- tw ⊆ m ;
- w ⊆ f ;
- m ∩ f = ∅ .
∴ tw ∩ w = ∅ ⇒ tw ≠ w
Categories
Logic
Category: Transgender
Transgender issues in the law, politics, sport, and the impact on children
The butterfly effect describes how the flapping of tiny wings in China may cause a hurricane in the Caribbean a couple of weeks later. The hurricane tearing through social policy in Scotland at the moment also had small beginnings: not in China 14 days ago but in Yogyakarta, Indonesia 14 years ago. This, however, was no accident of chaos — it was deliberate and planned.
Future historians may marvel how that meeting of human rights groups in Yogyakarta established gender identity as an innate human quality and decided that it must be protected in law. At the time, in 2006, political commentators at home were more concerned with the so-called Granita Pact, and whether Tony Blair would ever resign in Gordon Brown’s favour. But Yogyakarta triggered a chain of events that would eventually challenge the use of biological sex to divide humanity. While the definition of gender identity was vague — how can you define what is in essence a feeling in our heads? — the vision was grand.
From my earliest memories I struggled in a society delineated by sex. The rules were different for boys and girls, from what we could wear to how we related to society. Certainly, the expectations placed on me, as a three-year-old boy, were very different to those experienced by three-year-old girls.
Some of this was external – I was told that I would grow up to be big and strong – but we are all curious combinations of nurture and nature, and much was driven from within. I longed to be a girl from before I could speak in full sentences; without the capacity to explain my reasons, even to myself. But, at the same time, the taboo against wearing clothes marketed at girls was already hardwired into my mind.
Este texto es una traducción del artículo publicado por Debbie Hayton en su blog el 29 de noviembre de 2016. Es necesario contextualizar la preocupación de Debbie como presona trans ante la posibilidad de que se modificaran las leyes del Reino Unido para favorecer la llamada “identidad de género” como criterio jurídico suficiente para reconocer a una persona como transexual. Para ello, recomiendo la lectura de la entrada de Wikipedia sobre la situación de los derechos de las personas trans en el Reino Unido.
“Las mujeres trans son mujeres” es más que una consigna: es una exigencia de docilidad. Es, también, una retórica vacía que nos ha alejado de la verdad y nos ha adentrado en la tierra de la fantasía.
Con un espíritu de arrogación de un derecho más que de empatía, el transactivismo exige acceso a condiciones, becas y subvenciones otrora reservadas a las mujeres en los deportes y en la política. Sometidas al método del premio y el castigo que apela a su bondad al tiempo que denuncia a quienes no se doblegan llamándolas intolerantes, las mujeres se ven presionadas a aceptar a las mujeres trans, como yo, no como aliadas, sino como mujeres propiamente dichas. Las objeciones sustentadas en la biología son tachadas de falsa crueldad en un mundo donde los sentimientos tienen prioridad sobre los hechos.
Este año se popularizó la expresión no binario. El equipo lexicográfico del diccionario Collins en el Reino Unido ya recoge la entrada non-binary y la define como “identidad sexual o de género que no pertenece a las categorías binarias masculino/femenino, heterosexual/homosexual”.
La expresión no binario también figura en el manifiesto del partido Liberal Demócrata del Reino Unido, aunque para estas alturas la parlamentaria Jo Swinson quizás se esté arrepintiendo de ello. Es fácil hacerse propaganda con las palabras no binario, pero mucho más difícil explicarlas al electorado… o a periodistas. En una serie de complicadas entrevistas durante la semana, incluso negó el hecho de que todo ser humano es de sexo masculino o de sexo femenino. Soy docente y enseño ciencias: si la parlamentaria fuera mi estudiante, la esperanza se me habría ido al suelo.
This was the year that the word ‘non-binary’ went mainstream. It has now officially entered the dictionary — lexicographers at Collins have defined the term as ‘a gender or sexual identity that does not belong to the binary categories of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual’.
Non-binary also entered the Liberal Democrat manifesto, though Jo Swinson may now be regretting this decision. Non-binary is easy to announce; it’s rather more challenging to explain to the electorate — or to journalists. In a series of difficult interviews this week, she even denied the fact that every human being is either male or female. I’m a science teacher; if she had been one of my pupils, I think I would have despaired.
Sir,
As a transwoman I second the offer by Janice Turner (“Swinson chose wokeness over women’s rights”, comment, Dec 7) to send a bunch of flowers to Jo Swinson. By exposing Lib Dem plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) as incoherent and inexplicable Turner has alerted the electorate to concerns that I have been raising for three years.
As a child of the 1970s, I can still recall the trauma of watching Elvis Costello jab his finger at me as he sang “Called careers information; have you got yourself an occupation?” My dreams of becoming an astronaut had already evaporated by then and I feared I needed to make a hasty decision before I was conscripted into Oliver’s Army — or worse.
A generation later, the stakes are far higher for our kids. Today the refrain might be Called social media; have you got yourself a gender identity?
“We had women arriving through the crush in tears. One woman had liquid thrown at her as she tried to enter. Even the men who attended were shocked at the scale of the harassment because they’re not normally subject to this.”
Those were the words of a WPUK spokeswoman, reported in this newspaper [The Morning Star]. Shockingly, the context was a meeting to discuss women’s rights on the fringe of the Labour Party conference.
How on earth did we get here: to a place where women meeting to discuss sex-based rights and the trafficking of women and girls are accused of hate speech and denounced as “TERFs?” TERF stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” but it has become a dreadful slur — akin to bitch or whore.
Debbie Hayton 