The Conflict of Rights: Why can't people just admit to this?

My right to believe in biological sex conflicts with their right to believe that biological sex is irrelevant.

Biological sex isn't something you 'believe' in, though. It's a real, physical thing, which has real physical and social consequences whether someone believes it's irrelevant or not.

Why would you respect that some people believe this? It’s not possible. We all know it. Even those who pretend they don’t know it.

Personally, for the same reason that I would believe that somebody believes that Jesus is the Son of God. I don't agree with them, but I accept that they do.

"My right to believe in biological sex conflicts with their right to believe that biological sex is irrelevant."

In theory we all have the right to believe what we want. I think the conflict is in how we act on those beliefs.

I agree with others that they will never acknowledge a conflict exists because this forces them to acknowledge that they are not what they say they are (women), and their already tenuous argument falls apart on closer moral and scientific inspection.

The more frustrating thing, I find, is that the activists won't even acknowledge the safeguarding concerns on a very basic, practical level. So even if you are talking about a hypothetical, predatory man who is not 'trans', but is pretending to be in order to gain access to single-sex spaces, they will still not acknowledge that this is a very real risk which cannot be separated from the likes of self-ID. They will inevitably tell you that it would never happen, that the person isn't a 'true' trans person (therefore it isn't their problem), or just start screaming that you are a bigot. And the reason they don't engage with the safeguarding issue, I think, is because then they would be forced to engage with the calculus of risks and harms to women and children of opening the floodgates to predators, versus the risks and harms to trans people of not being able to access women's spaces. Which is to say, comparing the relative merits of avoiding increased instances of rape, abuse or harrassment (or an increase in the baseline level of fear of these things) for women and children, to the hurt feelings and lost validation of men who want to 'feel like one of the girls'.

Any way you look at it, they cannot win hearts and minds through reasoned debate on the practicalities or moral aspects of their position (as far as I can see, there aren't any). Thus the battering ram / trojan horse approaches.

It's important I think to somewht separate discussions of specific legal rights, like those you see in the equality act, with inherent rights. Sometimes legal rights are attempts to describe what we cosider to be inherent rights. Sometimes they aren't. But even in the former case, it can be the case that there are different ways that could be achieved, and you really have to explore the nature of the inherent right in order to try and get it right. It's possible that the legislation doesn't accurately reflect that.

Because it's easier to bury your head in the sand.

It is not an issue of conflicting rights. Transpeople have the same rights as anyone else, and more in some very specific cases (the right to have one’s birth certificate and other documents changed to reflect a legal fiction, for example).

The so-called “rights” that trans activists are agitating for are actually privileges, and in the process of attempting to secure the privileges they want - e.g. the privilege to make any single-sex space mixed sex by the act of entering it; the privilege to have their gender identity validated by, for example, insisting on treating a patient in a healthcare setting where the patient has asked for a healthcare professional of the opposite birth sex to that of said trans clinician - they are perforce removing women’s actual rights, enshrined in law, to single sex spaces, intimate care etc etc.

That Twitter mantra stating that "rights are not a pie and that if someone gets a slice yours won't get smaller " is based on this thinking.

That saying has always annoyed me because it's so patently untrue in many cases.

Goosefoot outlined some good examples of where rights collide. Others have arisen in this current pandemic e.g. the right to meet family and friends versus the right not to catch and potentially die of Covid. Some people try to deny this conflict by downplaying the sacrifices involved ("what's the big deal if you miss your sister's funeral?") or outright ignoring reality ("Covid-19 is a hoax, sheeple!")

Obviously it's healthier to acknowledge there's a conflict and determine there's a balance to be had, but that's harder and so much less satisfying.

Presumably people who consider themselves trans also have the right to call themselves what they want or wear what they want or whatever. The question is how is that applied within a community made up of many different people and in terms of meaningful language.

Gender woo is just the smokescreen for the Umentionable thing anyway. Human rights my arse.

You've changed your name NewlyGranny. Congrats?

While it would be nice to think there was middle ground to be found, it just isn't that sort of scenario. Male-bodied people cannot be partly in and partly out of women's spaces, sports, award ceremonies or shortlists, can they? It's one in, all in or nothing.

The way the lobbyists had everything stitched up privately beforehand is chilling. Whatever happened to "Nothing about us without us"?

We don't even have to frame the argument around the human-made intellectual concept of rights.

We also frame the debate in terms of best interests/safety/harms. Harms and benefits existed long before rights were invented.

And we frame the debate in terms of truth versus fiction. The Emperor's new clothes approach. 2+2=4. Even if a lie harmed nobody and breached no rights, it is still a lie.

Being honest that the wholesale removal of womens rights is the goal, would likely bring the misogyny in both the arguments, and the people who argue, front and centre tbh, and it all falls apart.

Because it's Men's Rights v Women's Rights.

A story as old as time...

Because this conflict requires the whole world to not just accept that persons belief but to change their way of life/compromise their safety to truly validate it.

That can never, ever be acceptable.

Nodding along to all of this, @carefulvulvadriver!

As I think some of you are aware, at the moment in Ireland there's a petition asking for the word 'women' to be put back into public health information about cervical cancer screening. Trans rights activists mocked and harassed women for being invested in their own health, while insisting that the language included 'trans men', 'people with a cervix', etc (some of them are still at it, even though the official spokesgroup-approved stance is that it's OK to include women - gee, thanks). What's at stake here is women not getting screened for cancer because the language is unclear, versus trans and non-binary people feeling uncomfortable or not feeling affirmed.

These are not equivalent risks, the same as in sports. The Times ran a piece recently re: Caster Semenya - and I am aware that she's not trans but has a DSD, I don't mean to conflate the two - and agreed it was unfair that she doesn't get to compete as a woman without medical intervention. But her rights to compete as such were weighed up against the rights of female athletes to have fairness in competition, in a category that is specifically segregated by sex.

Trans rights activists - and like most others on this board, I would distinguish between activists and trans people - are not interested in weighing up competing interests or vulnerabilities. If they were, there would not be a problem. Women are not the problem in this.

Why are so many people so reluctant to accept that there is a conflict of rights in the gender debate?

It's not just the gender debate. Many people don't really understand the concept of conflict of rights in a lot of different areas - you can see it even on this short thread. Despite the fact that it's well understood by people who work in law or deal with legislation or philosophy around human rights.

The reason, I believe, is that these people imagine "human rights" as a sort of perfect system, where everyone, in reality, has a certain set of rights that they can, should, and need to express. If they can't, then they are no longer living authentically and are being oppressed.

From this perspective, if someone has a right, then it simply cannot conflict with another right, if it seems to than you have misunderstood the nature of one of the rights. My right to a party cannot conflict with your right to a peaceful sleep, the cows right to a life cannot conflict with the farmers right to make a living or eat a burger, the unborn humans right to live cannot conflict with the mothers right to not be pregnant, the right of the person in the high rise to use air conditioning cannot conflict with the right of others to breath unpolluted air.

There is no need to balance these claims, or assess where one begins to outweigh the other, or anything else, in each case one is absolute and the other must be falsely attributed. There is never a possibility of a conflict of authentic rights.

This misapprehension is behind a lot of current discourse and I think also goes some way to explaining why people who think this way often become so upset when someone disagrees with them..

Well put @HPFA!

It’s a really interesting question @CatsGetCOVIDToo and one that has frustrated me too, because the debate could do with some bloody logic and rational unpicking.
Sometimes I think it’s because there’s a vague notion that all us “minorities” with protected characteristics should just play nicely together while the grown ups get on with running things (of course women aren’t a populatIon minority at all, but our interests are certainly treated as such). There’s a requirement in the EA2010 for public bodies to promote good relations between the protected characteristics (I’m paraphrasing wildly) but that seems largely ignored, otherwise it’s another way the “balancing” interests/needs/rights issue would come in (I think this is a point made by Ann Sinnott in her challenge, but I might be misremembering).

But as much as I’d like a systematic measuring up of conflicting “rights” (quotes because I’m not sure what rights transwomen are being denied) I think the other posters are right there would be a danger of that process awarding some sort of moral or intellectual equivalence to the two sides. We kind of see that already with the “be kind” response. The risks and hardships and proportionality/materiality on either side are just made equivalent. So yes a woman might suffer permanent life limiting injury from being rugby tackled by a biological man - but a trans woman’s feelings will be hurt if you don’t let them play women’s rugby, and that is somehow put on par, and “balanced” with the grave physical danger women face. It all ends up with women having to compromise ridiculous levels of personal safety because their right to safety is somehow seen as equivalent to someone’s right to have their internal sense of “gender” affirmed.

Sometimes I wonder why the whole trans rights thing has become the dominant discussion, when we could be talking about the continued violence perpetrated against women and girls, or how the world continues to be organised around the needs and interests of men. But i think it’s such an issue because It resonates so much with a theme that underlies the violence and subordination: when push comes to shove, or when “competing” interests and rights clash, it’s women who get silenced and compromised.

I remain interested in having that discussion about the conflict of rights, but I’m deeply sceptical liberal democracies will be discerning about the differing weights and materialities that really ought to be applied to each side

If you look at arguments over abortion the "pro-life" position is that life begins at the moment of conception, that the foetus/baby's right to life is equal to and independent of the mother's and that taking that life is therefore murder. You can disagree strongly with that position (I imagine most people on this board would!) but it is comprehensible and you could debate with it.

When those arguing for trans rights were arguing on the basis of gender dysphoria, again, that was also something comprehensible, we might not "understand" how it feels to be gender dysphoric but we can recognize its existence - you don't need to have experienced OCD to see that it exists. But now instead activists have based their position on a gender identity theory that is clearly nonsense and cannot be defended rationally. If there is are multiple indefinable genders that only exist in people's heads it is absurd to suggest that this is more "real" than biological sex and that would apply even if Intersex people did constitute a third sex. You therefore need very powerful combination of emotional blackmail and shaming to make people "believe" it.

Because there isn't a conflict of rights.

It's some prostate-havers wanting to dismantle women's sex based legal rights for reasons best known to themselves.

Absolutely I agree. Any adult should of course be free to make whatever changes to their body and live in any way that they choose. I'll march in the streets for that.

The issue is that they do not actually change sex. You cannot let people choose the service and space they want to use regardless of the reality of their sex and keep single sex services for people who need them.