This is a comment on the petition. I won't post his name, but he says pretty much what we're all thinking;
*Munroe Bergdorf does not meet any of the criteria that would normally be applied by the BFI in selecting someone for such an event: there are tens, if not hundreds, of women with more experience of and insight into the challenges faced by women in the film industry; he has no apparent skills in any field and has demonstrated no interest in or commitment to the arts; he is relatively inarticulate and lacking in insight; and he has a track record of directing inappropriate, negative, prejudiced comments at whole groups of people.
It seems highly unlikely that NONE of the key decision makers at the BFI would have had doubts about Bergdorf’s credentials; therefore one suspects that they have simply been too confused about the arguments or too afraid to stand up to the pervasive, Orwellian pressure to allow men to self-define as women and to appropriate women’s event and platforms
All people should be treated as individuals and given equal opportunities, and minority groups, including trans-gender, are often oppressed and need a voice. It’s also true that society sets up gender stereotypes which can cause psychological harm to people.
But Bergdorf’s preference for presenting a “feminine” persona to the world does not make him a woman, however convinced he is that he is one and however much surgery he has. He is conceptually confused (as is everyone who is going along with this): this is because there is no “essence of woman” that someone can look inside themselves and identify – all women are potentially mentally different and someone who is not a woman cannot “live as a woman” because there is no common essence or lifestyle choice that defines what a woman is (e.g. a woman can have sex with other women, cut her hair short and dress “like a man” but is still a woman). Being a woman means having 2 X chromosomes and the body that normally goes with that and then that leads to a set of wider life experiences which typically (not always) include menstruation, menopause, childbirth, risk of sexual attack, being talked down to etc. Bergdorf (a man) is effectively claiming to know what ALL women are like inside. The arrogance of this is obvious.
This is EXACTLY like asking a white person to present at an event for “People of colour behind the camera”: however much a white person may admire people of colour or empathise with specific cases, they can’t just decide to BE a person of colour because having dark skin and the social experiences that go with that is a biological distinction. Someone “blacking up” and having surgery would be seen either as offensive or as an indication of severe delusion. This is because everyone knows there is no “essence of coloured person” and that it is racist to assume anything at all about someone’s mind from the colour of their skin. If the BFI ran an event celebrating “People of colour behind the camera” and asked a white person who defined themselves as black to present, there would rightly be outrage. But here we have a PRECISELY equivalent situation in which we are asked to accept that a man who claims to be a woman is one.
Most thinking people (including I suspect, most regular BFI goers) are sympathetic to individual trans people but think that the answer is for society to be more aware of and more accepting of individual differences and more alert to and sceptical of gender stereotypes and the pervasive commercially driven social pressures which lead people to internalise them more as their psychological reality – cosmetics and pharmaceutical companies stand to make £billions if people are sold the idea that there is a misalignment between their body and their gender identity and the myth that they can change sex through medical procedures. They are deeply concerned about the way people like Bergdorf are silencing free speech on the subject in an Orwellian way by attempting to control language through legal means and its obvious that they have some big-money backers. The BFI should stop going along with this totalitarian, reactionary, commercially-drive, creepy nonse. History will judge you (and the rest of us) for such things.
N.B. none of this negates the fact that there are genuine inter-sex people whose genetics/morphology doesn’t fit neatly into male or female categories. These people have a tough time with society trying to normalise them through medical procedures, rather than seeing them as special and different.*