Bristol Law Professor Joanne Conaghan weighs in on the Gender Debate

[Needmoresleep]

legalresearch.blogs.bris.ac.uk/2018/12/sex-gender-and-the-trans-debate/

Enjoy!

The excellent Jane Clare Jones (aka @LadyPrincesexual ) has commented on the piece in the OP in an extensive Twitter thread:

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1075783838217973760

As ever, the whole is worth reading.

“I think this will always be the case when law attempts to incorporate ideology rather than material fact”

Yes. Did you notice she said there is “evidence” of the whole anthropological lots-of-sexes stuff but didn’t identify it?

This bit is new to me:

“There is a conceptual error here... I would say that the 'sex' and 'gender' are analytically distinct... that is, we can usefully think them separately, and then also, because we can think them separately, we can also think how they interact. To think that having a sex/
gender distinction means that you think there there is no meaningful relation or interaction between them is just to misunderstand what such a distinction is. As is to think that understanding that they interact, and are both, in fact, mediated by each other, in some way
·undermines such a distinction.
Bodies exist, they are mediated by culture, and culture is also, mediated by bodies. “

Just because we can think how the interact doesn't mean we are going to think the male sex is the same as the female sex. This trick has been tried already.

Its the Tommy Cooper trick of bottle glass, glass bottle, bottle bottle, glass glass.

It was funny when Tommy Cooper did it pissed.

www.bing.com/videos/search?q=tommy+cooper+bottle+glass+trick&view=detail&mid=31D8585482D31D711D9B31D8585482D31D711D9B&FORM=VIRE

Jane Clare Jones's fisking:

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1075783838217973760

I heart Jane Clare Jones

It was funny when Tommy Cooper did it pissed.

Tommy Cooper was non-binary before it was trendy.

Thats a brilliant sketch. The joke he plays on is that Jack is the slang name for Royal Navy sailors.

Urgh, that piece reads as if it's trying to be cleverer than it really is (not sure why - the author must be clever, surely?)

Just to play devil's advocate a little with something OldCrone said upthread: "Why should the rest of society have to agree to a major change in a person's legal status because they have made a lifestyle choice?"

Arguably marriage is a lifestyle choice, which the rest of society has to accept and to which certain status and benefits are awarded.

However, society also gets to make the rules about what constitutes a legal marriage (and this varies immensely from culture to culture, country to country) and anyone who tried to say "but I'm a wife because I say I am!" would be laughed at not pandered to.

This takes me back to my university days of trying to understand postmodernism and deconstruction by translating it into plain English and then finding the emperor was stark bollock naked.

I think this is Humpty Dumpty philosophy. A word means what you want it to mean, neither more nor less - the question is who is to be master.

I don't think I am ever going to understand it, but Tommy Cooper is brill

If I hadn't known, I would have assumed it was written by Sally Hines. And no, that's not a compliment.

Just to play devil's advocate a little with somethingOldCronesaid upthread: "Why should the rest of society have to agree to a major change in a person's legal status because they have made a lifestyle choice?"

Arguably marriage is a lifestyle choice, which the rest of society has to accept and to which certain status and benefits are awarded.

In what way does someone's marriage affect other people?

and anyone who tried to say "but I'm a wife because I say I am!" would be laughed at not pandered to.

Indeed. having experienced dear friends who spent their entire economic lives as a supposed "common law wife" only t find their perceived identity to be utterly meaningless, I'm not inclined to pay tat for tit here.

When the rules are deliberately slanted towards male desire, let's just think about the cost of that desire.

Women lining up to cheerlead for male desire, well....when you want to make it impossible to actually deal with female reality, frankly you are coming across as a bit too subservient for my taste.

*Professoress" - it varies from place to place, but often married couples enjoy better tax breaks to unmarried couples. They can pass down titles and wealth to their children when unmarried couples cannot. If someone is already married, they cannot (usually) marry someone else until the first marriage is dissolved (see many a thread on Relationships about men who haven't quite divorced their first wife before getting engaged again...). Their status is recognised in things like visa applications, and it's comparatively recent that things like mortgages could be determined on the basis of a partner's salary not just a spouse's salary. A husband can register a birth as the father where an unmarried man cannot without the mother present. Similarly, a spouse is automatically the next of kin for medical decisions but a partner can find themselves completely side-lined at the hospital bed.

All ways in which a piece of paper to support a lifestyle choice is pretty meaningful. Being married doesn't directly take rights away from unmarried people, but it definitely confers a whole host of privileges over those who are not married.

But marriage is available to all couples.

If a male colleague gets married, it doesn't affect my life in any way. If he decides to transition and wants to use women's loos and changing rooms, my right to single-sex spaces is taken away.

Arguably marriage is a lifestyle choice, which the rest of society has to accept and to which certain status and benefits are awarded.

The point I was trying to make (badly, it seems) was alluding to the original reasons for the GRA - that people who had gender dysphoria and had made a lot of changes to their bodies to try to resemble the opposite sex were given a way of making that change a legal one.

But why should society also acknowlege as the opposite sex those who simply have a wish to be legally the opposite sex without the dysphoria or the changes to their body?

This is the bit I was arguing with.

On the one hand, there is the perfectly proper concern of trans people to have access to a legal process of gender recognition which they do not experience as invasive, cumbersome, and pathologizing.

Really it's just a question of why should someone without gender dysphoria 'have access to a legal process of gender recognition' at all? Why do they need it if their 'gender change' is simply a lifestyle choice rather than a medical condition?

Really it's just a question of why should someone without gender dysphoria 'have access to a legal process of gender recognition' at all? Why do they need it if their 'gender change' is simply a lifestyle choice rather than a medical condition?

Yep. I don't accept they should have access to this necessarily.

OldCrone
The thinking seems to be that people shouldn't have to say whether or not they have GD, or that it shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. Was it Dawn Butler who compared gender dysphoria to being gay or black?

Not sure what you're getting at there, Professoress.

Angels dancing on the head of a pin.

The thinking seems to be that people shouldn't have to say whether or not they have GD,

If they're going to be given legal recognition, why shouldn't they have to say?

or that it shouldn't be seen as a bad thing.

It shouldn't be seen as a bad thing that someone thinks there's something wrong with their healthy body and that they need a lifetime of medication and irreversible surgery to change it?

Was it Dawn Butler who compared gender dysphoria to being gay or black?

In general, people who are gay or black don't feel that there's something wrong with their bodies, do they? Don't understand the comparison there.

What I meant was that self-id advocates don't differentiate between dysphoric and non-dysphoric transgender people. They see gender recognition as formal recognition of someone's inner identity rather than a change that needs to be justified.

In general, people who are gay or black don't feel that there's something wrong with their bodies, do they? Don't understand the comparison there.

Neither do I, and I think it was a very revealing comment from Butler. She seems to think that GD is just a manifestation of the suffering caused by the person not being accepted as their 'acquired' gender.
I mentioned Butler because she is a good example of someone who promotes self-id for the whole tg umbrella, no questions asked.