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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

It's against my religion to...

77 replies

PikesPeaked · 23/02/2019 09:13

Faith and belief are protected characteristics. This includes lack of religion or belief.

I do not believe that people can change sex.
I do not believe that a male can be a woman, nor that a female can be a man.

I am Jewish.

Judaism forbids us from standing by when another person is at risk of harm.
Judaism forbids us from deceiving a vulnerable person.

Trans ideology harms both young people exposed to it (ROGD) and women in general.

Judaism requires us to treat others with dignity.
Judaism requires us to treat others as we would wish to be treated ourselves.

OP posts:
emerencealwayshopeful · 28/02/2019 13:10

Thank you for this post.

Genderism is a religion that is entrenched in law. And that's terrifying.

The Judaism that shapes my life does not require anyone else to share my beliefs - not even other Jews.

The first thing we learn is that man and woman/humans were created in the image of G-d. The G-d who looked at the world and said that it was good. Over and over. Twice on day 3.

Modern Judaism has latched on to the commandment to heal the world. Social justice matters.

But this thing. This scourge that is transgenderism, men are again writing the rules. No one has asked the women whether we are ok with men colonising our spaces. Our spaces that we've been fighting for for hundreds of years. Finally we have female rabbis but they've had to fight for years to access the education that men get and then a man decides they are really a woman and they do it bigger and better then we do. (At the same time right now IKEA in Israel is being sued for having a whole catalogue with no women in it, and the Jewish internet is shocked that a bride played the drums at her own wedding - either they are shocked that she did this evil thing or that it is being called evil by people who claim ownership of our religion).

I don't believe that people can be born into wrong bodies. I believe in the commandment that doctors should first do no harm. And harm is being done. And even saying that in public can get you into trouble. And that's really really scary.

Goosefoot · 28/02/2019 15:31

This is something that is a problem, but I think the reason that it is particularly difficult is that it's potentially so for a lot of things we might legislate about. There are some things everyone really agrees about, and they aren't usually problems - the metaphysical implications don't come up because they are just assumed by all.

There really are different implications for what you might call the spiritual anthropology in genderism, so any time someone wants to take an action or have a customary approach to something concrete that is related, it will become obvious that there are real differences in belief. I think though this is true of quite a few controversial social changes or legal changes - they are controversial because they reflect different ways of conceptualising the issue.

For me, the question becomes, if there is a need to make some kind of decision that will materially affect people, how do we do it under those conditions? Some people will say that any non-religious worldview should trump a religious one - I think that's a fairly significant betrayal of secularism myself, which is meant to avoid institutional preference one type of worldview in governance, be it Christian or Marxist or logical positivism or anything else.

It's difficult though to avoid reflecting whatever worldview most people have, because those are the sorts of things they will value and want to enact in the way society is run. All our laws and regulations and customs ultimately reflect a certain worldview, they aren't really neutral.

My sense with this issue is that it won't be really fruitful to complain about the bare fact that genderist ideas reflect certain worldviews - if most people believe them, likely the law will end up reflecting that. It's important to talk about freedom to exchange ideas, and disagree, but my sense is there is a distinction there.

What I find interesting is I think actually quite a lot of people don't agree with some of the ideas being put into law, and maybe aren't aware. OTOH, how many would be happy to see laws ahead of personal views in the population on other issues they think are important? In any case, I suspect the only way to prevent this kind of change is to convince people they don't want it, so that worldview doesn't become dominant.

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