Their long awaited Queerphobia Guidance
Nathan Williams at The Critic on “queerphobia”:
Last week I wrote an article about the nasty treatment people in the Green Party have faced when they have questioned the prevailing ideology on gender and sex. The exact figure depends on the question asked, but in general a majority of the public agree that biological sex is real and matters (these are known as “gender critical” or “GC” beliefs). The party appears to be calling most of the electorate “bigots”, which is not a great electoral strategy.
But on the upside, it’s such fun.
The Green Party has now issued a document that seeks to correct this, by branding almost the entire population as bigots. Their long awaited Queerphobia guidance is nine pages of near incomprehensible word salad.
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These are sensitive issues where different people will draw the dividing line in different places. It’s precisely the sort of subject where we need to feel free to speak honestly and respectfully — about, for instance, the potential harms of choking, or autoerotic asphyxiation. The guidance prohibits such a debate, however, by defining it as bigotry to question any form of sexual attraction, whilst also making it a further offence to point out the obvious dangers of having no boundary.
Listen here, choking is kink, and kink is a good thing, and it’s sacrilege to say otherwise.
At least we’re on steadier ground with familiar terms like “lesbian”, right? If only. Unsurprisingly, the word “lesbian” is here assumed to refer to anyone who is attracted to women and identifies as a woman, so it includes trans women. But in a twist I wasn’t expecting, it can also include trans men if they wish to describe themselves as lesbian. The guidance is clear that trans men are real men and indeed are male (more on that later). So, the guidance is saying that it’s possible for someone to be male, and in every sense a man, but also a lesbian.
It’s really very simple. It goes like this: whatever the good people say is right.You’re welcome.
Where things get serious is in the section on transphobia, when the document strays into territory that could lead to the party breaking the law. As you might expect, the guidance takes the most extreme line on issues of sex and gender. Whilst the question of what the word “woman” means appears to have finally been settled in the rest of the country, the Greens have jumped the gender fluid shark to redefine “male” and “female” as well.
According to the guidance, all trans women are not only “real women” but are female. Remember that many trans women — likely the majority, though there’s a lack of good data — have undergone no medical transition. They are legally and physically no different from a typical male. According to the document, though, by uttering some magic words, they have transformed their sex such that they are now female — despite having the same gametes, chromosomes, hormones and physical characteristics that they did when they were male.
Well that’s the dogma. We’re not allowed to question it. Questioning it will be greeted with rage, ostracism, punishment, contempt, disgust, shunning, loss of friends, possible loss of job and career.
When I asked one of the authors how they could justify their claim that trans women are female, I was pointed towards a website. Nothing there provided any evidence that humans, uniquely amongst mammals, are able to spontaneously change their own sex. Apparently the key line is that “bio-essentialism plays into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologies”. Personally, I think basing your politics around an obvious untruth, so that it’s the Trumpian lunatics who end up looking like the sensible ones, is what plays into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologies — but perhaps that’s just me.
A party that aspires to power is not only promoting such a belief, but suggesting that it is an offence not to believe.
Others don’t suggest, they shout it as loudly and often as they can.
As I wrote in my previous piece, the party has apparently received advice confirming that members cannot be discriminated against or censured for holding gender critical beliefs without a breach of the Equality Act (EqA).
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The legal advice confirms that members can not only have GC views but express them: for instance, saying “the majority of transwomen are intact males” is a lawful, protected statement of gender critical beliefs. The party seems to think its guidance can ignore the law — even if its own lawyers say otherwise…
It might seem bizarre that a political party would issue an anti-discrimination policy that breaks anti-discrimination law, but we’ve been here before. Last year the Liberal Democrats adopted a definition of transphobia every bit as draconian as the Green Party’s — including a prohibition on referring to a trans woman as a “biological man”
Look, it’s not that it’s illegally forbidden or anything, it’s just that it’s not allowed.
I’ve been observing a discussion, or more accurately a pile-on, on a friend’s Facebook post that dissents (very politely) from the gender dogma. It’s a sight to behold, grown-ass adults flying into verbal rages because people can’t believe that men are literally women. David Gorski is there, Matt Dillahunty is there, Hayley Stevens is there, Ashley Miller is there – all of them furiously reiterating the dogma and name-calling anyone who doesn’t submit.
The spectacle has caused me to do another round of the “could I believe it if I really tried hard enough?” routine. Nothing has changed. I still, to this day, to this minute, cannot for the life of me understand how adults can expect other adults to nod enthusiastically to the claim that sex is in people’s minds rather than their bodies. I still cannot understand how adults can expect us to agree that we can all change our sex with the power of thought. It’s an inherently outlandish claim – it’s like saying people can fly or live forever or travel back in time.
I still don’t get it. I never will. They didn’t think that themselves ten or fifteen years ago, so how do they manage to convince themselves that everyone must think it now and that everyone who fails to do so is an extremely bad person? I’ll never never never understand it.
Ah, Gorski. Science Based Medicine. Neurologica. Steven Novella.
I stopped reading that shit a long time ago. And I won’t be going back.
Yep.
For a political party whose platform and policies are ostensibly based on a scientifically informed, big-picture appreciation and understanding of Earth’s bio-geo-chemical systems and cycles, this isn’t an own-goal, it’s seppuku. How can anyone espousing this shit claim to be doing science-based anything with a straight face? Why believe they’re “following the science” on climate change when they’re not following the science on this? How could they ever be trusted with matters concerning the convservation of endangered species if they don’t know the difference between male and female organisms?
Why does this remind me so much of the Christian doctrine of Jesus being fully God and fully Man?
I still wonder if they really, really believe it. The furiousness of the response might be as much performance as anything else. They’ve convinced themselves that this is what they’re supposed to believe, and joining in on pointing out Sin in others takes the heat off them.
Every Christmas, Canada Post tells kids how to send their letters to Santa*; on Christmas Eve, NORAD dutifully tracks Santa’s progress on its radar screens. But does anyone actually deliver those letters to the North Pole? No. Do the Canadian Armed Forces or the USAF scramble jets to ensure it’s actually an old guy dressed in red, driving a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, and not a Russian bomber taking advantage of Santa’s journey to launch a sneak attack? No. It’s a story to tell the kids, all part of “Christmas magic.” If anyone in any of those organizations actually followed through and took real-world action in conformity with this publicly professed belief, they’d be fired or discharged. Well, in the case of trans activists who you’d think should know better, it’s like they’ve taken a step too far and they’re now too committed to change their stance. It might have started out as a kneejerk assent to “be kind” ; a desire to avoid being seen as rude and churlish over pronouns or some such thing. A hasty unthinking, uncritical acceptance of what you’ve been told is the proper progressive position. (I was once there myself. I shudder to think where I might have ended up…) But now the “kids” are watching; so is everyone else. It’s hard to back out or back down. They can’t be seen to have endorsed an untruth, even out of kindness, or the “spirit of the season.” They’re all in. So now they’re committed to loading the mail for delivery to the North Pole; they’re sending up a squadron to escort Santa for the duration of his flight. Or, that women can have penises and men can be lesbians. The wacky thing is, they’ve got government departments and powerfull private sector organizations and institutions joining in. They’re as committed as the individual activists to the lies and dishonesty that are at the heart of trans “rights.” So they too resort to bullying and intimidation to maintain the lie they’re bought into and in turn sold to everyone else.
Interstingly, part of the urge to go along with trans activism seems to be a belief in the child-like fragility of those whom activists claim to be “protecting.” How much is genuine concern and how much is fear of angry denuciation might be a matter of debate. The degree of power and influence the trans lobby wields is grotesquely disproportionate to the size of the “trans” population, not to mention the worthiness of their goals. They may be child-like in the immature, fantasy based nature of their beliefs, but they are far from powerless. They certainly instill a degree of fear amongst some that is reminiscent of that evinced by those charcters afraid to cross the capricious, vengefull, god-like boy child in Gerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life If they don’t want to be “wished into the cornfield”, they have to keep him happy, and pretend to be happy themselves, as they jump and bend to his every whim.
*I’ve always found it amusing that Canada Post’s postal code for letters to Santa is H0H 0H0, which is in the proper letter-number-letter, number-letter-number form that Canadian postal codes normally employ.
YNnB:
Of course, they really believe it. They just don’t know what it is. Whatever it is, though, it’s so obviously self-evident that only a bigot could fail to see its truth. They really do believe it, though, so you know they aren’t bigots.
YNnB @4,
Reminds me of one of my favorite Doonesbury strips.
Me too, and the sad thing is that I once liked David Gorski. Same thing with Pharyngula.
So did I.
I think it is worth noting that the people who endorse this malicious and clearly false belief are largely the same people who have decided that an organization can cross a border and butcher 1200 civilians, and somehow be the good guys.