At 5:06pm on June 10, J.K. Rowling published the following piece, which was clearly the culmination of years of considering and agonising privately over her position on the issue of sex-based rights in the UK.
https://www.jkrowling.com/answers/
At 7:46pm on June 10, Andrew Carter started the following thread in response, and over the subsequent 3–4 hours it grew to something like 100 tweets.
https://twitter.com/Carter_AndrewJ/status/1270787941275762689?s=20
The problem with something like this, is that it is so vast, it is used mostly as a weapon to bludgeon anyone into submission. See, here are all of Rowling’s crimes, laid out for all to see, don’t listen to the evil witch! And if you point out a flaw, what does that matter when a hundred others remain? And that is precisely what happened — anyone who shared Rowling’s essay, got this in their replies and that was an end to it.
After all, you’d have to be an insane pedant to go through the whole thread trying to correct the record.
So, let’s begin.
Over the course of this thread, Carter uses some variation of the word “transphobe” 34 times by my count. I have noticed this sort of repetition of negative signalling in quite a lot of work, for example Alison Phipps’ “Me, Not You” can scarcely use the word “feminism” without tacking a string of negative modifers at the start, eg “white, western, middle-class, colonial feminism”. This gets repetitive fast, and in that instance might be an effort to drum up the word count on what is quite a slim volume, but Carter could have saved himself a tweet and a half if he’d left them out, so that’s not the reason. I doubt it is necessarily intentional, but it really does start to feel like brainwashing. It is unnecessary to repeat these things — we know what you’re talking about.
The point is that these serve no purpose other than to remind you that what is under discussion is *bad*. Don’t think about *why* it is bad, just know that it is, through sheer repetitive fatigue.
I would say, be on your guard when people do this sort of thing, and don’t trust it. And if I slip into it by accident before this is over, please point out what a massive hypocrite I am.
I will also say, that the whole treatment of Rowling here, as someone who needed to be *rebutted* the instant she opened her mouth and shared her feelings with the world, is really unpleasant. But taking on good faith that this springs from a place of genuine upset, I’ll proceed through the thread, and deal with what I can, skipping over the parts that are really just commentary.
In general terms, under UK employment law, non-renewal of fixed-term contract is considered “dismissal”:
If you have a fixed term contract and an expectation of renewal, and that contract is subsequently not renewed, that constitutes dismissal under UK law, and you are entitled to all the same protections as any other sacking.
So a plain assertion as Carter makes that “non-renewal” is not “losing your job”, is dubious at best.
However, this particular situation is more complicated, because Forstater was not on a fixed contract of the length necessary to qualify for unfair dismissal protection. She was a Visiting Fellow from November 2016 until March 2019 — and it is this Visiting Fellowship that was not renewed due to her views, but since that is not a straightforward contract of employment it is wrong to simply say that “her contract was not renewed” is a full or accurate description of the relationship. Spanning this whole period her work was spread between a series of shorter-term contracts, she was named as a full-time employee on an upcoming project, and had verbal agreement that her work would continue.
She had work. She expected that work to continue. There had been no issue with continuation previously. She had been given solid indication that future work existed and that she was going to be part of it. Then the employer had a change of heart, and stopped engaging with her. This is not at all a case of a contract simply not being renewed after some scheduled expiry, as Carter implies — there were discussions spanning several months about how to keep her on, and in what reduced capacity, in order to accede to the wishes of a third party who had asked she be removed from the project because of her views, before finally terminating their relationship with her. Hence why she uses the language “lost her job” - because it is a fair description of a complicated grievance. She wasn’t explicitly sacked, but her ongoing working relationship ended prematurely over this dispute.
So really, whether you define “having an existing employment relationship with reasonable expectation of continued work coming to an unexpected end” as something you could fairly describe as “losing your job” frankly comes down to whether you’re trying to paint the person in question in a bad light.
And if you want to be more pedantic — the judge had not yet ruled whether Forstater was technically “in employment”, or even whether her beliefs were the reason that employment came to an end. The case did not proceed that far, after the judge decided her beliefs weren’t protected anyway. This leaves those elements unresolved, so anyone trying to make a definitive statement that she did not lose her job isn’t really making a supportable claim. The strongest statement you could make is that she has claimed to have lost her job, and the matter is unresolved.
But why even make an issue out of this in the first place? It is fairly clear that the aim is to paint Forstater as someone with an exaggerated grievance, someone who didn’t “lose a job” but was merely subject to a minor and entirely neutral administrative process — rather than someone specifically removed from a project she was named on, at the behest of parties unhappy with her beliefs. This is important because, again, we are told to believe that Forstater is bad, and that Rowling is therefore bad for standing up for her.
Right off the bat, this is an attempt to take away sympathy, and blame the victim.
A man blaming the female victim. Fancy that.
This claim is false. The terms of reference for the hearing are here:
Not only this — “belief” is one of the 9 protected characteristics in the 2010 Equality act. This action could only have been brought on the grounds that some discrimination was taking place, hence the “belief” strand.
So what he says she did not ask, is in fact precisely what she did ask.
This is important, because even if a belief is protected, that does not give carte blanche to exercise that belief in the workplace.
If Forstater had succeeded, anybody could still be sacked for trans-discriminatory bullying in the workplace, because “gender reassignment” is another of the 9 protected characteristics.
This claim that she attempted to get “misgendering” somehow protected, as relating to employment rights, is false.
By comparison, you cannot be sacked for believing that gays are sinners who will burn in hell, because it constitutes a protected belief. But you can be sacked if you go round telling your gay coworkers that an eternity in hellfire awaits them.
Forstater could still have prevailed, and trans rights in the workplace would have remained unaffected.
So why does Carter claim that she attempted to get “misgendering” protected? I believe this stems from (ironically) the Judge’s absolutist interpretation of her statements. See this key passage from the following, thorough legal examination of the Forstater case by Karon Monaghan QC:
A belief that trans people should never be addressed in their chosen pronoun may well not be worthy of respect but that was not the position here (the C would refer to a person in their chosen pronoun as a courtesy but considered that no one had a right to compel someone to say that which they didn’t believe [41] — ie a person was a man when they were not).
[…]
It is somewhat surprising — and bold — for an ET to conclude that a “view” held by the senior courts and reflected in judgments spanning 40 years are not worthy of respect in a democratic society, not compatible with human dignity and conflicted with the fundamental rights of others.
Despite a commitment to polite usage of pronouns, she maintained that she could not be compelled to believe in a literal change of sex. The result of the judgement (which so offended Rowling in the first place) is that merely holding this belief in private is now enough to cost you your job. Essentially, if this ruling stands, believing that biological sex is immutable and politically important means you can be lawfully sacked.
Now, if you care about women’s rights, and understand women to be generally discriminated against on the basis of their sex, then this is a massive problem. Indeed, I fail to see how this ruling is in any way compatible with the single-sex exemptions in both the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act. How can such measures be enforced if you cannot say who they apply to?
So in the first two scene-setting tweets, he’s painted Maya Forstater as an antagonist (rather than a victim) seeking protection for workplace bullying. Again, all to ensure that you believe Rowling was wrong to support her in the first place. Pretty disingenuous.
I mean, you can read the ruling against Maya Forstater for starters, which denies that possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate is a legal fiction.
Or the countless people every day claiming transwomen are female.
Or the countless people every day claiming sex is a social construct.
Really, whenever someone says “no-one does this”, its an own goal, because there’s always someone. The thing is, it isn’t just random anons doing this, it is people like the deputy leader of the SNP in Westminster.
But notice the slide into appropriating intersex? People with DSDs are not your pawn, and nothing to do with the trans debate. Casually dropping them in like that is low.
So two things here. Firstly a note on acceptance.
The UK has been a world leader in trans rights, generally. We’ve topped the European rankings for many years (slipping down a couple of places since 2016 or so), but generally speaking, public acceptance of those who have always been referred to as transsexuals has been quite high.
The issue right now is that the terminology has changed, but public awareness of what that actually means is low.
So you look at a survey like this, and you have absolutely no idea how many people think that “transgender” just means “transsexual”, and how many realise that it includes a much broader range of people. In fact, you have no idea how many think “transgender man” means male.
This survey, which spells out in much starker language that this terminology covers people with fully intact male bodies, paints a very different picture:
https://fairplayforwomen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/gender_recognition_act-1.pdf
Now, this survey is criticised for sample size and sampling methodology, which I can’t really attest to. But I don’t think it is unreasonable to suggest that most people are less accepting of not-even-remotely-passing cross dressers in female facilities, than they are of completely-passing transsexuals.
This presents a challenge to the fact that we do also understand transition as a process, and that someone committing to undergo it needs to live as their intended legal gender throughout.
But we do also need to understand a significant majority of people now under the trans umbrella never surgically alter their genitalia, nor have an intention of doing so.
So I would suggest that we need better data on how people understand these terms, and to actually explain their meaning when performing acceptance surveys. Going off that, I’d speculate Carter’s survey gives a rosier picture than you would get with a clearer question.
[edit — 15/06/2020]
After originally writing this, a kind reader drew my attention to additional surveys to give weight to the point I was making.
The first is this PanelBase online survey from just last month which again shows that, when presented with a question that spells out exactly what’s being asked, there is strong opposition.
The other has more of a bearing on the concept of gender self-id generally, and was commissioned by Pink News in 2018:
This shows strong public support still for medical gatekeeping as opposed to self-identification.
All of this really makes it clear that the question in the survey in the original thread is not worded well enough, and leaves respondents far too much latitude to project what they imagine a “transgender woman” to be. If you clearly define that to include male anatomy, support for access to female spaces consistently plummets.
Note also, since it is possible to have a Gender Recognition Certificate without any physical transition, the respondents in the PanelBase survey are expressing a belief entirely in line with that of Maya Forstater. If the judgement against her stands, that would mean that 80% of the population could be lawfully sacked or refused employment.
[end of edit]
As for the “trans rights don’t impinge on women’s rights” — they don’t right now, because “gender reassignment” and “sex” are two separate protected categories in the EA2010. The whole entire point (as mentioned by Rowling) is legislative moves to change this relationship.
As an example:
This Scottish guidance includes a 7-paragraph redefinition of the word “woman”, that allows anyone to take the lawful status of “woman” for the purposes of this act pretty much on declaring pronouns alone. There’s no requirement to check — it is the very laxest interpretation of self-id that women have been warning about.
This is legislatively dangerous, and philosophically offensive. A woman is a feeling that any man may have.
Note, there is no similar treatment for “man”. Transwomen can self-id, transmen can’t.
This legislation is to provide 50/50 gender balance on public boards, to ensure representation of women’s interests.
In actual fact, it ensures only that all boards must be at least 50% male, and up to 100% male, but never more than 50% female. Now if you understand that your sex is somehow important to your political representation, an act that lawfully allows the removal of female representation, despite it being a protected strand in the EA2010, is a bit of a giveaway.
This is the legal erasure of sex, one act at a time, circumventing the contentious process of reforming the Equality act to remove those sex-based rights instead.
And here is Stonewall’s submission to that reform process in 2015:
Removing existing sex-based exemptions is exactly what trans lobby groups have been trying to do, for years.
And I’ll add this thread from someone far more knowledgable than I am explaining not only some of the potential impacts on women’s rights, but also the impacts that have already been felt by ignoring of how proposed reforms interact with existing legislation:
https://twitter.com/AudreySuffolk/status/1271012837842919425
When people say trans rights don’t affect women’s rights, there is no other word for it than they are lying.
Here we have a digression into gotcha cancellation.
Someone who died last year at the too-young age of 36 of brain cancer and who is not here to defend herself, has an inflammatory tweet screenshotted and used to denigrate everything about her, everything she ever was or did or lived through or said or loved.
A couple of shitty tweets, shorn of all context or meaning or pain, and you’re bad forever. Don’t listen. You don’t count. Cancelled.
People say bad things. People say bad things on twitter. Plenty of people Carter supports have said equally bad things. Are they cancelled? Is Carter cancelled for not disavowing them already?
Is that really the world we want to live in? A judgemental, fearful panopticon, that haunts us even after death?
And the point here is to dredge it up and use it against Rowling, who no doubt has never even seen this, and probably just watched her youtube videos, or didn’t follow every single exchange she ever had on Twitter anyway.
[edited]
So, on my first draft I hadn’t really planned to tackle this in any great depth, because its not a comment I’d make or defend. However, let’s parse it and actually find some context.
There’s three major components to this piece of guilt-by-association:
- The use of the “blackface” comparison
- The use of invective like “sick fuck” and “fetish”
- That this was her attitude towards all trans people
The first one I’m not going to defend. As if I didn’t know already, I’ve seen enough people make the comparison and then get blistering responses from black women to see how offensive it is. The thing is, I can’t find any other instance of this. I don’t think it is a general attitude, and sometimes if people are thoughtless they get a chance to apologise and make amends. I don’t think it is a statement you can’t come back from, because I’ve seen it happen. I can’t put words in her mouth, but it is unfair and disingenuous to turn that one into a life-summarising piece of phrasing.
The other two are more interesting, because I did find additional context like this:
Here we can see, when challenged about this screenshot in the past, she produces a video, presumably containing the sort of thing she was referring to in the original comment. This video has been removed from youtube, for reasons unknown, but given the response maybe we can guess.
In response, two of her opposition quickly disavow it, describing the contents as a crossdressing fetish, and whatever it is, unpleasant enough to be labelled as not trans.
So I think the picture is more mixed. Maybe the point isn’t that she thinks that trans people are “sick fucks” with a “fetish”. Maybe the point is that she’s saying that “sick fucks” with a “fetish” (who clearly exist in the world, I don’t think anyone can deny that) are now under the trans umbrella.
Which is a problematic point. If trans includes anyone who says they are, no exception, then it must include “sick fucks” and “fetishists” who are willing to say they are trans. Merely saying that, doesn’t mean all trans people are, nor that they are responsible for them, nor that they should be treated to invective such as that.
So in a far more charitable reading, you cannot say she’s directing her disgust at all trans people, when she might solely be talking about the sort of problematic behaviour that trans people really don’t seem all that eager to be associated with.
Perhaps you could interpret this as a point being made about lack of gatekeeping . The responders definitely don’t want to be under the same umbrella with whatever’s being discussed, but unfortunately, if your standard is self-identification, you don’t have that luxury.
So, invective that is portrayed as a prejudiced generalisation about “trans people” can plausibly be narrowed down to something much more specific with additional context. It could reasonably be argued as such, anyway — as I said, she is not here to defend herself.
What I actually think is that if people are going to insist on posting this screenshot as a gotcha, they should first find a copy of the video referenced above, and include it at the same time, to provide the appropriate context. Then, they should make the claim “here’s what she thought of people like this”, because that would be perhaps the clearest and fairest way of presenting this.
Also, think back to the acceptance survey above. If people deeply mired in this debate are unclear about terminology, how are the general public supposed to understand?
Most of the original context of the exchange the screenshot is taken from is gone now - her comment was deleted, and you can’t see what back and forth prompted it. She did later say:
And the person she was actually replying to in the first place later made fun of her terminal cancer diagnosis:
Ultimately, the picture remains much the same. She died young, and a screenshot of one part of what is clearly a bitter exchange lives on forever, despite being long-deleted, and is used to smear other people who subsequently liked the other things that she did.
[end of edit]
Anyway, how exhaustively do you police the tweets of the youtubers you watch? Or the tweeters you like and retweet?
I’m just going to point out the hypocrisy of criticising using a lesbian as a prop, and then producing another lesbian as a prop in rebuttal.
Christ. I have 40 more screenshots of this thread to go. This is going to take days…
Part 2 here:
