,
14 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
There’s a lot to take issue with in this piece from Justin Weinberg @dailynouseditor explaining his decision not to link to the recent Quillette article on sex and gender by @docstockk . But his claim that the outcome of the Scottish Government’s consultation on the inclusion 1/
of a gender identity question in the census shows that Kathleen’s discussion is ‘scaremongering’ regarding the collection of statistics about sex is particularly egregious. To be clear: the proposal on the table was to add a third ‘non-binary’ option to the ‘sex’ question on 2/
the census form, making clear that the question involved one’s self-identified sex, which could be male, female, or neither. This proposal was defeated only because (at the instigation of @docstockk and others) person after person carefully explained how such a change would be 3/
harmful to women and trans people in its effects on statistics gathering. This included a large number of academics (including philosophers @docstockk and @sophie_r_allen) writing written submissions to the Scottish government, as well as giving evidence in person to the 4/
Culture Committee (e.g. @goonerprof ). This article from as recently as last December gives a reasonable sense of what was going on: heraldscotland.com/news/17278626.… 5/
The outcome of all this is that the Scottish government have agreed that the original proposal was a bad idea, and that they plan instead to include a separate optional gender-identity question on the census, as advocated by @goonerprof and others, a win for common sense 6/
achieved only because of the large number of academics willing to stick their necks above the parapet, often at great personal expense as their interventions were met with threats and abuse. 7/
What is so frustrating about this incident is that it follows a predictable pattern that we are seeing again and again in this debate: activists demand a batshit crazy change in policy grounded in an unwillingness to separate sex from gender ID; women speak out, at great 8/
personal cost, about why this change would be a bad idea; activists shout them down as bigots and terfs who are challenging them out of pure hate; neutral onlookers such as @dailynouseditor think ‘these people must be bigots then’ and fail to listen to what they have to say; 9/
women keep on regardless, carefully explaining in words of one syllable precisely why the proposals are misguided; finally the penny drops with policy makers and they quietly drop the original proposals, to the great relief of the women who have put their reputations on the 10/
line in speaking up. One might hope at this point that the neutral onlookers might say “OK we realise you were right about this: thanks for speaking up, and sorry for calling you dried up bigoted old harpies when you did”. But instead we get 11/
“See: no one is advocating for <batshit crazy policy change>, so enough with your scaremongering (you dried up old terfs).” (See also: “no one is advocating for the removal of UK Equality Act sex-based exemptions”; “no one is advocating for self-declaration as the sole 12/
sole basis for eligibility for inclusion on all women shortlists”; “no one is advocating for unmodified teenage males to compete in sporting competitions with their female peers”; “no one is advocating for the sterilisation and lifelong medicalization of gender 13/
non-conforming pre-teens”, and so on, and so on, ad nauseam. 14/14
