Thread by @WomensLibFront

It’d be interesting if any of the people telling us that we shouldn’t worry about “transgender status” being added to civil rights law could tell us what “transgender status” means.

For instance, “woman,” means, “adult human female.” This term is useful because it refers to a distinct class of beings, and the definition doesn’t include the term to be defined, that is, it isn’t circular or meaningless.

The Supreme Court didn’t define “transgender status” in the Bostock decision, which was the majority’s claim regarding the grounds on which Bostock was decided, a claim not agreed to by the employer, Harris Funeral Homes.

Many people have suggested that barring discrimination on the grounds of “transgender status” is equivalent to barring sex-based rules around self-expression in the workplace.

That’s not what the ruling said. That’s not what this means:

That passage doesn’t refer to just anyone, but to a “transgender person,” a term as void of clear definition as “transgender status.”

Presumably the court doesn’t think that the term “transgender person” is a synonym for “everyone,” or they would have used some other phrasing.

People who are lawyers who are very, very sure that including “transgender status” as a protected category in civil rights law isn’t a problem, should define that term before presuming to say that our interpretation is wrong.

Here’s an example of a definition of “gender expression or identity,” from ACLU Washington, that includes the term “transgender status.” This is a bad definition, because it includes the terms to be defined in the explanation, but it’s law in WA state.
aclu-wa.org/docs/rights-tr…

We’ve been explaining that definitions like this are misogynistic, so poorly defined as to evade any clear meaning, and fundamentally illogical, for years. The illogic of it is every bit as offensive as the rest. It purports to cover nonconformity, but that’s not how it’s used.

How that understanding of nondiscrimination on the basis of transgender status has been used in the past, in Washington State, was to allow a grown man to walk around with his todger out in front of a girls’ swim team.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2…

If you are trying to tell us that adding nondiscrimination on the basis of “transgender status” is a great, happy occasion, please explain clearly why you think it will not be used down the road to let more grown men wave their todgers around in front of girls and women.

Please explain to us why you think that the future implementation of “transgender status,” now given greater stature and firmer footing, by the highest court in the land, isn’t going to lead to more men sharing showers with incarcerated women.
star-telegram.com/news/local/for…

Many women in gender critical activism, and sometimes even radical feminist politics, are still too caught up in trying to be nice to follow the truth to its obvious conclusions.

Letting people self-identify sex under the law is bad for women.

If you want to protect stereotype nonconformity, say so. The precedents are there. This is why we argued in the Harris/Bostock brief that, on the basis of the Price Waterhouse precedent, sex discrimination should be determined on the basis of sex, not “gender identity.”

“Gender identity” policy isn’t a request for respecting nonconformity on the basis of sex, but a demand for an exemption from ordinary rules. Asking for special exemptions is very different than asking for class liberation from unreasonable restrictions.

This is why feminism asks for the liberation of all women from, as an example, male violence. We don’t argue that women shouldn’t be coerced or abused through non-state torture on a case-by-case basis, or that some of us shouldn’t because we’re special.

Feminism doesn’t argue that feminists deserve to be free from male violence because we “aren’t like the other girls.” We argue that because we *are* like other women and girls, we must all be free of it.

This isn’t the model of gender identity policy.

Gender identity policy holds that some people have special internal states, desires, feelings, conditions, or some combination of these, any reason or none, that means these people who claim to be transgender should get a pass on rules that apply to their same-sex peers.

That’s not class solidarity, according to the usual organizing model of left-of-center movements. It’s a special case pleading.

They say things like that no one else can understand them. They say they used to be revered in traditional cultures, a presumption of special knowing.

But because neither “gender identity” nor “transgender status” has any firm, objective meaning, because they refer to no firm, objective category of person, their demands for special exemptions can’t help but to erode the objective categories against which they struggle.

Every acceptance of the idea of “transgender status,” or “gender identity,” undermines the feminist aim to liberate women, as a class, from male violence.
uncommongroundmedia.com/a-meaningful-t…