1./ If you want a brilliant introduction to the whole 'gender identity' debate or just wonder how trans rights became such a battlefield, do yourself a favour and listen to @holyroodmandy's interview with ex leader of Scottish Labour, @JohannLamont 👇 anchor.fm/holyrood/episo…
2./ Like so many on the Left Johann started by wanting to help a vulnerable group of people, transsexuals, but slowly realised activists who claimed to speak for them had a more ambitious and stranger agenda: to redefine words that have important meanings: like sex and woman.
3./ The original category of transsexual was expanded to become a vast, ill-defined umbrella and then the denial of basic science began. Every one alive today is the result of sexual reproduction by a male and a female but somehow this binary sex reality was to be foresworn.
4./ It got worse. As the new gender orthodoxy evolved anyone who questioned it was denounced. Johann is fantastic on how the whole point of politics, the thing that drew her into it was debate and argument. But this, the legacy of Socrates, was now cancelled. Debate was 'evil'.
5./ Johann is insightful on how our Scottish Presbyterian inheritance made us eager to embrace the seemingly safer word 'gender' rather than 'sex'. This is why John Money in the 1950s championed the word gender. He felt it made his research into sex sound more respectable.
6./ But it's now created confusion between the inescapable biological reality of sex and the social construct of gender or gender expression. As she says...every sensible progressive person wants kids to be able to express themselves in any way they want. But males remain males.
7./ A turning point was the debate about prisons. Allowing males to self-identify as 'women' and be placed in women's prisons made no sense. Women's prisons have been reserved for females for a reason. Keeping males out is a simple, effective way of reducing risks to women.
8./ And that's where the title of the podcast comes in. There are sometimes unfortunately clashes of rights. To validate a tiny minority of males who want to be viewed as female....biological women's safety was no longer to be viewed as a priority. Johann was having none of that.
9./ One of her most important insights is, she argues, we must constantly question ourselves about what motivates the positions we take. In any fierce argument 'hate' can creep in. We all have to be alert, as she was, to avoid that. We must disagree with love and respect.
10./ For me the most revealing point she makes is that it was the reasonable, calm and respectful behaviour of people on 'our' side of debates like say Self-ID that convinced her we were being traduced as 'hateful'. So stay respectful. And stay classy. As classy as @JohannLamont
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
