I am relatively new to the gender identity shitshow and, like many of us, have been grappling over the past month or so with having to rethink a lot of what I had previously accepted as Correct Opinions (Guardian, left wing, being kind, good! Daily Mail, Tories, bad!).
Part of this has involved reading more, questioning more and simply thinking more than I have done before. In doing this, I want to make sure that I stay balanced and fair, and keep trying to think of alternative points of view. I don't want my indignation and rage to make me as blinkered as the TRAs.
So, something I was pondering over yesterday is the argument that denying trans women the right to define themselves as women (something which I instinctively disagree with) is no different to the (now legally unacceptable) desire to deny same sex couples the right to marry (something I instinctively agree with).
At the time it was being debated, same sex marriage was something I didn't give any real thought to - it seemed at face value a perfectly reasonable thing for gay people to want to be able to do, and I personally didn't have a problem with it. And I would have almost certainly judged someone who did, and thought, frankly, that they were a bit of a bigot.
But what I'm now realising is that I didn't have any skin in the game. When DH and I got married, the motivation was the legal status of marriage, and, to a lesser extent, to make a personal and public commitment to each other. DH re atheists, so we had a civil ceremony. Religion didn't come into it, and if it had have been available at the time, we might have formed a civil partnership instead. So when the word marriage got legally redefined to mean a partnership between two people, rather than specifically between a man and a woman, it didn't take anything away from my marriage*.
But presumably for many people to whom marriage had a deep religious significance, this may have been deeply troubling. It forced them to accept a new definition, a new ideology being forced upon them against their will, against their beliefs. Presumably many of these people enthusiastically welcomed the rights of gay couples to form civil partnerships in order to achieve (almost) the same rights in law as married couples, but that concept of marriage wan't other people's to give away. I understand that Baroness Nicholson objected to gay marriage. Was this how she felt, I wonder?
I can't quite reconcile my position on this and would really appreciate some view points. Is the crux of it similar to the idea of proportionate response? That while one can recognise that a person with religious faith may legitimately disagree with gay marriage, their sense of 'harm' caused by the existence gay marriage is, on balanced, trumped by the harm caused to gay people by denying their right to marriage. Whereas in the case of TWAW, I can argue that the harm that would be caused to biological females through dismantling single sex provisions is much greater than the harm caused to trans women by denying them the right to be legally indistinguishable from natal females?