Any Quakers on here? (Mainly about pronouns.)

The problem lies not in "whose truth wins" overall, but in the freedom of every individual Quaker to obey their conscience in speaking whattheybelieve to be the truth

This is crucial and appears to be missing from some of the dialogue in Quakers currently.

The answer to the question at BYM (do we welcome and affirm transpeople) is yes. But do we also welcome and affirm gender- critical feminists? And women who need single sex spaces? Etc. I hope the answer is also yes. If it is, we need to find a way to hold both these different perspectives in the community and accept the current conflict between them, allowing it to exist openly, with neither side assuming the other's perspective comes from a place of bigotry or ignorance.

As other posters have said, Quakers encompass a wide range of positions on the existence of God. In the first world war, a third of young male British Quakers joined up to fight. Others were jailed for their refusal to fight or contribute to the war effort in any way. Quakers held together and accepted that, in this imperfect world, individuals following their consciences are led to different answers.

Perhaps it is always difficult to do this, and each time, the Society and Quaker process hangs by a thread. I hope that we manage it again.

Just to make clear - I'm not a Quaker. I'm a mathematician (or a Helen Joycer!)

But I do very much like what I understand to be the Quakers' outlook, and I did think that fitted with it.

I think @NecessaryScene answered your question about how a Quaker would respond to a Trans person describing their truth, very eloquently with that quote.

A person's belief about a thing (be that religion or gender identity), is subjective, it isn't "THE TRUTH". Quakers know that subjective belief is not Objective, not true for everyone. I would say that a Quaker asking not or understanding and empathy but for their truth to be taken as THE truth, has not understood the guiding principles.

Thank you OP. That's a really considered answer.

I am in membership and attend MfW semi regularly but I don't "identify" as a Quaker.

I am drawn to Quakerism because as a community it seeks for and sees the universal in all people.

But I don't "identify" as a Quaker because identity is of the ego, of the self. Seperate and often tribal. Selfish. Ultimately the cause of all conflict. That is "My Truth"

Sharing of individual spiritual truth and experience is encouraged, though I rarely feel moved in MfW. There is beauty in other people's truth and I learn from it, even if it is not "My truth". The main thing and where Quakerism differs from other faiths, is that nothing was ever seen as "THE TRUTH". Until recently.

Any sensible person would run a mile at anyone or any group professing to have moral or spiritual exclusivism over others. Gender ideology, like most religions and secuar ideologies makes truth claims, which it is so certain of it seeks to impose them.

"Think it possible that you may be mistaken".

There are however material, physical, rational and scientific truths that are universal. Language does evolve, but not unanchored. Scientific truths do change but slowly, with logic, consensus, rationale and the scientific method.

There is very little dogma in Quakerism. It has always resisted dogma. It is practical and seeks social justice.

However I feel the secular dogma of the "Social Justice Movement" is creeping in by stealth, cloaked in a veneer of kindness and pretty words that resonate on a superficial level with Quaker values and it concerns me.

Bottom up liberal principles of faith in humanity and practical pacifist activism are being seduced and replaced by top this top down ideology that sees everything in terms of hierachies of oppression and the "cult of the self", as in every other walk of life.

I don't have to agree with everything you say and believe about yourself to value and respect you, nor would I force anything on you, but I won't say, do or believe (or pretend I believe) anything that is forced upon me and I have a moral imperitive to resist that which I see as harmful.

Though in answer to the original post @SelfPortraitWithEelsI I do not and never have thought that using someones preferred opposite sex pronouns is particularly harmful, (if sex and gender are not conflated on a societal level) I find it easy to speak to a persons inherrent femininity or masculinity or your gender presentation or even just your stated truth, with no conflict, if it is asked of me.
I do object to stating "my" pronouns , since that is forcing me to "identify" with something that is just a fact about me and has no more bearing on who I am as a person than the colour of my hair, or the size of my nose. I am female, I do not identify with being female, I would like it to be irrelevant.

How would a Quaker respond to a trans person who said that the truth is they had always felt trapped in the wrong body, since childhood, and the truth is that they feel complete and right in their new identity as someone of the opposite sex?

I liked the quote from Helen Joyce's book in this review:

Whether a religion makes its believers happy is irrelevant to the question of whether god exists, or whether everyone else should be compelled to pay it lip service.

It seems to me that the Quakers understand that very well, normally. But can they resist the genderologists demands for belief and acquiescence? That LGN article wasn't hugely encouraging...

How would a Quaker respond to a trans person who said that the truth is they had always felt trapped in the wrong body, since childhood, and the truth is that they feel complete and right in their new identity as someone of the opposite sex?

Does the trans person's psychological inner truth have less value than the Quaker's biological outer truth? If so, how does the spiritual, inner not-biologically-visible component of faith (the soul, the presence of God and the Devil) get handled in Quakerism? Must it always have a clear physical manifestation?

Bumping this thread to add a link to this new article on Lesbian and Gay News, as I thought it was relevant.

lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/08/trans-substantiation-a-quest-for-truth-in-the-quakers-by-deborah-evans/

I - like a couple of others here - was really heartened at the Norwich Quakers' process, which seemed to be that most Quakerly of things, a listening process which affirmed at every point the humanity of everyone involved, even when it was difficult, and even when it came to conclusions neither side was entirely comfortable with.

Quakers - a religious organisation, the Religious Society of Friends - can cope with accepting that plenty of it's own members don't even believe in God. Which, frankly, baffles me - why bother joining a faith body if you are an atheist? - but which in practice is absolutely fine. If we can do this without schism, you'd think we should be able to work out a way through the current impasse, even if it takes us 50 years.

The Yearly Gathering epistle is just the first step in a long journey to explore this issue, not the final word. I have also been heartened by Quakers at a local level (very unlike the Euston HQ) being keen, to ensure that gender-critical Quakers are heard, even on the occasions that they personally are not of the same opinion.

Movement on trans issues has been pushed forward by a coterie of largely upper-middle-class, privately educated young Quakers, embarrassed about their own extreme privilege and desperate to distance themselves from it. This is the perfect way for them to do so, at no cost to themselves.

This partly sums up "woke" for me - I was saying to some younger relatives on the weekend that I find it interesting at the moment that people find it easier to change language than change society.

I think some social change can come from language change, but that it only goes so far ...

I am also heartened by BenjaminGay’s comment regarding dissent. Thank you to all who continue to push for discussion as a means to find resolution. I have generally seen Quakers as a force for good in a world that is sometimes very messy. For Quakers to push transactivism unequivocally in its current aggressive form would be a sad day for me.

There's a very woolly bit of "aren't we nice" about trans issues in the epistle that is the final statement that comes out of Yearly Meeting, which has just finished, but nothing is settled about how we as a Society approach things like single sex spaces, prisons, etc.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this is being discussed at the same time that Quakers are also attempting, in our clumsy and well-meaning way, to get to grips with real injustices, like racism, classism, abelism, not to mention the demands to take action on climate change seriously. Movement on trans issues has been pushed forward by a coterie of largely upper-middle-class, privately educated young Quakers, embarrassed about their own extreme privilege and desperate to distance themselves from it. This is the perfect way for them to do so, at no cost to themselves.

I just googled a trans activist, Abigail Maxwell, whose name popped up in another context, to discover that they are a Quaker, which led to quite a lot about Quakers and the current gender debate.

I don't know much about Quakers, but liked the listening approach described here:

www.norwichquakers.org.uk/post/norwich-meeting-s-experience-of-conflict-around-transgender-issues-january-2019-january-2020

I'm a Quaker, and take very seriously the Quaker testimonies of equality and truth.

I have been very disturbed to witness Quaker HQ, in Euston, run a coach and horses through those testimonies, and ignore Quaker process, in their efforts to push gender ideology onto the rest of us. They don't appear to be concerned about homophobia, or the rights of women, and they have tried very hard to suppress dissent.

But one thing that Quakers do very well is dissent. Ours is fundamentally a radical religion, whose practitioners naturally resist a would-be priest class dictating to them what they must believe. Thou must think for thyself.

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It seems to me that at least part of the distinction you are making revolves around what is sometimes called pastoral response.

@SmokedDuck thank you so much for putting a proper name to a way of working that I recognise as a teacher of adults. I was one of the earlier cases of an academic doxxed & threatened because of feminist views expressed on social media (back in 2016 ...).

One of the reasons the complainants to my employer said they couldn't go through informal discussion first before launching a formal complaint to get me sacked, was that - given my expressed views - they felt no trans person would be safe on my presence.

What I needed was a succinct way to explain that there is a difference between my personal views, and the way I treat the person in front of me as a teacher & pastoral tutor. I'd call it professionalism: you deal with the person in front of you, and it's not a personal interaction, as such, it's a professional interaction.

Your examples and the phrase 'pastoral response' perfectly explain what I spent 3 months trying to explain to my employer!

It's also what one might like to say to those trans activists who say that any discussion of transactivism, the transgender trend, and the issues around conflicting rights, is "denting the existence of trans people."

It's not. It's not personal -it's an appropriate discussion to have at the level of the law, ethics, and principles by which we organise society so we can all hope to live reasonable lives.

Although a lot of the time, when I hear that any discussion of the broad issues around trans rights (especially vs women's sex-based rights) I want to answer that my sex (and my own experience) has been debated, discussed, denied for millennia. The "position of women" - of our rights, our characters, our 'natural' abilities etc etc ad infinitum have been the subject of male discourse since, ooooh, at least as early as the Book of Genesis ...

Smokedduck I think you are exactly right with the pastoral response comparison, and the question about harm reduction. What is a social and philosophical exploration and what is harm, in this area, is a line that can be crossed in the blink of an eye.

I used to have a routine I had to follow leaving the house, otherwise I would be convinced the house was catching fire or flooding. My friends found it very frustrating. Then one day I changed my clothes to go out, and when I came back to the living room, my friend said with a smile “I touched all the knobs in your kitchen so that you don’t have to.” It was such a precious gift - I never felt that he was affirming that my fears were real, but he was affirming me and saying my peace of mind mattered to him. And actually it was the start of opening my eyes to different ways to deal with my problem. So although I know a lot of trans people resent comparisons to mental health, and locate the problem in the physical body, rather than to do with the mind’s map of the embodied self in society (my own take on it), that is the feeling I am drawing on.

Thanks for the explanation, SmokedDuck, and for jumping in quickly to say it. I have a lot going on at the moment and too little mental space for this discussion, but was tempted into this thread as the discussion is of particular interest to me.

I have swithered for a long time between a belief in God and agnosticism as I don’t feel there is sufficient evidence of absence to conclude there is no God in every possible sense of the word. I would attend Quakers if there was a meeting near me. Perhaps I should attend an online meeting instead, given that’s an option now. It’d forgotten about it because it has been so long since attendance was a possibility.

Yes - I was thinking more of the post your post was a response to, AnyOld - I should have made that more clear. Which asked how a Quaker could respond truthfully to someone who asked about the existence of God, since there is no evidence for it. The idea that belief in God in some way flies in the face of reason and evidences supposes a kind of positivist empiricism that isn't just obviously true or accepted across the board. It's probably the standard approach that western secular state education pre-supposes though, as a kind of baseline, so often people think it's just the natural and obvious rational viewpoint.