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Friends. I have been reading, listening and talking to people on different sides of the sex and gender debates for over a year before I felt confident enough to publicly to state an opinion. medium.com/@MForstater/in…
Over that time I changed my mind from a view of "acceptance without exception" to "its a bit more complicated than that". Everyone's human rights should be protected, but being male or female is a material reality and that matters.
When I started tweeting about this I was surprised by how many economists, researchers and development professionals: empirically minded people, not shy of serious debate thought this debate too unimportant or too controversial to get into
Or they thought it was settled: women are not defined as people with female bodies anymore (thats exclusionary, unkind and old-fashioned). Women are people with a deeply held feminine identity, often expressed visually through clothes, hair and makeup.
Except I don't think they really believe that.
In our work we look at populations segmented by *sex* to study outcomes in education, employment, poverty, health, etc… and to look at violence against women, the burden of household work & etc...
None of this is based on people having a personality at the ‘feminine end of the spectrum’. It is based on the way societies treat people who are male or female. Where women are treated as second class citizens its not something they can opt out of by dressing differently.
Of course there can be different definitions for things. Being a woman is a social identity based on other people reading you as female, and being a woman is also a function of being female: chromosomes, gametes, genitalia
We can use both definitions. Usually they align. When they don’t its polite and kind to treat people the way they want to be treated, even when they don’t ‘pass’ as the sex they’d like to be seen as.
But here is the thing. Sometimes the interests of the female people (who may get pregnant, who tend to be physically less powerful, who face sex discrimination & violence from men) diverge from the interests of people who are male but would like to be treated as women socially.
When these interests diverge (such as in questions over who has access to single sex spaces where women are vulnerable, who can compete in women’s sports), we have to be able to weigh the different interests up as a society and talk about it.
Telling women that they must be kind when their interests are being traded off in favour of male people is something we should learn to notice and stop doing.
Right now people who make that case for talking about this calmly and carefully are called names — bigot, TERF, nazi.
And so maybe you haven’t engaged with their arguments. The debate is toxic. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. There are only so many hours in a day. And if you are a bloke (or a ‘cis-man’ as they say) you probably feel like you best keep out of it.
Or maybe you agree that its a problem that issue is not being talked about more seriously carefully. But you are fearful of being called names, or worse. I get that. I’ve lost my job at @cgdev over this and i’m not going to berate anyone for not taking risks they can’t afford to
But please do one thing for me on this #internationalwomensday - sit with the cognitive dissonance a bit longer. Try to turn on your 'system 2 thinking' modules and turn off the 'system 1'.
If you think there should be more space for clear, calm constructive debate over how women's rights (as a sex!) and the rights of transgender people can be protected do something to make that happen in whatever way you can.
