Thread by @runthinkwrite

OK, I'll try to explain how I see things, recognising that this might not be right, and that others here can put things better and/or differently

https://twitter.com/Claire_Bradley0/status/1402709950502260739

1) The rights that women have fought for and won are collective rights, and in a lot of cases they are sex-based rights.

2) Sex -based rights are grounded in and justified by the fact of sexed bodies. Sexed bodies do not always count for grounding rights, - eg. for the right to vote they are irrelevant - but sometimes they do.

3) There are specific contexts to do with physical material sexed bodies, such as contexts of privacy, intimacy, vulnerability (of various forms, like nudity or when we are unconscious, or physically constrained in prison) and also contexts of bodily competition, like sport.

4) In those contexts, it is a violation of those rights to substitute gender ID for sex. because it is not gender identity - how someone identifies - that grounds those rights, but sexed bodies.

5) Perhaps the most obvious example, and the one I know most about, is sport. Maybe it's also least contentious. Women have won the right to compete in their own category in sex affected sport.

6) This is a collective right like the others - you don't have to avail yourself of it, if you don't want to, but that doesn't affect the right of other women to have that right.

7) The right stems from bodies, and we cannot change the sex of our bodies. We are a dimorphic species, with different capacities. For example, men can't give birth, are stronger, on average, and have a much higher propensity to sexual violence. These things matter for rights.

8) So I hope I've responded on why these particular rights are grounded in sex, and why anyone's individual woman's agreement for them to be violated doesn't alter things.

9) On your last point, I agree that everyone has the right to live their best life - *consistent with the rights of everyone else to do the same* That's the crucial bit. In some contexts, there is a clear conflict, most obvious, though perhaps not most important in sport.

10) I think it is clear in all the contexts I've mentioned. I say that self-ID trashes women's rights, because it gives permission for the violation of those sex-based rights: Self-ID is not about bodies. The rights in question are.