The Times today

[Blessex]

Hmmmm does this headline mean I can now enter the paralympics because I feel disabled?

'Black, disabled, LGBTQ+ or women'. But not men, interestingly.

It's all about identifying into a category that is historically disadvantaged and taking up resources intended to reduce that disadvantage.

Funnily enough the obviously bigoted Scottish Government is not taking this approach to the new Scottish disabilities benefits. No self ID there - it is a long document which requires details of difficulties with everything from whether you need support in order to eat or how incontinent you are and how often you need to be cleaned or have someone wash your sheets because your incontinence nappies have leaked again. Along with providing back up evidence. Though obviously this isn't anything like as demeaning as having to.provide a gas bill in a female name thank goodness!

The mention of disability in the last para on the 'long history' makes me wonder if this has arisen from an initially valid position. Which is that people who actually do have a particular protected characteristic should be able to determine to what extent that is their 'identity'. A person with a disability should be able to decide whether that's how they want to be defined. Are they the professor of cosmology or that bloke in a wheelchair? At work my identity is scientist not woman scientist. Etc.

Where they've gone disastrously wrong is to invert this logic to allow people who do not truly have a characteristic to appropriate it.

Hm, wonder what their policy on cultural appropriation is.

So I can identify as anything I want except a man. Gee, thanks.

It’s in the Mail as well. It’s exactly where most of us probably thought it would go, I’m sure. The ultimate conclusion.

Interesting to see it finally in print.

Funnily enough the obviously bigoted Scottish Government is not taking this approach to the new Scottish disabilities benefits.

Although that contrasts with the SNP's internal policies, where before the last election they decided that candidates could self-ID as black or disabled, and get boosted in internal elections for closed-list seat places in certain seats.

But that self-ID was top sekret, meaning it could not be revealed whether any candidate was invoking this clause.

Which in turn means that all those elections had to conceal vote counts. They just announce final rankings, not the number of votes, so you don't know if the person who came first actually got the most votes, or was claiming to be black, or claiming to be disabled. Not even the candidates know how many votes any candidate got, apparently.

Hopefully if the candidates for next time have any sense, every single candidate will claim to be disabled or black. (I think the rule was that self-ID disabled people get absolute priority for those seats).

I look forward to government agencies accepting self-ID for disability benefits. Because of course they will, won’t they? Mustn’t be bigoted.

That could even be helpful for the genuinely sick or disabled people who currently have to slog their way round a maze of obstacles to claim a few quid.

Self indentifying as black? Really?

Ooops, cross-posted, Lovely. But I’m sure English politicians don’t want to be outdone in wokeness by the Scots!

Sorry, I’ve just seen the daily mail was from 2019. Must’ve missed that one…

Encouraging signs of this utter nonsense “identity” ideology starting to disappear up its own…vortex.

@BatmansBat

Self indentifying as black? Really?

I know! Can't wait for the BLM/critical race theorists to have a collective hissy fit about that.

Please tell me someone is picking this up on Twitter? I though identifying out of your race was a huge NO NO. Cultural appropriation is a massive deal on social media. There is no way that even the wokeist beard is going to go along with that.

This discussion is happening thedimhoardingrightosaur.

A black comedian, David Chapelle made a Netflix comedy which dropped last week. He is all about the rights of black people and made some comments.

Now a white transwoman is trying to cancel him. Funnily enough, this white transwoman used to run the show “dear white people”. Some black people on Twitter don’t seem very happy with a white showrunner for a show about black people. Or the fact that a person who was born a white male is trying to cancel a black man…..

However, I think the white BLM/TRA etc are a bit caught in the middle and don’t really know what to say.

Please tell me someone is picking this up on Twitter? I though identifying out of your race was a huge NO NO.

It sort of is and it sort of isn't. If you're a Good Person, then no-one can question you. If you're a Bad Person then you can be denounced for it.

Whether you're a Good Person or Bad Person is hard to determine, and this is an unstable equilibrium, as the act of "falsely" claiming an ethnic identity is Bad, but obviously a Good person wouldn't do that, so the question of whether a person can be flipped from Good to Bad by being called out, or whether such an accuser would be Bad is a complex social dynamics question.

You can certainly get away with it for some time. But when you lose it, you lose it hard. And sometimes that's hilarious, as in the case of some poet(?) in Canada who was falsely claiming to be Native Canadian, and eventually got called on it, by a load of people continuing to very studiously ignore that he was also a man claiming to be a woman.

During Maya Forstater's first hearing, someone from CPD's HR (American) did talk about how they were totally self-ID.

@BatmansBat

This discussion is happening thedimhoardingrightosaur.

A black comedian, David Chapelle made a Netflix comedy which dropped last week. He is all about the rights of black people and made some comments.

Now a white transwoman is trying to cancel him. Funnily enough, this white transwoman used to run the show “dear white people”. Some black people on Twitter don’t seem very happy with a white showrunner for a show about black people. Or the fact that a person who was born a white male is trying to cancel a black man…..

However, I think the white BLM/TRA etc are a bit caught in the middle and don’t really know what to say.

Wow this is some fucked up game of Top Trumps isn’t it?

Well… it seems to be about a group of people who predominantly are born white males. They now claim to be the most oppressed group in society. Women have been accepting this for a while. Now black men see it and they are less happy.

@BatmansBat spot on. I watched Dave chapelle at the weekend and this is exactly what he was saying.

He said how you women ok with Caitlyn Jenner winning woman of the year? That’s like Eminem winning black rapper of the year.

I was like shit yes it is. The majority of young women say - oh how kind are we letting that happen. Well fuck that.

It came through with that YouTube video where that white male identifying as a female was punching down in the black low wage worker.

As Dave Chapelle says - I was getting all over this while people shit and then you go and change the damn rules!!!!

How can you "identify" as black or disabled? (I won't go there with the ID'ing as a woman )
Are they really trying to say they're dispensing with reality as we all know it and people can say black is white and the sky is green and grass is blue if they want to; and the rest of us must validate their nonsense?
They can sod off with this mindfucking bollocks.

I generally find the UCU appalling but have some sympathy with them over some of this.

For example, my understanding of them accepting people's self ID as black is not about welcoming Rachel Donezals, but rather about the impossibility of saying objectively who is black. Am I black if I have one black grandparent? How about two? Three? and so on. This sort of approach is rather reminiscent of those Nazi guides for working out who counts as a Jew. Given that UCU's main interest in the race of their members is to eg track discrimination, it seems quite reasonable to allow people to decide the matter for themselves rather than dictate to them, and worry about a load of white people piling in if and when that happens.

Likewise disability- perfectly fine to ask members whether they consider themselves to be disabled rather than asking them whether they meet an objective standard such as the blue badge test.

perfectly fine to ask members whether they consider themselves to be disabled rather than asking them whether they meet an objective standard such as the blue badge test
But why? Why allow someone to decide for themselves when there is an objective standard that they don't meet?

How can you "identify" as black or disabled?

You can 'identify' - or not - as disabled if, and only if, you actually do have a disability.
Same with 'identifying' as black.

And in any rational world, it'd be the same for 'woman'. It may be important to your 'identity' that you're a woman, or you may wish it to be irrelevant in some contexts. A doctor not a 'lady doctor' - that sort of thing.

It's all been turned totally arse about face and made a complete nonsense of.

@GreyhoundG1rl Asking someone whether they consider themselves to have a disability is standard practice for things like diversity monitoring. It’s also the right approach for union representation- the alternative is a situation where members encountering disability discrimination have to prove they’re disabled enough to be represented, with some being turned down.

It’s completely different from the tests for providing a benefit such as a blue badge.