Woman's Hour 18/11/2021 Nancy Kelley CEO of Stonewall

[Abitofalark]

From the programme notes:

"Nancy Kelley is CEO of Stonewall, the largest LGBT rights charity in Europe. She speaks to Emma about her organisation’s work and gives her reaction to recent high-profile withdrawals from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions workplace inclusion scheme, including the BBC."

Hmmm...yes, we've heard - and dissected - the previous pronouncement from that quarter about the BBC pulling out of the Stonewall scheme. Let's see what waffle and spin come out in this interview.

It doesn't make sense. The only way to explain it is she believes that material reality doesn't matter. The word woman always meant adult human female. NK, Stonewall and other gender ideologues now believe it should mean anybody who identifies as a woman, regardless of what their biological sex is, and regardless of their reasons for said identification or the steps they've taken to do whatever they believe is 'living as a woman'.

Any attempt to point out that this is wide open to abuse by manipulative sexual predators is met with accusations of bigotry, transphobia and 'La la la, not listening', effectively. And when (inevitably) evidence emerges that predators have indeed claimed to be trans to get into places/services set aside for females for their privacy, dignity and safety, well, that's all very unfortunate, but the law will sort it all out, and they weren't really trans in the first place. The women, girls and children harmed along the way are acceptable collateral damage as the most important thing is that no male people should be prevented from expressing their authentic selves.

I just can’t make sense of the contradiction.

Easy. She has a conception of "woman" that has nothing to do with sex. This is totally valid and OK as long as you avoid pushing it into unnecessary areas by asking things like "Well, what has it to do with, then?"

Nobody can explain why it's OK to say 'I identify as a woman' when your biological sex is male but it's not OK to say 'I identify as a toddler and I'm going to attend this pre-school' when you're actually in your 50s or 'I identify as Black and I'm going to take this committee post reserved for BAME people' when you're white, or 'I identify as fat and I demand that you help me lose more weight' when you're actually frighteningly underweight, or 'I identify as a pilot and I'm going to fly this plane' when you have no qualifications for that at all, or 'I identify as disabled and I need you to push me around in a wheelchair' when actually there's nothing physically wrong with you.

What wasn't even mentioned was that XX means you are a woman and XY means you are a man. The following is a quote from
www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zcdfmsg/revision/5
'Human body cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes in the nucleus. Twenty two pairs are known as autosomes, and control characteristics, but one pair carries genes that determine sex - whether offspring are male or female:
males have two different sex chromosomes, X Y
females have two X chromosomes, XX'
There are rare exceptions to this - but they are rare. So as far as I'm concerned it would save a whole lot of fuss if people said 'If you are XX, you are a woman. If you are XY, you are a man'. You can try and change your behaviour. You can try and change what you look and sound like. But you can't change your genes, no matter what you do because every cell in your body reinforces what you are.

EB: Do you believe that literally or metaphorically, that trans-women are women?

NK: Literally.

She knows that a man who says he's a woman, even one who has had full surgery, is not the same as an adult human female, a woman.

Therefore when she says she think TWAW is literally true she is lying.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

It doesn't make sense. The only way to explain it is she believes that material reality doesn't matter. The word woman always meant adult human female. NK, Stonewall and other gender ideologues now believe it should mean anybody who identifies as a woman, regardless of what their biological sex is, and regardless of their reasons for said identification or the steps they've taken to do whatever they believe is 'living as a woman'.

Any attempt to point out that this is wide open to abuse by manipulative sexual predators is met with accusations of bigotry, transphobia and 'La la la, not listening', effectively. And when (inevitably) evidence emerges that predators have indeed claimed to be trans to get into places/services set aside for females for their privacy, dignity and safety, well, that's all very unfortunate, but the law will sort it all out, and they weren't really trans in the first place. The women, girls and children harmed along the way are acceptable collateral damage as the most important thing is that no male people should be prevented from expressing their authentic selves.

It does make sense of you view Stonewall as a charity gravy train rather than an organisation committed to moral goals.

All you have to do is find your unique selling point and market it, if you are a commercial charity rather than a grassroots activist charity committed to a cause.

The fact that Kelley went into this interview fully lawyered up in terms of what she knew she could say and couldn't say and then tried to indirectly smear an ideological rival smacks of the fact its a slick PR organisation and not one which is trying to tackle an obvious social injustice in society.

We should stop trying to make sense of gobbledegook. Kelley knows damn well that you can't change sex. She said as much. She also then tried the sales pitch of the belief of gender.

Its like an evangelical tv preacher for a modern audience which isn't interested in Christianity.

At a time when evangelicals, conspiracy theorists and extremists of all types have risen in popularity, all we have here is another form of it.

Just another bunch of charlatans.

She doesn't think you can change sex.

She believes 'woman' to be a term for a 'gender' which is a separate thing to sex. Many Genderists still concede the word 'female' is a sex term, though that is changing rapidly, but it's a very settled Genderist doctrine that 'Woman' is just a gender.

So when Nancy, the true believer, says that you can't change sex, though she tries to obscure it with flimflam about secondary sex characteristics and hormones, she's conceding that it's not possible to do more than cosmetically alter a male body to resemble a female one.

However, given that 'Gender is supreme' is the cardinal doctrine in Genderism, she is completely fine to do that, because she then says that TW are literally women, by which she means the Genderist doctrine of 'woman' as a disembodied 'gender identity', like an indefinable essence that can only be felt by the person who has it.

You're listening to a fully committed religious believer explain her faith. It's religious jargon.

What a disingenuous [so hard not to sear] and lying PoS she is.

She literally doesn't believe in sexual orientation. She is a completely homophobic bigot. She thinks being gay or het is a preference. She is insane.

@HoardingFloralBuntingInACervix
“However, given that 'Gender is supreme' is the cardinal doctrine in Genderism, she is completely fine to do that, because she then says that TW are literally women, by which she means the Genderist doctrine of 'woman' as a disembodied 'gender identity', like an indefinable essence that can only be felt by the person who has it.

You're listening to a fully committed religious”

Hoarding, that explains it to me clearly.

@BaronessWrongCrowdRex

Hang on. If people can not change their sex, Nancy. How are transwomen literally women?

By the word "women" being used solely as a way to validate men, stripping it of it's meaning to define a sex class that encompasses around half the world?

Yes, gender identity is treated as more important than sex. This is why they are so keen to appropriate people with medical conditions (DSDs) so they can make their claim that sex is a spectrum, not binary, a touch more credible. And of course what follows from that is thta laws which talk about women and give us protection in respect of things that only a female body can do/experience are no longer any good. We saw a hint of this in the US some years ago, IIRC, when an employer argued that breastfeeding isn't solely something that female employees do.

Very good point @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g. I've learned so much about DSDs from some posters on Twitter. I wish Emma Barnett and WH would do something on this.

We're on the final stretch for transcription. Moving on to Kathleen Stock:

EB: Professor Kathleen Stock who resigned from Sussex University after eighteen years, after student protests, after what she describes as a sustained campaign by some of her colleagues, over her view – that you say is protected – that trans-women are not biological women and that biological sex is real, trans-women – she doesn’t see them as women. Should she have been fired by Sussex University?

NK: So, I don’t want to comment in detail on the case because I don’t know anything about it that hasn’t been reported in the press. But I’m happy to kind of make—

EB: Well you must have been pretty familiar with it because it was reported with reams and reams of coverage.

NK: It was reported a lot in the press but I don’t know anything about the inner workings, I don’t know any more than was in the press. I think the critical thing here is that everyone, whatever their characteristics, should be able to both learn and work in an environment where they’re free from harassment, from discrimination, from abuse. I think that is a kind of absolute statement. And for universities, they are also balancing that with legal requirements around academic freedom and free speech that are really complicated. And where those things come into tension there is a really complicated set of decisions for universities to make, and they are for universities to make.

EB: Universities who have subscribed to Stonewall’s schemes, like Sussex University, because Kathleen Stock feels that part of the reason – she said on this programme – that students were protesting was because the univeristy had adopted your organisation’s approach to this subject, contributing to this climate.

NK: So, again, I don’t think we have anything to do with the specific circumstances in Sussex. I know, as I think has been widely reported, that staff and students had raised concerns about Professor Stock over a long period of time. In some reports, trans students and colleagues have talked about their perceptions of whether or not it felt safe to kind of work in an environment or learn in that environment. And that matters. And Professor Stock’s experience of working matters. Both of these things matter, and they’re very very difficult to balance out. Which is why I wouldn’t dream of adjudicating in a circumstance I don’t know anything about really.

EB: I’m not asking you to adjudicate, but I will ask you something I ask of politicians, because you are a leader of an organisation that’s incredibly well-versed and is hoping to guide policy on this.

NK: Mmhm

EB: Did she do anything that meant she should have been fired? Is she a transphobe as she’s been labelled?

NK: I mean, I understand why you want to ask me the question, but I simply don’t know the answer to the question. I’ve not met Professor Stock, not met her colleagues—

EB: It’s become a very important moment and case for people who care and follow this, ‘cause even if they didn’t follow anything about trans rights they care about freedom of speech which we’ve been talking about throughout this. And there were other students – other trans students – and other trans people who stood up for her, saying all she had done was express her views, whether it’s in her book or in her lectures.

NK: So, I would never comment – we don’t comment and don’t get involved in that kind of HR decision-making. And so all I can do--

EB: Well, it wasn’t an HR decision in the end. She resigned. She walked down a corridor – a tunnel – to get to her workplace and, you know, there’s posters on the wall “Stock out”, there’s things I can’t say on the radio on the back of the toilet door. I’m not saying you’re responsible for this, but this is real. This is happening. There is a climate. What do you attribute it to?

NK: So, I mean, I’ve got a lot of empathy for Professor Stock in that experience. I experienced quite similar things it won’t surprise you to know in my job. I’m a woman in the public eye, there are many many people that disagree violently with me and they do many of the things to me that Professor Stock experienced.

EB: Like, like what?

NK: Online abuse, hate mail, protests, those sorts of things. So, as a human, I would never want to deny that those are really really distressing experiences, and that’s important to be clear about. But I don’t know what the content of any of the complaints were that were made, so I don’t want to kind of stray into talking about things I don’t know about. What is really really important is that we protect people’s right to free speech and we also protect people’s rights to safe workplaces, everybody’s rights to safe workplaces. And decision-making about that balance is a matter absolutely for individual employers.

And wrapping up with some talk on bullying, abuse, and what it's like to be CEO of Stonewall :

EB: It’s anti-bullying week.

NK: Mmhm

EB: You do, as we’ve talked about, represent the views and champion the views and experiences and lives of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and trans. Is there anything you want to say to somebody who’s listening who is perhaps having a hard time at the moment, or maybe is the parent of someone having a tough time, because that perhaps is a lot clearer to say and talk about, where those boundaries are?

NK: So, I guess, we know still that fifty percent of children at school that are LGBTQ+ are bullied because of who they are, and a lot of children are bullied because of having LGBTQ+ parents. So, my own children have experienced that. I think the first thing I want to say is that everybody in the movement, including in Stonewall, is doing everything we can to change that, to make it better. And it is so important for children to reach out and speak to a trusted adult, whether that’s their parent, whether that’s a teacher, whether that’s a kind of youth worker, and tell people what you’re experiencing. And I think for parents it’s so important to feel like you can challenge your school to do better for your children. We don’t have to accept bullying and exclusion in our schools as a norm. It shouldn’t be a norm. And there are lots of resources and lots of people out there who really want to help.

EB: Important to hear that. And I just-- finally with you, if I may. You reflected on this, and of course as Woman’s Hour, I interview a lot of women in the public eye. Is it something that you are enjoying, is it something you are enduring, that experience – of course, take that very seriously what you talked about the abuse you receive – you know, just take us into that, because obviously people will also look up to you as somebody who’s in a leadership position, especially perhaps from those backgrounds that you’re talking about with those characteristics?

NK: So, most days, it’s a job that I enjoy and some days, because of the things you’re pointing out, it’s a job that I endure. And I don’t think any of us, anybody, but particularly women and women of colour in particular that we know experience really extreme forms of online abuse, none of us should have to put up with that. That shouldn’t be the price of having any job, yours or mine. But I also am really fortunate, I’ve got a very stable tiny cosy house with a loving wife and two great little boys. So I take a lot of comfort even at the end of a day that I’ve had to endure from coming home and kind of taking off my chief exec of Stonewall hat and being mum.

EB: Well, Nancy, thanks for having the hat on for this discussion. Thanks for having the discussion. And a lot of ground covered and very important ground. Thank you.

NK: Thank you.

And thank you DadDadDad

Thanks Dad

My pleasure. Here I am getting flowers on the feminism board of Mums net discussing Woman's Hour.

Am I, ... am I, a woman?

No, no, I'm not, but I can still listen to Woman's Hour, right?

Yes, thank you very much DAdDadDad. People will refer to your transcription for a long time to come. What an effort.

Yes, I was thinking that it seems rare to hear Kelley being interviewed - maybe I listen too much to Radio 4, and she pops up elsewhere, but I thought having her own words to refer to, not filtered through a PR process, would be useful reference.

For example, next time someone claims JKR is transphobic, we can ask them to let NK at Stonewall know as when she was asked if that's the case she said "no idea".

Thank you DDD, sterling work.

For example, next time someone claims JKR is transphobic, we can ask them to let NK at Stonewall know as when she was asked if that's the case she said "no idea".

excellent point!

Thanks again DDD and more 💐

So… the reverse ferreting is starting.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4406280-Stonewall-backtrack-on-removing-mother-from-policies

Thanks for latest transcripts DDD.

EB: Do you believe that literally or metaphorically, that trans-women are women?
NK: Literally.

That’s the bit that stopped me in my tracks when I heard it and again when I read it (thanks DDD from me as well).

Because either the word woman doesn’t mean what it should, or literally doesn’t mean what it should, or she’s deluded.

Almost the worst thing about all this nonsense is the (deliberate) destruction of descriptions of objective reality by undermining the meanings of words.