lose out on” a job; she lost the job she had. She lost her job.
Ms Forstater, the founder of campaign group Sex Matters, believes biological sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.
She doesn’t “believe” sex is immutable, she knows it is. Knowing that people can’t change sex isn’t a “belief”; it’s just awareness of a reality. [Yes, philosophically speaking knowledge is justified true belief, but the BBC isn’t speaking philosophically, to put it mildly.]
Casting it as “belief” isn’t just sloppy, it’s a massive elbow on the scales.
Ms Forstater was congratulated in a tweet by Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who has courted controversy with her own statements on trans issues.
That’s a snide and stupid thing to say. We don’t “court controversy” when we reject claims that men can magically become women; we make an effort to get the truth out there.
Commenting on the July 2022 ruling, charity Stonewall said the decision did not “change the reality of trans people’s workplace protection”.
It added: “No-one has the right to discriminate against, or harass, trans people simply because they disagree with their existence and participation in society.”
Why quote Stonewall? Why insinuate that women who know men are not women want to discriminate against or harass trans people? Much less “disagree with their existence”?
That was propaganda, not journalism. It’s crapola like that that is turning my agnosticism about gender identities* into outright rejection.
As you say, Forstater is talking about basic knowledge, not speculative belief. Knowledge that is even more certain than our knowledge about gravity and evolution. (Both of which are technically “theories.”)
It spends more time with the Center for Global Development Europe and Stonewall pontificating about how this unfortunate ruling hasn’t changed their devotion to being wonderful people dedicated to making the world a better place than it does explaining the nature of Forstater’s views.
It makes it sound like Forstater and JK Rowling are shit-disturbers who got away with something.
*Humans and human brains are complicated and at this stage I still can’t confidently deny the possibility that there might be gendered brains and just as with intersex conditions (especially Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) there might be some crossing of the wires. Even still, a lot of these transwomen seem to conform to Dr. Ray Blanchard’s theories more than anything else.
“…knowledge is justified true belief…” And the facts of reality exist independently of our beliefs about them. Gender ideology defies common sense so blatantly that no deeper explanation is necessary. Believing the sky is not blue can be explained by ignorance, dishonesty, misuse of language, wishful thinking, forced compliance, or mental illness. There are probably reasons I’m unaware of, but I can’t think of any.
Stating facts is “transphobic” if the facts themselves are “transphobic.” Reality itself is “transphobic,” so we will deny reality. It reminds me of the (likely apochryphal) comment supposedly made by some Cof E bishop’s wife regarding evolution: “Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it does not become widely known.”
The problem for trans activists is that it is true that there are only two sexes, and that humans can’t change sex. Their hope is that they can confuse enough people (and intimidate the rest), that they can go on pretending that neither of these things is true. But reality doesn’t go away. It’s always right there, accessible to everyone. And it’s not even a part of reality that requires specialized knowledge and expertise to grasp, like subatomic physics or cosmology. The reality of the binary nature of sex is all around us, every day. Parents, siblings, animals, plants. The eggs on the supermarket shelves. We’re immersed in this basic biological truth that is hundreds of millions years old. In order to maintain the lies trans activism depends upon requires a constant flow of disinformation, obfuscation and bullying, and lots of willing partners to carry it out. Unfortunately, there seems to be a ready supply of these.
So we’re all caught in someone else’s game of Let’s Pretend. It’s nightmarish.
It’s at least impressive how Genderists can simultaneously talk about one thing and convince others that they’re actually talking about something else. And this despite the fact that all of their demands and barbaric, pseudoscientific surgeries are aimed at the thing they’re actually talking about.
The only explanations for not seeing the sleight of hand that come to mind are stupidity, ignorance, and doublethink.
(their, obviously)
Being caught in someone else’s fantasy is the aspect of this that has made me appreciate Kant more than I did in college. Everyone else is treated as mere means toward the happiness of the divine trans and non-binary people, which breaks the categorical imperative to treat people as ends to themselves. For all their talk about autonomy, it’s the Genderists who trample others’ humanity and dignity. Projection is kind of their signature move, though.
Which is what makes the constant accusations of imminent “trans genocide” rather ominous. It’s foreshadowing of what they’d do if they had the power to do it. There would be no “cis genocide,” but there would be incarceration and “re-education” for TERFs. Given how far trans activists have managed to get as it is with de-platforming, sacking, and insitutional capture (particularly media and law enforcement capture), one can see that it wouldn’t take very much at all to reach much more widespread inprisonment for wrongthink. Our freedoms are less inevitable and more fragile than many of us might imagine. The moral arc of the universe bends to whomever is pulling hardest.
YNNB: You’re not wrong. Genderists see themselves as righteous crusaders in a world that is actively trying to eradicate them in the same way that the Third Reich tried to eradicate the Jews. Their paradigm is one of existential warfare, which motivates a narcissistic totalism. Nothing is justified that doesn’t support them, and everything is justified that does.