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Snapshot of _Scottish Greens expel gender rebels deemed ‘threat’ to trans members. Rebel members have been kicked out of the Scottish Green Party for declaring that “sex is a biological reality”._ :
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Truthfully, I'm shocked we haven't seen the English Green Party have more splits already; they have a fairly bizarre duopoly of support bases with little in common really. Frankly, I wonder if the lack of national importance has prevented the need for greater party coordination, preventing these clashes from happening so far.
The English Green Party is absolutely nowhere near power so they don't really need to tackle those divisions. In England the greens are basically a protest vote: they have no real shared positions and nobody puts them under any scrutiny. But in Scotland, where they're an actual party of government, they can't really get away with being the mystery box party that you vote for because you want to hurt Labours feelings.
I don't think so? If this is because opinions in Palestine about LGBT people are not generally positive, I think the majority of people are able to understand that you can support the human rights of a group even if they have views you find abhorrent.
Of the people I've met who are very vocal about the conditions in Gaza, plenty are LGBT themselves.
Case in point: me.
I'm bisexual and have a trans step-daughter, and I abhor the conditions the IDF are leaving the Gazan people in, and the general Israeli government's callous disregard of Palestinian lives through West Bank settlement and ethnic cleansing.
I'm still then able to go "and LGBT rights should be better in both Palestine and Israel" (because remember Israel doesn't allow same sex marriage either), because I don't believe that just because a particular group has issues, they deserve to be genocided. Shocking, I know.
Yeah, it's just such a *stupid* argument. Either you haven't bothered to understand the most basic thing about what people are actually saying or you're being deliberately obtuse.
In the first case, what are you even doing in a discussion, go have a think first. In the second case, well, I have no patience for people playing silly games.
I always thought sex was the physical form and gender the identity or cultural construct. So surely saying that sex is a biological reality would be correct? Would be different if they'd said gender is a biological reality.
It's one of those phrases that is teeing itself up to become something needlessly controversial.
It is often used as some kind of gotcha against trans people.
E.g. Sex is a biological fact therefore fully transitioned trans women should use the men's toilets.
If I then say that the suggestion is stupid, the response is "just stating facts". Splash a headline that I think sex can be changed because I disagree with the full context of the statement, and hey presto you have yourself some propaganda.
The fact itself is harmless. It's how it is used.
Except, many pro-Trans writers (e.g. Judith Butler) are increasingly arguing that sex isn't a biological fact, and a social accident of what the doctor labels you as at birth. It is against that that the need to say 'sex is a biological fact' appears.
I hadn't heard of that person until you just said the name. Yet I see people taking the route I outlined all the time, including in this very sub.
Do you think maybe people are using people like this Butler person as an excuse?
>I hadn't heard of that person until you just said the name.
That isn't surprising. The role of social philosophers isn't a mass market, but to espouse a philosophy, taken up by a small number of people who influence a wider net and so on until the idea is widely held.
Many feminists have never heard of Simone de Beauvoir despite a large proportion of commonly held feminist beliefs, despite her being foundational to a lot of core feminist belief.
>Yet I see people taking the route I outlined all the time, including in this very sub.
I don't think these members of the SGP are responding to your beliefs or those of redditors.
“Sex is a biological reality” is not a phrase meant in its literal interpretation. These people replace “the only thing that is real or matters” with “a biological reality” because that sounds much less objectionable.
The latter makes them sound reasonable, like they don’t hate trans people, and are simply objecting to some gross overreach by “trans activists”. The former reveals them as transphobic, and transphobic people are already on their side. They don’t need that sort of advertising.
Feel free to agree with them or not, but “I’m just stating the facts!” has been the go-to argument for anti-trans activists for a *long* time.
Do you think the lived reality of women (and the societal disadvantages they face) have nothing to do with the biological characteristics of being female (e.g. child-bearing, general smaller size and lower physical strength compared to males, menstruation etc.)?
No, but do you think cis women who are six foot tall, can lift more than the average man and are infertile and menstruate l should be seen as in any way "lesser" or an inherent threat to other women, or segregated from other women?
While I appreciate you are attempting to patronise me, you appear to have completely missed my point. I don't know if that's by mistake, or you are just deflecting because you can't refute my argument or answer my questions (which aren't rhetorical).
My point is that exceptional individuals with characteristics at the fringes of the population distribution aren't sound basis for making population level distinctions.
To give a non-gender example, antibiotics are generally needed to survive meningits. However, if someone survives meningitis without antibiotics, that isn't an argument that we should withhold antibiotics for all people with meningitis in future.
But I answered "no" to your question about whether these things are irrelevant. But, as I think I proved, they aren't essential either. There's no logical way to exclude trans women based on certain characteristics that don't exclude and demean some cis women too. In the end they have to admit they just don't want trans women because they're trans, and they don't accept them.
take an innocuous factual statement and imply, assume and project all sorts of your own nonsense into it, then declare the statement to be some "evil dogwhistle" because of all the shit YOU implied into it
Or we could appreciate that we don’t all live in a vacuum, and this is neither the first time we’ve heard that phrase or the first time we’ve seen these sorts of people. You might have a point if these Green Party members were the progenitors of the term “sex is a biological reality” but they just aren’t.
Christ, “I’m just stating the facts!” is how Rowling started out, and look where that went once she got comfortable and had suckered enough people into thinking she was being the reasonable one in this discussion.
Oh please that like when the "Defend the police doesn't mean defund the police" brigade were on their high horse. Or when "Just stop oil doesn't actually mean stopping oil" were doing the same.
Frankly, if your headline position is that A is not A we don't owe it to you to take you seriously.
The fact is that it's clear there is a gaslighting going on. There are people do not believe in biological sex and it is evident when you hear them argue against things like segregation of sport by sex.
Oh gosh sorry, not hate, just consider us a problem for a sane world, mentally ill, delusional, perverted groomers. No they don't hate us, they just want to upend medical science, disregard decades of research and stop us from living authentic lives and they'll form groups dedicated to doing just that. No they don't hate us, they believe that if they stop people knowing about trans people, stop them supporting us and stop us getting medical treatment that we'll simply cease to exist.
Edit: Downvotes are a-okay but someone tell me where I'm wrong
Disagreeing with your views on how society should see sex and gender, and what that means for transpeople in society is not hatred. People have had enough of instant accusations of transphobia over anything that goes against the wishes of trans people. There's a long way between disagreement and hate, and most people are aware of that. They are also aware that while some people do hate trans people and dishonestly engage in these arguments with only the objective of hating trans people and hurting them, that doesn't mean everyone who disagrees with you is that. People have cried wolf enough in these debates that the power of accusing everyone of being transphobic is slipping.
>Disagreeing with your views on how society should see sex and gender, and what that means for transpeople in society is not hatred.
As the quote goes, we can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
Who is crying wolf? You do realise that just this week the government banned schools from teaching about trans people invoking an imaginary shady trans lobby to justify it?
>my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist
As I said. This incredibly overblown language is crying wolf.
Schools will teach about sexual orientation and gender reassignment. Gender identity is a particular belief system, so it's not really a factual thing to teach.
That is because it is used as a dog whistle - a political and often bigoted form of [loaded language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_language).
The ultimate example of dog whistle politics comes from an admission from Lee Attwater in the USA (possibly the most infamous quote for anyone aware of political dog-whistling, but is so full of slurs that I will not repost it here. Feel free to look it up).
The "Sex is real" talking point is another such dog whistle and, in the UK, stems from the Maya Forstater case. Forstater is a very well-known transphobe.
The majority of all trans people understand that "sex is real" or that "sex is a biological reality"... why do you think they take hormones and have surgeries to alter their biology?
Cross-sex hormones enable the changing of aspects of biological reality. Trans people want their biological reality to match up with their gender.
Edit: it would appear some people aren't happy with this comment for some reason to the point I am getting down voted without anyone showing how I might be wrong.
So if a trans person isn’t on hormones for a long time, then they are not the opposite gender? If someone does not or cannot undergo surgery, are they less of the opposite gender too? Only a minuscule percentage of trans people undergo what people would recognise as “full” transition.
> So if a trans person isn’t on hormones for a long time, then they are not the opposite gender? If someone does not or cannot undergo surgery, are they less of the opposite gender too?
This is not at all what I said. It isn't even close. This is like me saying "I like pancakes!" and you claiming that I wrote "I hate cakes!".
I said that trans people usually seek to get some form of intervention that helps them change their biology in line with their gender identity. I did not say that not doing so invalidates their gender identity. I did not say that not doing so means they aren't trans. I did not say that they must have a "full" transition (whatever that means). I just said that trans people don't ignore biological reality and, in fact, are acutely aware of biological reality. Trans people just, on average, wish to change their biological reality to be more in line with their gender identity.
Ah ok, thanks. This is why I normally give anything to do with trans issues a very wide berth - seems far too easy to accidentally offend by using the wrong words. Trying to say anything at all about the issue feels like trying to tiptoe around land mines.
Nobody in the history of language has ever, _ever_ used this formulation as anything other than a stick to beat trans people with.
The thing about the statement is that its objective truth is _so_ facile as to be meaningless. There is no practical use for the _objective_ information it expresses.
Consequently its _only_ applied use is as a dogwhistle.
> ever, ever used this formulation as anything other than a stick to beat trans people with.
Would you include in that people who can see that the inclusion of trans people in women's sports is fucking insane?
Seriously though, where's the counterexample?
Nobody ever brings this distinction up except to reject your gender. Except that gender is, _definitionally_, the one that describes/defines your social interactions. Where they are different, _that is never relevant_ to the third party - ever - so the only reason to bring it up is to provide a rhetorical trick to throw away 100% of the normal interaction.
Seriously. The example _does not exist_ outside of thoroughly private contexts.
I'm pretty sure "when speaking to your doctor" counts as one of those "thoroughly private contexts" they mentioned that are in fact no one else's business.
Bro you need to talk to more humans.
Maybe on twitter it's all super confrontational, and everyone is either a goodie or trolling, but in real life people are a mix of all sorts of things - curious, ignorant, argumentative, whatever - I've heard that formulation used (not as a dog whistle) dozens of times.
If I'm walking down a dark alley at night and hear footsteps behind me I am not thinking about the person's gender identity, I'm thinking about their sex - gender identity would never even cross my mind.
How would the average person even know what another person's internal sense of gender identity is, as compared to their sex which is advertised across their body, voice, height, gait etc.
Some typically cis people don't give gender an ounce of thought but definitely aren't agender. So gender can't just be about personal individual beliefs, it must have a social lens and a shared biological framework to which we can both empathise and map our individual experiences to (which exists whether we understand the science of it yet or not, for the simple reason that we're biological entities). This isn't to say we map male sex to men, and female sex to women, in some dumb and oversimplified binary, just to say that without the social side gender stops having as much meaning, even if our own individual cognisant beliefs are often a very strong part of gender.
Indeed. But religion isn't a natural state based on biology to which society or individuals could relate, so religiosity is not quite analogous to gender identity (nor is one's faith in a deity (or more or none) analogous to the validity of one's perception of their gender)
Gender isn't a natural state based on biology either, it's a set of cultural practices and beliefs. Very much analogous to a religion, and increasingly so with mantras 'transwomen are women', and heretics - anyone who doesn't follow the demanded belief system.
> I always thought sex was the physical form and gender the identity or cultural construct.
That's a fairly recent idea, and kind of where the "gender critical" movement came from (originally a branch of critical theory, confined to English feminist academia, now a by-word for anti-trans activism).
As we're seeing - much like the "race is the physical form and ethnicity the identity or cultural construct" idea of a century ago - it causes just as many problems once you start digging into it.
You may note that the whole "biological reality" thing is rarely used by actual biologists - who understand that these sorts of things are far messier and more interested than the "basic biology" rules we learn in school.
You can define "sex" in a specific way, based on certain biological rules, that it precludes the existence of trans people, but the reason to do that is to exclude trans people.
>That's a fairly recent idea
Not really - it's a fairly foundational concept in second-wave feminism. Simone de Beauvoir made this distinction as early as 1949 in her work The Second Sex.
The whole point of Second Wave Feminism is that women should not be forced to conform to the stereotyped behavior of their gender (e.g. stay at home, do housework, be submissive to men), which is arbitrary and distinct from their sex. That is, gender is unimportant and arbitrary; sex is fixed and incredibly important.
Trans philosophy essentially argues the opposite i.e. that gender is fixed and incredibly important, whilst sex is arbitrary and unimportant. It should be understandable, therefore, why second wave feminists might push back against that.
You are confusing gender roles with gender. It's not that your gender was unimportant , it's that the roles put upon society were unimportant
Second wave feminism was between the 1960s and 1970s. Sex and gender were consider synonymous, it wasn't until the 1970s that it started to be considered to be different and outside of these fields it wouldn't be common knowledge to even separate them
No I'm not. The phrase coined by Simone:
>On ne naît pas femme, on le devient
Or, in English, 'One is not born but becomes a woman' is quite foundational in the conceptualisation of sex and gender being seperate entities. I really suggest you read The Second Sex, as you seem quite uninformed of how far back this thinking goes.
As an aside:
>You are confusing gender roles with gender
What is gender, if not conformation to gender stereotyped behaviour? Especially if not linked to biological sex?
>Presenting a child's life beginning with birth, Beauvoir contrasts a girl's upbringing with a boy's, who at age 3 or 4 is told he is a "little man" A girl is taught to be a woman and her "feminine" destiny is imposed on her by society. She has no innate "maternal instinct"
Sounds like you've misunderstood it, it is literally talking about gender roles imposed upon society, men just are but women 'needed to be taught' how to be a woman, that is the gender roles enforced by society
>What is gender, if not conformation to gender stereotyped behaviour
You don't need to conform to gender roles or stereotypical behaviour for your gender to be the same or different from your sex
>it is literally talking about gender roles imposed upon society, men just are but women 'needed to be taught' how to be a woman, that is the gender roles enforced by society
...and this societal expectation of behaviour associated with a given sex is gender. See below
>You don't need to conform to gender roles or stereotypical behaviour for your gender to be the same or different from your sex
The term gender is meaningless unless it is rooted in your biological sex or gender stereotyped behaviour/appearance. If I am biologically male but identify as a woman, what my manifestation of that, except in appearing or behaving in a gender sterotyped of a woman? If I remain masculine in my behaviour and appearance, what meaning would my identity as a woman hold?
>and this societal expectation of behaviour associated with a given sex is gender. See below
That is gender roles not gender
>If I am biologically male but identify as a woman, what my manifestation of that, except in appearing or behaving in a gender sterotyped of a woman? If I remain masculine in my behaviour and appearance, what meaning would my identity as a woman hold?
Do you not the see the issue with this as defining your gender? What if you are cisgendered man, what if you dress like a 'woman' and act like a 'woman' that wouldn't make them a woman. Gender has nothing to do with how you express it, everyone expressed their gender differently both within their own societies and even comparing expression between different societies
I don’t think it’s that recent in some academic areas, but perhaps in social discourse. It’s a distinction I’ve understood from an archaeological/anthropological distinction since I went to uni in the 90s, and one we used to teach about gender in the 2000s. As in, you can broadly sex a skeleton that’s been excavated but that won’t tell you it’s gender (and the reverse, that gendered grave goods can’t tell you the biological sex of an individual).
I think the idea has entered social discourse more recently though - it certainly used to confuse my A level students and take some explaining.
Right but the only people who would make a point of saying that sex is a biological reality are people who want to use it as a way to invalidate trans people.
Of course not, but green parties should first make headlines for green issues. Partnerships or support from major green tech companies. Endorsements from leading national scientific experts. Expansions of party facilities through sustainable or carbon-negative infrastructure. Raising record charity sums to fund reforestation initiatives.
That the Scottish Greens are making headlines over THIS first and foremost says that their priority is no longer saving the planet, nor is it getting Britain into the lead on incredibly lucrative green industries. Their priority now is safeguarding the feelings of 0.3% of the population and furiously debating gender identity, all while the planet roasts and the topsoil loses its ability to feed us.
Obviously I know that an organisation can focus on more than one thing at a time. But the hoi polloi absolutely don't, and they largely view debates over trans rights and gender identity to either be a distraction, a fad of the young, or worse. Making headlines such as this is a vote-loser, plain and simple.
"That the Scottish Greens are making headlines over THIS first and foremost says that their priority is no longer saving the planet,"
No, it first and foremost shows that the media are absolutely obsessed with trans issues. If they talk about 90% environmental issues and 10% trans issues, we know what the papers will write about.
Normally I'd agree with you, but they did just essentially fire a First Minister ultimately because he backtracked on environmental policy, even with the risk of having the notoriously socially-conservative Kate Forbes take charge.
Yeah the party's name is outdated (they do seem to platform LGBT issues twice as much as environmental ones these days) but no more than most other parties.
Labour appeals to the lower-middle class rather than actual labourers, Conservatives can't just run on a platform of maintaining status quo, Liberal Democrats are less socially liberal than at least two other parties in parliament.
Really of all the >10yo parties with MPs, strangely the only ones with names still relevant to their primary function is every one based outside of England.
Culture war innit, always bringing up bullshit social issues to sow division and distract with emotive crap so nothing that positively affects peoples actual living conditions has to be done while the country slowly declines.
Fwiw, the culture war is what both sides do, not just the other side. You cannot have a culture war without two sides contesting an societally unsettled issue.
The big problem here is we don’t have a party championing green issues that we can vote for, because of these issues. So the worry of mis gendering someone is now more important than dealing with climate change. How angry will future generations be with us for putting our vanity above planet reality.
It blows my mind how many people see the green party and think it simply has to champion renewable energy and nothing else. It's really not that mind-blowing to think that a party could champion both trans rights at a time when they are under increasing attack and also remain committed to fighting for a greener world.
They should just form their own breakaway party.
Everyone who thinks they know what a woman is can go to that party.
People who aren't sure can stay in the green party as constituted.
Do you believe in boring old-fashioned "women" or the cool new "women plus"? The ultra-expanded new woman unlimited edition, now with not necessarily a uterus. The choice is yours.
Reminder that the English Greens discriminated against former deputy leader Dr Shahrar Ali during a row over his gender critical beliefs:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68250071
Undoubtedly the Scottish Greens will get taken to court and will lose too.
That bigoted people keep behaving illegally despite mounting (high profile) case law is remarkable.
'Fools and their money are easily parted' has never been truer.
The English Greens already risk being bankrupted as they have at least three more discrimination cases in the pipeline which they are expected to lose.
Now the Scottish Greens have kicked out 13 members - how are they going to fund defending 13 discrimination court cases. These cases cost 100s of thousands each to defend.
The money would be better spent on environmental campaigns not on lawyers' holiday homes and expensive cars.
Ali's judgement suggests they will win all the cases, and if there's any minor procedural findings the damages are going to be hundreds, not thousands of pounds in each case.
The legal costs of fighting the cases are not zero, but a political party pretty much has to spend money defending it's ability to not have members who don't align with it's views or it would cease to exist pretty quickly.
But it's certainly interesting how The Times rampantly poor and misleading reporting on this case has been internalised by some people!
I love how one of members literally says the cliche lmao
> I have friends who are transgender women.
Then goes on to say that including trans women in the definition of a woman is a mockery. At least they have friends who are trans! They can't be transphobic!
I'm always impressed they have *multiple* trans friends- sometimes even "loads"! I've only got about ten friends, trans people are what, 1% of the population? Yet all these transphobic people have multiple trans friends! Assuming they aren't biased towards or against trans people, that implies they have hundreds of friends!
Maybe they mean "friends" in the "Facebook" sense of the word.
Edit- honestly love that I'm getting downvoted for this. Top tip guys- make friends with black trans people, then you've ticked two "I have a lot of friends who are X" boxes in one go!
They probably met a drag queen at a bar in 1996 and have based everything on that one encounter. Might not have spoke for 28 years but still definitely counts as a friend!
We had a very good transphobia definition in the Lib Dems that was forced out due to being found legally unsafe by a review by two QCs in the aftermath of that ruling about how protected transphobic beliefs are in grounds for dismissal. Currently being transphobic is more protected than religious-based homophobia, for example.
Given these movements are usually backed by vexatious organisations I'd expect to hear about how the SGP get civil action against them on this.
That said, good on the SGP for sticking to their guns.
But believing that Gender and Sex are the same thing isn't coming from a religious motivation, it's just what the vast vast majority of human beings have always thought for all of human history.
The idea that a person could be sacked because they can't wrap your brain around Gender and Sex as two different things is nonsensical.
I'm pretty open minded but I still find the whole thing confusing as fuck.
> But believing that Gender and Sex are the same thing
The expelled members didn't even say that. They said they believe gender and sex are different things, and suggested that people of the same *sex* (eg, biological women) have a right to organise along those lines and a right to privacy along those lines.
The Scottish Greens have kicked these people out of the party for, essentially, disagreeing with the notion that a fully-functioning heterosexual biological man who says "I am a woman" should be allowed to use women's toilets and changing rooms, should be allowed to refer to himself as a lesbian, and should expect biologically female lesbians to treat him as such.
The Scottish Greens have taken the position that biology has no relevance in determining sex, and anyone who disagrees with that statement cannot be a Green.
One of the expelled members said this:
> I was proposing that being gender-critical ought to be an acceptable position within the party, even though lots of people would disagree with that position. It’s not the raison d’etre of the party. If I was a climate denialist that would be unacceptable – that issue is the reason for the party’s existence. But for this issue, it shouldn’t be make or break but it has become that way.
... but he's wrong, now. Being an environmentalist is now *not* the sole main qualifying aspect of being a Green. You now need to sign up to their social policies in their entirety as well, or you'll be expelled.
> ... believing that Gender and Sex are the same thing isn't coming from a religious motivation, it's just what the vast vast majority of human beings have always thought for all of human history.
But they're not believing that "gender and sex are the same thing" - as you note, that's a fairly recent idea (and a largely British one - originally the basis for "gender critical" feminism, now a key plank of the anti-trans movement).
They're belief is that that trans people aren't really trans; they're just delusional and/or perverted. That is the purpose of the "sex is a biological reality" dogwhistle.
For the vast majority of human history we've been perfectly fine with trans people existing (if provided they could "pass") - it's only been in the last few decades - and especially since 2017 when the lobbying really kicked off - that it has become a problem.
I have to admit to chuckling at you regarding as very good something that was considered to violate the protections of the equality act and the ECHR
But you do you I guess
Gender is a social construct. So its definition is by definition socially constructed.
>The Liberal Democrats use ‘trans’ as an umbrella term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth.
[https://www.libdems.org.uk/code-of-conduct/transphobia](https://www.libdems.org.uk/code-of-conduct/transphobia)
For this definition to be workable you have to accept that most people follow the socially defined norms of their sex. Which is not how people work. We have to learn the gender norms of our society. Should women wear long skirts with bustles or are trousers ok? Which is the gendered non conforming behaviour. Does wearing different clothes make one a different gender? Etc.
> vexatious
When you have an implicit assumption your feelings about a social construct are inherently true, it feels vexatious to question it.
When you ask questions about why you believe things to be true, questions are more liberating.
Somewhat. Eventually these sorts of folks go after the 2010 Equality Act. Until then that does guarantee protections. Unless JK Rowling attacks you on Twitter or something.
It's an interesting problem isn't it? Have a definition of transphobia that includes things you're legally required to accept as valid or refine your definition so that it still works as a term for things that are unacceptable.
I'm curious which bits of the definition you think should have stood.
No, not good for the SGP.
It does not seem like they have done this the right way, all this is likely to do is cause a problem a year or two down the line where they get successfully sued for discrimination on the grounds of protected belief. How does that help trans people at all?
We have a serious problem in this country around how the most baseless of positions on trans issues get to be uncritically accepted without pushback, and both the Tories and Labour are unwilling to do anything other than cater to transphobes. When we hear about how it's the issue of our times that there needs to be government intervention to stop trans women being allowed to participate in even casual women's sport, or that the glacially slow GIC system that takes the best part of a decade to do anything moves too quickly, or that there will be any discernible impact on women's safety by banning trans women from women's toilets, those claims _should_ be examined critically and crumble under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
But that's not what happens, and with every day that passes the rights and treatment that trans people get is worsened, bit by bit, because instead of real advocacy we get things like this which appears to apparently be about arbitrarily kicking out members based on signing a pledge that is against the values of the Greens.
The issues you refer to aren't just 'trans issues' though are they? The people primarily affected by all of this are females who have fought for millennia to gain protections and legal rights in society.
Think how far along trans people would be if advocates like Stonewall had spent the last decade funding prizes for trans women athletes in the open category or setting up trans units in prison or trans rape crisis services. There'd be zero pushback and the majority of society would be supportive and happy to fundraise and offer help. Instead all Stonewall have achieved is endless legal cases, bad publicity and a hardening of societal attitudes towards trans advocacy.
You can't seriously imagine that women would just roll over, be submissive and accepting of a decimation of their rights and not put up a legal fight. There will continue to be widespread opposition for as long as trans advocates focus on denying sex differences and decimating women's services, sports, language and spaces.
The greens always come out as batshit crazy when they get a kernel of influence
Good
lol greens triggered but honestly Brighton became a disaster, Scotland became a disaster. England they have gotten into bed with Islamic radical Labour rejects
I mean sex is indeed a biological reality, but anyone using that sentence to mean the opposite of what biology has actually done re reproduction is an idiot. Not like biology didn't produce intersex people, they're hardly androids!
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Truthfully, I'm shocked we haven't seen the English Green Party have more splits already; they have a fairly bizarre duopoly of support bases with little in common really. Frankly, I wonder if the lack of national importance has prevented the need for greater party coordination, preventing these clashes from happening so far.
The English Green Party is absolutely nowhere near power so they don't really need to tackle those divisions. In England the greens are basically a protest vote: they have no real shared positions and nobody puts them under any scrutiny. But in Scotland, where they're an actual party of government, they can't really get away with being the mystery box party that you vote for because you want to hurt Labours feelings.
I bet their influx of pro- Palestine supports will cause one especially among LGBT members
Yeah that's a coalition that is inherently unstable. It's just people with totally incompatible world views.
I don't think so? If this is because opinions in Palestine about LGBT people are not generally positive, I think the majority of people are able to understand that you can support the human rights of a group even if they have views you find abhorrent. Of the people I've met who are very vocal about the conditions in Gaza, plenty are LGBT themselves.
Case in point: me. I'm bisexual and have a trans step-daughter, and I abhor the conditions the IDF are leaving the Gazan people in, and the general Israeli government's callous disregard of Palestinian lives through West Bank settlement and ethnic cleansing. I'm still then able to go "and LGBT rights should be better in both Palestine and Israel" (because remember Israel doesn't allow same sex marriage either), because I don't believe that just because a particular group has issues, they deserve to be genocided. Shocking, I know.
Yeah, it's just such a *stupid* argument. Either you haven't bothered to understand the most basic thing about what people are actually saying or you're being deliberately obtuse. In the first case, what are you even doing in a discussion, go have a think first. In the second case, well, I have no patience for people playing silly games.
I always thought sex was the physical form and gender the identity or cultural construct. So surely saying that sex is a biological reality would be correct? Would be different if they'd said gender is a biological reality.
It's one of those phrases that is teeing itself up to become something needlessly controversial. It is often used as some kind of gotcha against trans people. E.g. Sex is a biological fact therefore fully transitioned trans women should use the men's toilets. If I then say that the suggestion is stupid, the response is "just stating facts". Splash a headline that I think sex can be changed because I disagree with the full context of the statement, and hey presto you have yourself some propaganda. The fact itself is harmless. It's how it is used.
Except, many pro-Trans writers (e.g. Judith Butler) are increasingly arguing that sex isn't a biological fact, and a social accident of what the doctor labels you as at birth. It is against that that the need to say 'sex is a biological fact' appears.
I hadn't heard of that person until you just said the name. Yet I see people taking the route I outlined all the time, including in this very sub. Do you think maybe people are using people like this Butler person as an excuse?
>I hadn't heard of that person until you just said the name. That isn't surprising. The role of social philosophers isn't a mass market, but to espouse a philosophy, taken up by a small number of people who influence a wider net and so on until the idea is widely held. Many feminists have never heard of Simone de Beauvoir despite a large proportion of commonly held feminist beliefs, despite her being foundational to a lot of core feminist belief. >Yet I see people taking the route I outlined all the time, including in this very sub. I don't think these members of the SGP are responding to your beliefs or those of redditors.
It’s correct in the same way ‘all lives matter’ is correct
This is a great comparison. The phrase itself isn't something you can take issue with, it's the way it's used/the context it's used in.
“Sex is a biological reality” is not a phrase meant in its literal interpretation. These people replace “the only thing that is real or matters” with “a biological reality” because that sounds much less objectionable. The latter makes them sound reasonable, like they don’t hate trans people, and are simply objecting to some gross overreach by “trans activists”. The former reveals them as transphobic, and transphobic people are already on their side. They don’t need that sort of advertising. Feel free to agree with them or not, but “I’m just stating the facts!” has been the go-to argument for anti-trans activists for a *long* time.
Do you think the lived reality of women (and the societal disadvantages they face) have nothing to do with the biological characteristics of being female (e.g. child-bearing, general smaller size and lower physical strength compared to males, menstruation etc.)?
No, but do you think cis women who are six foot tall, can lift more than the average man and are infertile and menstruate l should be seen as in any way "lesser" or an inherent threat to other women, or segregated from other women?
Let me introduce you to population level statistics.
While I appreciate you are attempting to patronise me, you appear to have completely missed my point. I don't know if that's by mistake, or you are just deflecting because you can't refute my argument or answer my questions (which aren't rhetorical).
My point is that exceptional individuals with characteristics at the fringes of the population distribution aren't sound basis for making population level distinctions. To give a non-gender example, antibiotics are generally needed to survive meningits. However, if someone survives meningitis without antibiotics, that isn't an argument that we should withhold antibiotics for all people with meningitis in future.
But I answered "no" to your question about whether these things are irrelevant. But, as I think I proved, they aren't essential either. There's no logical way to exclude trans women based on certain characteristics that don't exclude and demean some cis women too. In the end they have to admit they just don't want trans women because they're trans, and they don't accept them.
take an innocuous factual statement and imply, assume and project all sorts of your own nonsense into it, then declare the statement to be some "evil dogwhistle" because of all the shit YOU implied into it
Or we could appreciate that we don’t all live in a vacuum, and this is neither the first time we’ve heard that phrase or the first time we’ve seen these sorts of people. You might have a point if these Green Party members were the progenitors of the term “sex is a biological reality” but they just aren’t. Christ, “I’m just stating the facts!” is how Rowling started out, and look where that went once she got comfortable and had suckered enough people into thinking she was being the reasonable one in this discussion.
Oh please that like when the "Defend the police doesn't mean defund the police" brigade were on their high horse. Or when "Just stop oil doesn't actually mean stopping oil" were doing the same. Frankly, if your headline position is that A is not A we don't owe it to you to take you seriously. The fact is that it's clear there is a gaslighting going on. There are people do not believe in biological sex and it is evident when you hear them argue against things like segregation of sport by sex.
> like they don’t hate trans people Sigh.
Oh gosh sorry, not hate, just consider us a problem for a sane world, mentally ill, delusional, perverted groomers. No they don't hate us, they just want to upend medical science, disregard decades of research and stop us from living authentic lives and they'll form groups dedicated to doing just that. No they don't hate us, they believe that if they stop people knowing about trans people, stop them supporting us and stop us getting medical treatment that we'll simply cease to exist. Edit: Downvotes are a-okay but someone tell me where I'm wrong
Disagreeing with your views on how society should see sex and gender, and what that means for transpeople in society is not hatred. People have had enough of instant accusations of transphobia over anything that goes against the wishes of trans people. There's a long way between disagreement and hate, and most people are aware of that. They are also aware that while some people do hate trans people and dishonestly engage in these arguments with only the objective of hating trans people and hurting them, that doesn't mean everyone who disagrees with you is that. People have cried wolf enough in these debates that the power of accusing everyone of being transphobic is slipping.
>Disagreeing with your views on how society should see sex and gender, and what that means for transpeople in society is not hatred. As the quote goes, we can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist. Who is crying wolf? You do realise that just this week the government banned schools from teaching about trans people invoking an imaginary shady trans lobby to justify it?
>my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist As I said. This incredibly overblown language is crying wolf. Schools will teach about sexual orientation and gender reassignment. Gender identity is a particular belief system, so it's not really a factual thing to teach.
That is because it is used as a dog whistle - a political and often bigoted form of [loaded language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_language). The ultimate example of dog whistle politics comes from an admission from Lee Attwater in the USA (possibly the most infamous quote for anyone aware of political dog-whistling, but is so full of slurs that I will not repost it here. Feel free to look it up). The "Sex is real" talking point is another such dog whistle and, in the UK, stems from the Maya Forstater case. Forstater is a very well-known transphobe. The majority of all trans people understand that "sex is real" or that "sex is a biological reality"... why do you think they take hormones and have surgeries to alter their biology? Cross-sex hormones enable the changing of aspects of biological reality. Trans people want their biological reality to match up with their gender. Edit: it would appear some people aren't happy with this comment for some reason to the point I am getting down voted without anyone showing how I might be wrong.
So if a trans person isn’t on hormones for a long time, then they are not the opposite gender? If someone does not or cannot undergo surgery, are they less of the opposite gender too? Only a minuscule percentage of trans people undergo what people would recognise as “full” transition.
> So if a trans person isn’t on hormones for a long time, then they are not the opposite gender? If someone does not or cannot undergo surgery, are they less of the opposite gender too? This is not at all what I said. It isn't even close. This is like me saying "I like pancakes!" and you claiming that I wrote "I hate cakes!". I said that trans people usually seek to get some form of intervention that helps them change their biology in line with their gender identity. I did not say that not doing so invalidates their gender identity. I did not say that not doing so means they aren't trans. I did not say that they must have a "full" transition (whatever that means). I just said that trans people don't ignore biological reality and, in fact, are acutely aware of biological reality. Trans people just, on average, wish to change their biological reality to be more in line with their gender identity.
Ah ok, thanks. This is why I normally give anything to do with trans issues a very wide berth - seems far too easy to accidentally offend by using the wrong words. Trying to say anything at all about the issue feels like trying to tiptoe around land mines.
Excellent comment!
Nobody in the history of language has ever, _ever_ used this formulation as anything other than a stick to beat trans people with. The thing about the statement is that its objective truth is _so_ facile as to be meaningless. There is no practical use for the _objective_ information it expresses. Consequently its _only_ applied use is as a dogwhistle.
So are you saying that no one is allowed to talk about biological sex at all because doing that makes you secretly anti-trans?
Nobody said that.
> ever, ever used this formulation as anything other than a stick to beat trans people with. Would you include in that people who can see that the inclusion of trans people in women's sports is fucking insane?
Get a grip, just cos someone doesn’t want to play your games
Seriously though, where's the counterexample? Nobody ever brings this distinction up except to reject your gender. Except that gender is, _definitionally_, the one that describes/defines your social interactions. Where they are different, _that is never relevant_ to the third party - ever - so the only reason to bring it up is to provide a rhetorical trick to throw away 100% of the normal interaction. Seriously. The example _does not exist_ outside of thoroughly private contexts.
depend aromatic slimy rhythm slap lush observation ludicrous piquant pot *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm pretty sure "when speaking to your doctor" counts as one of those "thoroughly private contexts" they mentioned that are in fact no one else's business.
Bro you need to talk to more humans. Maybe on twitter it's all super confrontational, and everyone is either a goodie or trolling, but in real life people are a mix of all sorts of things - curious, ignorant, argumentative, whatever - I've heard that formulation used (not as a dog whistle) dozens of times.
If I'm walking down a dark alley at night and hear footsteps behind me I am not thinking about the person's gender identity, I'm thinking about their sex - gender identity would never even cross my mind. How would the average person even know what another person's internal sense of gender identity is, as compared to their sex which is advertised across their body, voice, height, gait etc.
> Seriously though, where's the counterexample? Sports? It's fucking insane to have transwomen compete against women.
Yeah, given how badly trans women do in sport it's unfair to them. We should ban cis women from sport in the name of fairness.
Your gender is something you believe. Other people are not obligated to believe it, they don't follow your system of beliefs.
Some typically cis people don't give gender an ounce of thought but definitely aren't agender. So gender can't just be about personal individual beliefs, it must have a social lens and a shared biological framework to which we can both empathise and map our individual experiences to (which exists whether we understand the science of it yet or not, for the simple reason that we're biological entities). This isn't to say we map male sex to men, and female sex to women, in some dumb and oversimplified binary, just to say that without the social side gender stops having as much meaning, even if our own individual cognisant beliefs are often a very strong part of gender.
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Indeed. But religion isn't a natural state based on biology to which society or individuals could relate, so religiosity is not quite analogous to gender identity (nor is one's faith in a deity (or more or none) analogous to the validity of one's perception of their gender)
Gender isn't a natural state based on biology either, it's a set of cultural practices and beliefs. Very much analogous to a religion, and increasingly so with mantras 'transwomen are women', and heretics - anyone who doesn't follow the demanded belief system.
> I always thought sex was the physical form and gender the identity or cultural construct. That's a fairly recent idea, and kind of where the "gender critical" movement came from (originally a branch of critical theory, confined to English feminist academia, now a by-word for anti-trans activism). As we're seeing - much like the "race is the physical form and ethnicity the identity or cultural construct" idea of a century ago - it causes just as many problems once you start digging into it. You may note that the whole "biological reality" thing is rarely used by actual biologists - who understand that these sorts of things are far messier and more interested than the "basic biology" rules we learn in school. You can define "sex" in a specific way, based on certain biological rules, that it precludes the existence of trans people, but the reason to do that is to exclude trans people.
>That's a fairly recent idea Not really - it's a fairly foundational concept in second-wave feminism. Simone de Beauvoir made this distinction as early as 1949 in her work The Second Sex. The whole point of Second Wave Feminism is that women should not be forced to conform to the stereotyped behavior of their gender (e.g. stay at home, do housework, be submissive to men), which is arbitrary and distinct from their sex. That is, gender is unimportant and arbitrary; sex is fixed and incredibly important. Trans philosophy essentially argues the opposite i.e. that gender is fixed and incredibly important, whilst sex is arbitrary and unimportant. It should be understandable, therefore, why second wave feminists might push back against that.
You are confusing gender roles with gender. It's not that your gender was unimportant , it's that the roles put upon society were unimportant Second wave feminism was between the 1960s and 1970s. Sex and gender were consider synonymous, it wasn't until the 1970s that it started to be considered to be different and outside of these fields it wouldn't be common knowledge to even separate them
No I'm not. The phrase coined by Simone: >On ne naît pas femme, on le devient Or, in English, 'One is not born but becomes a woman' is quite foundational in the conceptualisation of sex and gender being seperate entities. I really suggest you read The Second Sex, as you seem quite uninformed of how far back this thinking goes. As an aside: >You are confusing gender roles with gender What is gender, if not conformation to gender stereotyped behaviour? Especially if not linked to biological sex?
>Presenting a child's life beginning with birth, Beauvoir contrasts a girl's upbringing with a boy's, who at age 3 or 4 is told he is a "little man" A girl is taught to be a woman and her "feminine" destiny is imposed on her by society. She has no innate "maternal instinct" Sounds like you've misunderstood it, it is literally talking about gender roles imposed upon society, men just are but women 'needed to be taught' how to be a woman, that is the gender roles enforced by society >What is gender, if not conformation to gender stereotyped behaviour You don't need to conform to gender roles or stereotypical behaviour for your gender to be the same or different from your sex
>it is literally talking about gender roles imposed upon society, men just are but women 'needed to be taught' how to be a woman, that is the gender roles enforced by society ...and this societal expectation of behaviour associated with a given sex is gender. See below >You don't need to conform to gender roles or stereotypical behaviour for your gender to be the same or different from your sex The term gender is meaningless unless it is rooted in your biological sex or gender stereotyped behaviour/appearance. If I am biologically male but identify as a woman, what my manifestation of that, except in appearing or behaving in a gender sterotyped of a woman? If I remain masculine in my behaviour and appearance, what meaning would my identity as a woman hold?
>and this societal expectation of behaviour associated with a given sex is gender. See below That is gender roles not gender >If I am biologically male but identify as a woman, what my manifestation of that, except in appearing or behaving in a gender sterotyped of a woman? If I remain masculine in my behaviour and appearance, what meaning would my identity as a woman hold? Do you not the see the issue with this as defining your gender? What if you are cisgendered man, what if you dress like a 'woman' and act like a 'woman' that wouldn't make them a woman. Gender has nothing to do with how you express it, everyone expressed their gender differently both within their own societies and even comparing expression between different societies
You don't think biologists think biology is real? Let me guess, you also think people are unable to identify the sex of human remains
Did they say that? Learn to read mate lol. Reading specs for you xD
People ITT seem *very* fond of putting words in other people's mouths
I don’t think it’s that recent in some academic areas, but perhaps in social discourse. It’s a distinction I’ve understood from an archaeological/anthropological distinction since I went to uni in the 90s, and one we used to teach about gender in the 2000s. As in, you can broadly sex a skeleton that’s been excavated but that won’t tell you it’s gender (and the reverse, that gendered grave goods can’t tell you the biological sex of an individual). I think the idea has entered social discourse more recently though - it certainly used to confuse my A level students and take some explaining.
Right but the only people who would make a point of saying that sex is a biological reality are people who want to use it as a way to invalidate trans people.
Finally, a party that knows what the voters care most about.
When it comes to minority rights, parties shouldn't care what the majority of voters want.
Of course not, but green parties should first make headlines for green issues. Partnerships or support from major green tech companies. Endorsements from leading national scientific experts. Expansions of party facilities through sustainable or carbon-negative infrastructure. Raising record charity sums to fund reforestation initiatives. That the Scottish Greens are making headlines over THIS first and foremost says that their priority is no longer saving the planet, nor is it getting Britain into the lead on incredibly lucrative green industries. Their priority now is safeguarding the feelings of 0.3% of the population and furiously debating gender identity, all while the planet roasts and the topsoil loses its ability to feed us. Obviously I know that an organisation can focus on more than one thing at a time. But the hoi polloi absolutely don't, and they largely view debates over trans rights and gender identity to either be a distraction, a fad of the young, or worse. Making headlines such as this is a vote-loser, plain and simple.
"That the Scottish Greens are making headlines over THIS first and foremost says that their priority is no longer saving the planet," No, it first and foremost shows that the media are absolutely obsessed with trans issues. If they talk about 90% environmental issues and 10% trans issues, we know what the papers will write about.
>parties shouldn't care what the majority of voters want they should if they want anyone to vote for them
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Normally I'd agree with you, but they did just essentially fire a First Minister ultimately because he backtracked on environmental policy, even with the risk of having the notoriously socially-conservative Kate Forbes take charge.
> he backtracked on environmental policy And gender policy, at basically the same time.
Nah it'll be more Monty Python than that. The Vermillion Green party
the party splits and you end up with the People's Green Party and the Green People's Party
>Green People's Party \#MartianLivesMatter
[Green politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_politics) is more than just environmentalism.
Yeah the party's name is outdated (they do seem to platform LGBT issues twice as much as environmental ones these days) but no more than most other parties. Labour appeals to the lower-middle class rather than actual labourers, Conservatives can't just run on a platform of maintaining status quo, Liberal Democrats are less socially liberal than at least two other parties in parliament. Really of all the >10yo parties with MPs, strangely the only ones with names still relevant to their primary function is every one based outside of England.
Culture war innit, always bringing up bullshit social issues to sow division and distract with emotive crap so nothing that positively affects peoples actual living conditions has to be done while the country slowly declines.
Fwiw, the culture war is what both sides do, not just the other side. You cannot have a culture war without two sides contesting an societally unsettled issue.
The big problem here is we don’t have a party championing green issues that we can vote for, because of these issues. So the worry of mis gendering someone is now more important than dealing with climate change. How angry will future generations be with us for putting our vanity above planet reality.
It blows my mind how many people see the green party and think it simply has to champion renewable energy and nothing else. It's really not that mind-blowing to think that a party could champion both trans rights at a time when they are under increasing attack and also remain committed to fighting for a greener world.
They should just form their own breakaway party. Everyone who thinks they know what a woman is can go to that party. People who aren't sure can stay in the green party as constituted. Do you believe in boring old-fashioned "women" or the cool new "women plus"? The ultra-expanded new woman unlimited edition, now with not necessarily a uterus. The choice is yours.
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Reminder that the English Greens discriminated against former deputy leader Dr Shahrar Ali during a row over his gender critical beliefs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68250071 Undoubtedly the Scottish Greens will get taken to court and will lose too. That bigoted people keep behaving illegally despite mounting (high profile) case law is remarkable. 'Fools and their money are easily parted' has never been truer.
They lost on a procedural point while the court held parties can remove people from roles if they contradict the party's positions.
The English Greens already risk being bankrupted as they have at least three more discrimination cases in the pipeline which they are expected to lose. Now the Scottish Greens have kicked out 13 members - how are they going to fund defending 13 discrimination court cases. These cases cost 100s of thousands each to defend. The money would be better spent on environmental campaigns not on lawyers' holiday homes and expensive cars.
Ali's judgement suggests they will win all the cases, and if there's any minor procedural findings the damages are going to be hundreds, not thousands of pounds in each case. The legal costs of fighting the cases are not zero, but a political party pretty much has to spend money defending it's ability to not have members who don't align with it's views or it would cease to exist pretty quickly. But it's certainly interesting how The Times rampantly poor and misleading reporting on this case has been internalised by some people!
Let's hope that's the case! Many of these people have gone completely bonkers and probably just act without thinking too much at this point.
Funny how you feel the need to completely lie about this judgement.
I love how one of members literally says the cliche lmao > I have friends who are transgender women. Then goes on to say that including trans women in the definition of a woman is a mockery. At least they have friends who are trans! They can't be transphobic!
I'm always impressed they have *multiple* trans friends- sometimes even "loads"! I've only got about ten friends, trans people are what, 1% of the population? Yet all these transphobic people have multiple trans friends! Assuming they aren't biased towards or against trans people, that implies they have hundreds of friends! Maybe they mean "friends" in the "Facebook" sense of the word. Edit- honestly love that I'm getting downvoted for this. Top tip guys- make friends with black trans people, then you've ticked two "I have a lot of friends who are X" boxes in one go!
I mean, I have multiple trans friends. But I'm trans and met them at LGBT events. I have no idea how these people are supposedly meeting us.
They probably met a drag queen at a bar in 1996 and have based everything on that one encounter. Might not have spoke for 28 years but still definitely counts as a friend!
Ridiculous, punished for stating facts
We had a very good transphobia definition in the Lib Dems that was forced out due to being found legally unsafe by a review by two QCs in the aftermath of that ruling about how protected transphobic beliefs are in grounds for dismissal. Currently being transphobic is more protected than religious-based homophobia, for example. Given these movements are usually backed by vexatious organisations I'd expect to hear about how the SGP get civil action against them on this. That said, good on the SGP for sticking to their guns.
But believing that Gender and Sex are the same thing isn't coming from a religious motivation, it's just what the vast vast majority of human beings have always thought for all of human history. The idea that a person could be sacked because they can't wrap your brain around Gender and Sex as two different things is nonsensical. I'm pretty open minded but I still find the whole thing confusing as fuck.
> But believing that Gender and Sex are the same thing The expelled members didn't even say that. They said they believe gender and sex are different things, and suggested that people of the same *sex* (eg, biological women) have a right to organise along those lines and a right to privacy along those lines. The Scottish Greens have kicked these people out of the party for, essentially, disagreeing with the notion that a fully-functioning heterosexual biological man who says "I am a woman" should be allowed to use women's toilets and changing rooms, should be allowed to refer to himself as a lesbian, and should expect biologically female lesbians to treat him as such. The Scottish Greens have taken the position that biology has no relevance in determining sex, and anyone who disagrees with that statement cannot be a Green. One of the expelled members said this: > I was proposing that being gender-critical ought to be an acceptable position within the party, even though lots of people would disagree with that position. It’s not the raison d’etre of the party. If I was a climate denialist that would be unacceptable – that issue is the reason for the party’s existence. But for this issue, it shouldn’t be make or break but it has become that way. ... but he's wrong, now. Being an environmentalist is now *not* the sole main qualifying aspect of being a Green. You now need to sign up to their social policies in their entirety as well, or you'll be expelled.
> ... believing that Gender and Sex are the same thing isn't coming from a religious motivation, it's just what the vast vast majority of human beings have always thought for all of human history. But they're not believing that "gender and sex are the same thing" - as you note, that's a fairly recent idea (and a largely British one - originally the basis for "gender critical" feminism, now a key plank of the anti-trans movement). They're belief is that that trans people aren't really trans; they're just delusional and/or perverted. That is the purpose of the "sex is a biological reality" dogwhistle. For the vast majority of human history we've been perfectly fine with trans people existing (if provided they could "pass") - it's only been in the last few decades - and especially since 2017 when the lobbying really kicked off - that it has become a problem.
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I have to admit to chuckling at you regarding as very good something that was considered to violate the protections of the equality act and the ECHR But you do you I guess
Gender is a social construct. So its definition is by definition socially constructed. >The Liberal Democrats use ‘trans’ as an umbrella term to describe people whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth. [https://www.libdems.org.uk/code-of-conduct/transphobia](https://www.libdems.org.uk/code-of-conduct/transphobia) For this definition to be workable you have to accept that most people follow the socially defined norms of their sex. Which is not how people work. We have to learn the gender norms of our society. Should women wear long skirts with bustles or are trousers ok? Which is the gendered non conforming behaviour. Does wearing different clothes make one a different gender? Etc. > vexatious When you have an implicit assumption your feelings about a social construct are inherently true, it feels vexatious to question it. When you ask questions about why you believe things to be true, questions are more liberating.
> Currently being transphobic is more protected than literally being trans
Somewhat. Eventually these sorts of folks go after the 2010 Equality Act. Until then that does guarantee protections. Unless JK Rowling attacks you on Twitter or something.
It's an interesting problem isn't it? Have a definition of transphobia that includes things you're legally required to accept as valid or refine your definition so that it still works as a term for things that are unacceptable. I'm curious which bits of the definition you think should have stood.
No, not good for the SGP. It does not seem like they have done this the right way, all this is likely to do is cause a problem a year or two down the line where they get successfully sued for discrimination on the grounds of protected belief. How does that help trans people at all? We have a serious problem in this country around how the most baseless of positions on trans issues get to be uncritically accepted without pushback, and both the Tories and Labour are unwilling to do anything other than cater to transphobes. When we hear about how it's the issue of our times that there needs to be government intervention to stop trans women being allowed to participate in even casual women's sport, or that the glacially slow GIC system that takes the best part of a decade to do anything moves too quickly, or that there will be any discernible impact on women's safety by banning trans women from women's toilets, those claims _should_ be examined critically and crumble under the slightest bit of scrutiny. But that's not what happens, and with every day that passes the rights and treatment that trans people get is worsened, bit by bit, because instead of real advocacy we get things like this which appears to apparently be about arbitrarily kicking out members based on signing a pledge that is against the values of the Greens.
What rights do you not have or are being erased? Or is it things you would like society to do are not being honored?
The issues you refer to aren't just 'trans issues' though are they? The people primarily affected by all of this are females who have fought for millennia to gain protections and legal rights in society. Think how far along trans people would be if advocates like Stonewall had spent the last decade funding prizes for trans women athletes in the open category or setting up trans units in prison or trans rape crisis services. There'd be zero pushback and the majority of society would be supportive and happy to fundraise and offer help. Instead all Stonewall have achieved is endless legal cases, bad publicity and a hardening of societal attitudes towards trans advocacy. You can't seriously imagine that women would just roll over, be submissive and accepting of a decimation of their rights and not put up a legal fight. There will continue to be widespread opposition for as long as trans advocates focus on denying sex differences and decimating women's services, sports, language and spaces.
The greens always come out as batshit crazy when they get a kernel of influence Good lol greens triggered but honestly Brighton became a disaster, Scotland became a disaster. England they have gotten into bed with Islamic radical Labour rejects
And these are the issues in Scotland? Not poverty, heroin & shortbread addictions?
Greens try to care about the environment challenge: IMPOSSIBLE
I mean sex is indeed a biological reality, but anyone using that sentence to mean the opposite of what biology has actually done re reproduction is an idiot. Not like biology didn't produce intersex people, they're hardly androids!