If those regards are kind…
Part of a response from Amnesty International to a complaint:
First…
For example, the letter asks for media and politicians to not give legitimacy to those spreading vitriol or misinformation. This is being framed as a call to take away their political representation, which anyone reading the letter will clearly see is not what it means.
Ahem. Cough cough cough. FROM THE LETTER:
We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation for those that share bigoted beliefs, that are aligned with far right ideologies and seek nothing but harm and division.
See? I’ll repeat, with emphasis added.
We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation
The letter SAID “legitimate representation.” It did not say “to not give legitimacy.” It said what it said, not what it did not say, yet this “Charlie” says it said what it did not say and blames the complainant for complaining of what it DID SAY. That takes quite a lot of gall, or just plain stupidity. What “Charlie” meant was: “Amnesty was talking about legitimacy as opposed to literal representation, we apologize for wording it so badly.” Wording things badly is just a mistake, and easy to apologize for, but instead “Charlie” lied about what Amnesty said and rebuked the complainer for objecting to what Amnesty did in fact say. This is not what one might call acting in good faith.
Second.
Allowing self-determination of our bodies is a basic principle of feminism and human rights.
No it isn’t.
Not least it isn’t because it’s not clear what that even means. In general, sure, it’s nobody else’s business what people do with their bodies, but there are limits. We can’t use our bodies to beat people up (except in self-defense). People who are delirious due to fever or cocaine may be protected from themselves if they start to saw a finger off. But more to the point, that’s not even the issue – the issue is forcing everyone else to agree that our bodies are those of the opposite sex even though they aren’t. That’s not “self-determination of our bodies,” it’s interference with the minds of everyone but us. Sure, decide your body is a woman’s body, knock yourself out, but you can’t force me to agree with you, and you can’t force anyone else to agree with you.
And finally of course the claim that genitals have nothing to do with a person’s sex aka “gender” is just childish.
Amnesty has been taken over by children, children besotted by fatuous ideas about sex and gender, which they’re forcing on all of us. It’s a mess.
It is the oldest trick in the book.
Amnesty has been targeted by a group who clearly see it as a useful vehicle for their own special interest agenda, which they further pursue after entering it by making Amnesty increasingly about THEM, until its original purpose is lost sight of. Transgender ideology, slipped in as a card from the bottom of some deck, ‘justifies’ the whole business, until the claimed right of westerners born with male genitalia to use dunnies intended for the exclusive use females is equated with the fight for liberation of those jailed for their political or religious beliefs by the tin-pot dictators and totalitarian regimes of the rest of the world.
Yeah, right. Got it.
https://www.amnesty.org.au/how-it-works/our-history/
On 10 December, World Human Rights Day, the first Amnesty candle was lit in the church of St-Martin-in-the-Fields, London.
I used to be a member of Amnesty and thought concentrating on prisoners of conscience was a very fine and effective aim for an organisation.
They have now gone all ways. Remember them championing CAGE – an Islamist organisation – and hounding out Gita Sahgal for objecting to this. That was when a chunk of the left saw Islamism as a mere response to racism. The stupidest of them saw it as a kind of quasi socialist force.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/terror-apologists-group-cage-likely-to-lose-support-of-amnesty-international-10079914.html
An organisation with a simple, focused aim can appeal from the right to left. However such organisations are always prone to take over from special interest groups, from the barmier left, and lose sight of what their initial aim was. They ditch their own credibility for a passing fashion.
“There is no such thing as a biologically male/female body…” (Talking about sex.)
“… a person’s genitalia doesn’t determine their gender.” (Swoosh — talking about gender.)
By playing Equivocation Tennis they manage to make it sound like the Gender Critical are people who “seek to force people into one gender or the other.” Wtsf.
I wonder if it is less about being captured, and more about mission creep?
It was a grand idea to have letter-writing campaigns, but who writes letters anymore?
It was a grand idea to fight for the rights and freedom of political prisoners, but these days they are “the other” or imprisoned by regimes we support.
Perhaps faced with a declining interest in its core purpose, and the commensurate drop in donations, Amnesty became a follower instead of a leader, an organisation in search of a new, better likely to donate, audience.
a person’s genitalia doesn’t determine their gender
True, but what if we don’t want to classify people by their gender?
Colin, then you’re a TERF, a transphobe, an eraser of humanity, a killer of puppies, and the most despicable person ever born.
There, I think I covered all the bases.
I think you are onto something there Colin. I mean, there are so many alternative ways, each with its own functionality. White / other; black / other, brindle / other, tall / other, short / other… I could go on. Classifying by sex, not gender (which latter is reserved for French verbs) we get male / other, female / other…
This is definitely paydirt. A bonanza, no less….!
You know what’s really not a thing? Male and female minds. If male and female bodies are not a thing, then neither are “men” and “women”. If having a biologically male or female body doesn’t make us “men” and “women”, then nothing does. If words like “man” and “woman” don’t mean “adult biological male” and biologically “adult biological female” respectively, they don’t mean anything at all.
Bjarte: @#8:
What we lack is a control. If only we had one, we could do a controlled experiment or two… hundred.
The control IMHO would be someone who has grown up in total ignorance of what sex is, of what sex they are; and also with no idea that there there are bodies other than the kind he/she has. A bit hard to organise that outside of a desert island situation, with just a mother and daughter OR father and son on the island.
I once made the naive and hare-brained mistake of buying my 7-year old daughter a Meccano set for Christmas, when she was expecting a doll. Trying to avoid steering her into a sex-role and all that 1970s stuff.
Guess what the decibel level was on Christmas morn at the point on the roof where Santa had parked his sleigh the night before. Santa was by that stage back at the North Pole, Greenland or wherever. But he would have heard the indignant uproar all the same.
(Fortunately, I picked one up for a reasonable price in a post-Christmas sale.)
Sure, Omar, but there are actually some pretty good studies out there that fail to show that gender divide until about the age of 3. And while you may try to bring your child up gender-neutral, that could only work if your child is in a bubble where it is just you and her…I learned the hard way. No matter what I tried to teach my son about roles or other things, there is always television, the computer, the grandparents, the books and movies, the school system, the day care…many of which are subtly or not-so-subtly gendered.
Right now, there is little to no evidence that actually supports the existence of male and female minds. There is a lot of evidence to support the existence of male and female bodies.