Amnesty - “no such thing as a biologically male/female body”

[NellieEllie]

A week ago I saw that Amnesty had responded to a complaint about the open letter signed in Ireland and in that response had said the above.
I wrote to Amnesty as a long time supporter and queried whether this was their official stance, and have today received a reply.
This is an extract - see esp para 3.

“We stand over the letter, which we signed to stand in solidarity with the trans community and against those spreading hate.

There are attempts to decontextualise certain phrases used in the letter in a way that misleads and confuses people, which is a common tactic used against many of our human rights campaigns. For example, the letter asks for media and politicians to not give legitimacy to those spreading vitriol or misinformation. This is being framed as a call to take away their political representation, which anyone reading the letter will clearly see is not what it means.

Another example is the letter’s referring to those ‘defending biology’. Allowing self-determination of our bodies is a basic principle of feminism and human rights. There is no such thing as a ‘biologically female/male body’ - a person’s genitalia doesn’t determine their gender. Those that seek to exclude and disenfranchise groups of people, or force people into one gender or their other on that basis, are working against basic human rights principles.

We feel much of the current media reporting and conversations on social media with regards to self-identification is misguided. Restricting the rights of transgender people, and omitting the use of inclusive language will not advance or protect women’s rights.“

I was hoping that it was a case of an earnest woke teen manning the social media account, but clearly not.
How can they promote such doublespeak? Their last magazine was full of references to women in developing countries - do they REALLY think that there is no such class? “A person’s genitalia does not determine gender” is a separate statement - but they are conflating the two and specifically denying biology.

I am so wearied by this nonsense.

@Collidascope

"Allowing self-determination of our bodies is a basic principle of feminism and human rights. There is no such thing as a ‘biologically female/male body’ - a person’s genitalia doesn’t determine their gender."

... the actual fuck?
They don't understand what they're arguing, do they?

Whoever wrote this is clueless. It’s word soup. The two interconnected parts of the sentence aren’t the same thing.

Amnesty is a charity, they should be very mindful as to how this will affect their fundraising, and how many people will feel they just can't support them anymore.

There is zero need for Amnesty to wade into this, they can choose to stay neutral, but didn't. Very unwise decision.

A large part of the worst cases they see will be those treated so badly due to their biological sex.

I’d like them to come on here and explain and make a statement to retract that line.

Didn't Professor Rosa Freedman say in her evidence last week, that the principle of 'self determination' applies to 'peoples', (choosing their government), and not to individuals.
I think she was refuting a point made by the TRAs in their evidence

@Clymene

The vagina museum has gone full 'people with vaginas'. The word woman appears on their website a handful of times and only in relation to being trans inclusive.

I went to an event by them before the museum was even opened where they were going on about ‘vagina-havers’

@houseinthesnow

Amnesty is a charity, they should be very mindful as to how this will affect their fundraising, and how many people will feel they just can't support them anymore.

There is zero need for Amnesty to wade into this, they can choose to stay neutral, but didn't. Very unwise decision.

The trouble is that most of our large charities have been captured.

I work at one and our diversity training is supplied by Stonewall.

Education helps, but when we are so clearly being gaslit by governments and this sort of shit from the likes of Amnesty it's harder and harder to hold on to what is real.

Ravenesque I absolutely agree and that is where life experience comes in as a problem rather than as asset. Life experience means the older generations are going to be more resistant to this, so this dogma pits older against younger people and labels their views ‘phobic’ or ‘problematic’.

Younger generations are less able to resist it and TRAs don’t want sceptical older, more established or more grounded people coming in and being sceptical about the dogmatic beliefs. So they use authoritarian tactics to get the dissenters to shut up.

The lack of resistance hasn’t always been a problem of lack of critical thinking, of a lack of education. It’s not that more information was needed. It’s about adherence to specific political beliefs. This dogma is better viewed as extremist politics or a cult.

We can see multiple influential educated people and key organisations who could have been instrumental in stopping this along the way, (GMC, MPs, Charity Commission, EHRC for example) being presumably too scared or self serving for their own reputation to go near this topic or to speak up even to ask questions.. or under resourced and sexist and incurious.. or successfully groomed by the lobby misrepresenting the law and legal obligations around all this. It’s absolutely individually and collectively damaging and anti democratic and it all starts with undermining facts and reality.

Ravenesque there’s this thread about The Vagina Museum and it also has some links to other threads
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4068162-vagina-museum

Thanks @EyesOpening and others. I'm taking them off my Smile thing.

We're not even allowed to own our own vaginas now. Or again. It's taken us long enough to get to a place where are vaginas are something to celebrate and now they belong to people and not women.

Excuse my language, but fuck that shit.

the principle of 'self determination' applies to 'peoples'
Yep - it's an international law thing (twas the subject of my masters thesis)

I'm disappointed about The Vagina Museum but to my delight, I have discovered Jess De Wahls and places on the internet that haven't disappeared through the looking glass.

Who bailed out the vagina museum? Weren’t they going to the wall (quite deservedly?)

It seems as if the Irish media has finally woken up to Amnestys capture as a pressure group for what they deem acceptable speech rather than freedom of speech

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/amnesty-has-lost-focus-on-rights-of-prisoners-of-conscience-1.4497378

Same article here but without potential paywall www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/top-stories/comment-amnesty-has-lost-its-sharp-focus-on-prisoners-of-conscience/

"In some ways, this is the endpoint of a longer story. Amnesty’s mission has been steadily changing over recent decades. As their own website puts it “Amnesty has grown from seeking the release of political prisoners to upholding the whole spectrum of human rights”. Amnesty has broadened its focus to campaign on a whole range of broader human rights issues such as poverty, gay rights, abortion, trans rights and migrant rights among others.

Although I usually supported the goals Amnesty campaigned in favour of, I confess that this change made me uneasy. I feared that the disciplined, principled USP that allowed Amnesty to make such a particular contribution on the question of prisoners of conscience would be undermined by a broader focus. There are organisations campaigning on all of the broader issues that Amnesty began to engage with, so the opportunity to add value seemed less. In addition, the term “human rights” covers such a range of policy questions that I feared that the difference between Amnesty and a more generally left-wing pressure group may become difficult to see........

Amnesty’s current position undermines the key distinction that made their advocacy on the issue of prisoners of conscience so effective in the past. They used to argue that it did not matter what the substance of a person’s views was, the important thing was that people should not be imprisoned for peacefully holding and expressing them.

Now the position is that if someone is guilty of advocating ‘hatred’ (itself a concept notoriously susceptible to concept creep), a person cannot be a prisoner of conscience. In other words: express views that Amnesty finds abhorrent and you cannot be a prisoner of conscience.

Perhaps this was inevitable. It is hard to be an effective advocate on the issue of prisoners of conscience at the same time as taking substantive positions on a range of other politically sensitive issues.

Perhaps Amnesty has a successful future in store for it as a left-wing campaigning group. "

Imagine giving birth and the midwide declaring 'it's a vagina-haver!'

It's like a secular, left wing version of "young earth creationism."

It really is.

Amnesty’s current position undermines the key distinction that made their advocacy on the issue of prisoners of conscience so effective in the past. They used to argue that it did not matter what the substance of a person’s views was, the important thing was that people should not be imprisoned for peacefully holding and expressing them.

Now the position is that if someone is guilty of advocating ‘hatred’ (itself a concept notoriously susceptible to concept creep), a person cannot be a prisoner of conscience. In other words: express views that Amnesty finds abhorrent and you cannot be a prisoner of conscience.

So Amnesty has not only dumped its original good purpose, but now preaches the opposite. Sickening.

Abosolute madness. Shocking for an organisation who works with women in third world countries and presumably knows better than most, the atrocities inflicted on those of the female sex.

That's a great article, and yes it is a sad departure.

Lost.

I have read the OP but not the full thread.

They need to be exposed for this. I am gobsmacked.

How did we come to a position whereby stating a FACT is "spreading hate"?? It simply doesn't make sense to me.

Excellent post miri1985

They've lost the plot. So sad. They did such good work in the past. Now they police women for their views.

The state of Amnesty, and other orgs like the ACLU in America, are an extension of what Jonathan Haidt started talking about a few years ago, now spread further throughout the system, and increasingly abroad.

He was addressing universities - saying they can't do both "social justice" and "truth". They have to choose one to take priority. They have to understand what their core mission is, and declare it. Maybe you can have "social justice" universities, but they can't pretend they're "truth" ones. And having all universities be "social justice" ones is market failure.

This is the same thing extending to other previously single-purpose organisations - they've let the general "social justice/equity" thing replace "defending people against political targetting" and "universal civil liberties".

Leaving a massive gap in the market for new organisations that will prioritise what Amnesty etc used to do.

If you have an hour to spare, try this:

www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/women-were-in-the-fight-of-our-lives-to-save-our-identity/news-story/89fcf7c8da5821b7f5aadcce63da9ae3

I've written this elsewhere but Amnesty Ireland has gone completely off the reservation and far outside its remit into a wide range of issues which have little or nothing to do with their proported USP. In recent years these issues which they have chosen to focus on are not based on any kind of rigorous assessment of where and how the most aggregious human-rights violations are happening but are instead based mainly so far as I can see on the thoughts and 'causes' swirling around the head of its Executive director Colm O'Gorman who never saw a media opportunity or fashionable cause he didn't want to attach himself. He is almost beyond parody at this stage. Another letter here to the Irish Times along the lines of that mentioned by @miri1985

www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/amnesty-and-freedom-of-conscience-1.4419263

Interesting idea, Necessary. I've not watched the link but I'm a bit perturbed...
Any 'social justice' movement which isn't based soundly in realities is surely futile. This seems like a false dichotomy; isn't what's needed a non-trivial social justice informed by and underpinned by objective truth?