If they hold a certificate
Sometimes it just looks like sheer unadulterated sadism. For the sake of it.
Male officers identifying as female are allowed to intimately search women if they hold a gender recognition certificate
Women’s rights campaigners are suing the British Transport Police (BTP) over guidance that allows [male] transgender officers to strip-search women.
Why would they do that? Why would the higher ups lean back in their chairs and blow cigar smoke at the ceiling and decide yes indeed, we will allow men who pretend to be women to strip-search women? Other than sadism?
The policy, revealed by The Telegraph, allows male staff identifying as female to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC).
A certificate doesn’t matter. A certificate doesn’t make a man a woman. Male staff could have a billion certificates per officer and it wouldn’t change anything. What sex you are isn’t a matter of what piece of paper you have, it’s a matter of what kind of body you have. Certificates are just plain beside the point.
The most a certificate can do is certify that this fella here really strongly feels that he feels like a woman. That’s nowhere near enough to make it ok for him to stick his hand up a woman.
Campaigners wrote to Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi last month calling for the advice to be removed on the basis that it breaches human rights.
But the force refused and now faces a lengthy legal battle with activists who say the guidance means women risk being subjected to “undignified and humiliating treatment”.
Apparently that’s what the higher-ups want.
Sex Matters penned a letter before claim, also known as a letter before action, as opposition mounted over the BTP policy.
But the force doubled down, rejecting the claim that the guidance “exposes women to a particular risk of behaviour”.
The force wrote: “As has been outlined previously, Parliament has imposed stringent safeguards in respect of the ability of an individual to obtain a GRC. It is not enough simply that a man identifies themselves as a female to obtain one.”
Ugh god. I am so sick of this shit. A certificate does not change a penis into a rose or a kitten or a fluffy sweater. There are no “safeguards” that make it okie doke for a man to force a woman to let him shove a hand up her for non-medical purposes.
If you ask me, I think that all this trans bullshit has become a sadistic game wrapped up inside a sick joke.
Even if you buy all the word magic stuff, even then, you still have to know that there are women who don’t. Therefore, you know that this will forcibly subject those women to being searched by people whom they believe to be men. You seriously have to believe that it is morally good to force that upon women. For whose benefit, then, is this policy?
What does gender identity have to do with strip-searches? What’s the connection? Indeed, why should this be a factor for segregation in any situation, be it prison sentences, athletic performances, or anything else? What could be the relationship between these things and a vaguely-defined property of the mind that does not reliably mean anything specific about an individual?
I can’t think of any practical reason to separate athletes or washroom users according to gender identity. It’s a parameter that seems completely, thoroughly irrelevant – not to mention once again that its lack of any consistent, concrete implication makes it virtually useless. The only purpose I can see for gender identity-based segregation is to “affirm” people’s gender identities. In effect, since they are unverifiable, this amounts to affirming nothing, based on nothing. Being incarcerated differently depending on gender identity is about as useful as being pronominalized differently on that basis.
Not to mention all the logistic problems. Keeping in mind that there’s no real bound on what gender identities can be, if they’re to be a basis for determining who can strip-search who, can transfeminine autigender androgynous individuals expect to be strip-searched by transfeminine autigender androgynous officers? If not, why not? Of course it would be wildly inconvenient, but I do believe it would be important if one is to stick to the concept. And what of people who don’t believe they have such a thing within their brains? Where do they fit in this system? Personally, not really having any deep-seated feeling of who I truly am or whatever, I often find myself wondering if I’m allowed to use the bathroom at all.
The problem with this decision from the BTP is a dual one: an important, legitimately useful form of segregation is being removed, and a completely absurd and frivolous one is being introduced instead. Whereas sex matters, gender identity does not – and not merely in the sense that it doesn’t trump sex. Even on its own, it’s just not a very useful categorization.
Or, to quote Helen Joyce, “it’s a price they’re willing for others to pay”. It seems to me like there’s a lot of that going on. A price they’re willing for others to pay for what? For keeping their jobs, for not having their names pulled through the dirt all over the internet, for getting along with their peers, for signaling tribal loyalty, for ideological consistency, for protecting their “investment”, for saving face etc. etc. No need for any particular concern for what’s morally good.
I’m sure we’re all familiar with Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. Google sums it up as “rather than questioning people’s intentions, question their competence”. It’s the kind of nice liberal sentiment that gives nice liberals a warm fuzzy feeling: People generally mean well, they’re honestly trying to do the right thing as they see it, they’re doing the best they can with the information that’s available to them, they have just been “misinformed” * etc.
As much as I see the appeal, I’m increasingly inclined to think the opposite is the case. I don’t deny that people tend to get into various forms of activism or advocacy in the first place out of some mixture of (perhaps misguided, but still) “good intentions”, sloppy thinking, intellectual laziness, group conformity, a sense that it’s “the right [ingroup] thing to do” etc. But once they have made a sufficiently large investment in the movement, the ideology, the cause, the belief system etc., other, far less admirable, motives (see my first paragraph) gradually come to supplant the original noble cause, and now there is no longer any limit to the price they’re willing for others to pay to save face. As I keep saying, the “good intentions” excuse can only get you off the hook for so long. There are no brownie points for doing the right thing “as you see it” if the way you see it is based on self-serving motivated reasoning rather than an honest effort to find out. Once again William Clifford’s On the Ethics of Belief is essential reading.
As I have said many times susceptibility to extremist ideologies and crazy belief systems has very little to do with general brain power. E.g. nobody is better at picking apart Christian apologetics than Muslim apologists, and Christian apologists return the favor with the same surgical precision. They just don’t apply the same standard of rational analysis and hyper-critical scrutiny to their own beliefs. Indeed the word “apologetics” is virtually synonymous with motivated reasoning. Religious apostates are often the best at picking apart their former beliefs, thus demonstrating that they always had the cognitive tools for doing so. And once again, I know for an absolute fact that many of the people currently determined to defend gender ideology to the death, used to say the kind of things for which they would now label others as “TERFs” and “transphobes” and go out of their way to destroy their lives. Having the cognitive abilities to see through the flaws in an argument doesn’t get you very far if you’re not motivated to use them that way. Once again, the problem is precisely the motivation part, not the competence part.
Obviously we should all be wary of becoming too morally judgmental (“There but for
the grace of Goddumb luck go i” etc.). On the other hand there’s also a risk of becoming too condescending and treating others as ignorant children who just “don’t know any better”. Once again the tendency among liberals to talk and act as if Trump’s followers were supporting him by mistake, because they just didn’t know how awful he truly was, comes to mind. It’s not at all obvious to me that the latter is less of a problem than the former.* Back in the late oughties a secular humanist organization in my country ran a critical thinking campaign called (the Norwegian equivalent of) “Nobody likes to be fooled”. This didn’t sit well with me even at the time. In my experience people don’t hold crazy beliefs because they’ve been misinformed (i.e. fooled). Instead they actively and selectively seek out the misinformation to justify what they’re already determined to believe.
(This is a reply to both Nullius’ and Bjarte’s comments, which I don’t exactly disagree with, but which I think elide a fundamental point, as well as an answer to Mosnae’s question.)
Because trans ideology is a fundamentally moral enterprise and as such has minimal concerns for any facts or indeed any actual human reality. And as a moral enterprise it is fundamentally social and thus ultimately always resolves its conflicts not by reference to actual human needs (even if it sometimes claims to do so) but by deference to (some understanding of) social status. And men in dresses, however much they are identified as women, and as having always been women, retain their male status. (Apparently a male infant gets an irrevocable certificate of male status at some point that mysterious ceremony at birth during which they are are assigned male. The actual birth certificate, however, can be altered. This certificate, like a bad tattoo on the soul, is forever)
And why is such a blatant absurdity not ignored but rather celebrated and indeed elevated to the status of some sort of divine truth?
Well, from my admittedly heretical point of view it’s because we have taken something that was created during the enlightenment, and out of the trauma following the continent-wide devastation of the Thirty Years War, and made it our model of “morality”, that is, of soft social control. That thing is, of course, the idea of the sovereignty of individual conscience.
I want to be clear here, that I am not, of course, claiming that morality didn’t exist prior to the invention of conscience. Morality has always existed, but for most of human history it was religious or the religion itself – the mandate of heaven in all its forms. What needs to be explained is how a fundamentally religious concept can persist in the minds of thoroughly secular or even irreligious people. And to my mind, understanding the (false) idea of the sovereignty of individual conscience is the key.
In this model the individual obtains a certain status by subscribing to one of the available religious doctrines. Obviously atheism wasn’t available as an option, which I mention only as an illustration of the fundamental limitations of this approach. But once the doctrine is accepted and the status established, the actual way it is applied in a person’s life is entirely a matter of an individual’s conscience. (There are limits, of course. Anyone who pisses off too many people who themselves possess status, or just one person of great status, will quickly find themself out of the club on their arse.)
Now, that might work well in a religious setting where, after all, everything is just made up, but it’s a horrible model for everything else. Remember, the whole purpose of elevating the individual conscience was to get it out of the realm of politics. But here we have a model where a person gains social status, which has a strong, but complex and perilous, relationship to social power and by gaining that status correctly understands that they are authorised to act on behalf of society and in the world (that is to punish, which is to say, harm other people). “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, or the offices of the Guardian, as the case may be.” And that’s not supposed to be a problem? So we have people acting under a societal mandate but when challenged they will claim the privilege of individual conscience. Or rather they will claim both the mandate of society and individual conscience, seeing no conflict in serving two masters. And morality like religion has developed complex mechanisms for simultaneously legitimating and concealing contradictions,so they may well be entirely sincere in their protestations of innocence.
In that it’s a lot like the problem of cranks and conspiracy theorists that plagues the online world. Perhaps it’s the same problem. Doing your own research, thinking for yourself, will get you exactly nowhere. Because nothing we have made was created by individual effort. When The Creature finally comes into the world, it will not be the creation of a lone scientist working in a remote castle but a product of The Frankenstein Company (sole proprietor, the estate of Elon Musk). And that’s the problem. We cannot confront 21st-century problems, let alone those of the twenty-second century (only three quarters of a century away, remember) using social mechanisms created in the 17th and 18th centuries and with their roots firmly planted in the long and oppressive history of religious thought.
Just some apocalyptic thoughts to take you into the new year.
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