Maya Forstater hearing starts Monday

[MForstater]

Hi all,

Thank you so much for all your support: emotional, intellectual, financial, spiritual(!) reading the Mumsnet feminism board is where this all started for me!

The case starts tomorrow.

It is all online. If you want to watch you need to email the tribunal for a log in to [email protected]

It kicks off at 10am - the first bit will be "admin" between the judges and the lawyers working out the timings, issues and any reporting restrictions .

Once that is all sorted the judge and the panel will go away to read (probably for the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday)

I will most likely give evidence Wednesday and Thursday.

@tribunaltweets will be tweeting the whole thing (assuming they get permission from the judge)

Links to papers will go up throughout the case at www.hiyamaya.net.

Any other questions I am happy to answer them (apart from the ones where I have to say "that is for the tribunal to hear"...)

I have made a spectators guide with FAQs etc here

Lots of love

Maya

I'm reminded yet again how things are going in the tribunal. Maya's beliefs are presented as being terribly harmful to those who find them offensive but there's no space to consider whether Maya, or other women, find the gender identity ideology profoundly harmful.

I think as a starting point, everyone should accept that they can't control other people's thoughts.

Should my view that I'm absolutely lovely be given greater weight than the view of mumsnet member X that I am contemptuous and supercilious? Because that is what is being argued there.

I don't have the right to dictate how any of you perceive me, and nor does anyone else. Dear Lord, Elizabeth I understood she could only compel the outward forms of obeisance, and she executed people!

[quote Helen8220]@Whatiswrongwithmyknee
“A transwoman might be offended if thought of as male, and I'm offended if they're thought of as female.”

Me too. But apparently we are not the group whose offense matters. I'm not sure if it doesn't matter because I have a vulva, a cervix or a uterus or because I don't and never did have a penis or just because I don't know my place.

Maybe it’s because it’s not about you, it’s about them?

A same sex married couple might be offended if their marriage was considered by a Christian as not being a ‘real’ marriage. On the other hand, the Christian person might be offended by that same sex marriage being considered to be a real marriage.

I think that, as a starting point, a person’s view of their own life or identity should be given greater weight than the view of someone else about it.[/quote]
No thanks. My biological reality is not someone else's 'identity'. Stop appropriating my name, category, reality and experience.

These people can get their own. Woman is taken.

Absolutely Datun

Sorry, I have to admit I hadn’t appreciated the discussion was in the context of rape. I just dipped in and saw what appeared to be someone equating their own offence at a trans woman (I assumed any trans woman) being regarded as female, with a trans woman’s offence at being regarded as male. If I’d seen the comment was made in the context of how a rape victim regards the perpetrator I wouldn’t have waded in.

That's ok Helen - people learn an awful lot when they come to these boards

You didn't even need to bother reading previous posts.

Think about your own post. It is transparently obvious what you did there. You knew what your end goal was and reasoned backwards

Goal: asserting why one particular group (no-one ever cares if a GC feminist says she'd like not to be perceived as cis) of people's self-descriptions should supersede other people's opinions.

So you posted some automated flimflam and did not bother to examine it for 30 seconds to consider what unintended consequences your reasoning would have. Why are you posting on a feminism forum if you don't think women are worth 30 seconds of uninterrupted thought?

Helen likes to proselytise.

I appreciate your apologising, Helen.

Perhaps you can understand why women are so angry about attempts to control what we think, feel and say. Giving more weight and power to the feelings of transwomen than the feelings of women results in exactly these situations. We've already had women in court being admonished for using wrong pronouns to refer to their attacker. Rapists and sex offenders are referred to as 'she' if they say that's how they identify.

If you feel it's different when it comes to rape and sexual assault, i wonder why? Compelling speech has exactly the same dynamic whatever the situation.

If you feel it's different when it comes to rape and sexual assault, i wonder why? Compelling speech has exactly the same dynamic whatever the situation.

Quite.

If providing service to someone against your own beliefs should be an expected requirement unless that person has done something sufficiently heinous - we're saying it is a service, it is in the gift of the service provider and based on their good will as a gesture of courtesy, and that there are limits to which a person is entitled to expect it.

So let's find the line. How badly exactly does someone have to treat me before I'm excused performing a belief for their benefit that I don't hold and find offensive and demeaning personally, and damaging to all female rights and equalities? Is the limit actually forcibly penetrating my body? Does my agency come back at that point? How evidenced does this have to be, bearing in mind that less than 1% of rapes are successfully prosecuted?

Yes, does it extend to being non sexually assaulted by MTF trans people, as Maria McLachlan was, and was considered "provocative" by the judge for not calling her 6 foot 4 assailant "she"?

performing a belief for their benefit that I don't hold and find offensive and demeaning personally, and damaging to all female rights and equalities

This is it. I find it offensive that a male, with no experience of growing or living as a girl or woman, can say that there is common experience of womanhood. Purely because of some inner feeling and a few accessorising choices.

In the same way that one might find it offensive if someone moved to Greenland and instantly started claiming Inuit identity because they're wearing a fur hood and mittens.

Womanhood has fuck all to do with clothing or hairstyles. Fuck all. It's an outrage that anyone accepts this as an equivalent to living a life as the 'second sex', with the enormous lifelong weight of patriarchal expectations, the likelihood of experiencing assault/abuse at the hands of males, the reproductive burden and all those implications, the extra work involved in the 'second shift', etc etc etc.

It's an insult. I am insulted and deeply offended that Pips Bunce feels a lace frock and some lipstick gives Pips any glimmer of insight into the female condition. None. There is none.

I don't give a single fuck how anyone chooses to dress or present. But the idea that wearing certain clothing suddenly confers the same experience, insight or rights to the wearer as those that women fought so bloody long and hard for, onto someone belonging to the sex that has oppressed and subjugated women is actually obscene.

This is it. I find it offensive that a male, with no experience of growing or living as a girl or woman, can say that there is common experience of womanhood. Purely because of some inner feeling and a few accessorising choices.

In the same way that one might find it offensive if someone moved to Greenland and instantly started claiming Inuit identity because they're wearing a fur hood and mittens.

This. I think many of them just do it to wind women up because they know they can. It's ludicrous. It's the only time cultural appropriation is perfectly fine and "valid".

I just dipped in and saw what appeared to be someone equating their own offence at a trans woman (I assumed any trans woman) being regarded as female, with a trans woman’s offence at being regarded as male.

One of these perspectives is supported by reality. Doesn't that count for anything?

Think about your own post. It is transparently obvious what you did there. You knew what your end goal was and reasoned backwards

I agree

I think that some posters do this all the time due to the deep prejudices they hold about those who regularly comment on this board of MN. They simply resume their role of shaming and admonishing posters across threads they are so convinced that they have the moral superiority over others.

Thankfully, it is not many posters and they are getting less every time a court case is won, every time a independent report/study comes out or an incident happens, and shows how unbalanced and harmful some of the go to arguments they support are.

I find it offensive that a male, with no experience of growing or living as a girl or woman, can say that there is common experience of womanhood. Purely because of some inner feeling and a few accessorising choices.

Yes. It is purely dishonest too. If activists pushing to make people think that woman means anyone who feels like taking the label cannot admit that a male is only ever adopting their perception of what is a woman they are dishonest.

A male cannot have the experience of being born with and growing up with a female body and how that shapes a woman's life. They simply can interpret that how they wish.

All women have in common are the commonalities of that female body, whether the body parts function as they were intended to or not. Everything else is personality. It was always dishonest to claim it as a 'label'.

I just cannot imagine the distortions in people's thought processes that they cannot admit that a male claiming a 'woman' identity can only ever be claiming what they perceive as a woman and never the real life experience. No matter how much they wish to.

@HipTightOnions

I just dipped in and saw what appeared to be someone equating their own offence at a trans woman (I assumed any trans woman) being regarded as female, with a trans woman’s offence at being regarded as male.

One of these perspectives is supported by reality. Doesn't that count for anything?

Quite.

This wordery also completely attempts to dismiss any meaningful reason why a woman might be offended at a transwoman being regarded as female despite many clear arguments for the material discrimination and negative experiences this leads to for women.

The comparison is between a 'being regarded as' which is leading to men in all female-protected spaces, an erosion of any ability to keep statistics which demonstrate the depth of female oppression, the obliteration of female-only prizes e.g. in literature etc. versus not allowing someone to appropriate an oppressed identity and by doing so reinforce the actual negative gender stereotypes which are used to oppress women. Put like that, it is in fact the trans-woman's offence which starts to appear offensive.

It has the effect of male domination of women's groups, because women are made to feel uncomfortable sharing lived experiences that males can't relate to, such as ones related to their biology.

I am offended by it, and it is equal, Helen. Feel free to argue why I shouldn't be.

I’ll try to explain a bit more where I’m coming from.

I was recently talking to a colleague who’s a gay man about stonewall, trans rights, our own LGB identities, etc. He said he used to have relationships with women, and that they were fine, and perfectly functioning, but he was never able to fully commit. He is now in a long term relationship with a man, and identifies as gay. He acknowledged that he could equally have identified as bisexual. Another person might regard him as bisexual, depending on how they understand categories of sexual orientation. He can’t control how another person privately regards him. But he can legitimately ask people to refer to him as a gay man (so far as it comes up) and not argue that he’s wrong about his own identity. Similarly, I was talking recently to a female colleague who identifies as straight and is engaged to a man, but told me she had had flings with women in the past. We both agreed that she have chosen to identify as bisexual.

This is obviously different in significant ways from gender and the trans situation - our language doesn’t require us to know or acknowledge a person’s sexuality just in order to speak about them; and we don’t have formally segregated spaces or services on the basis of sexuality. Sexuality is also less binary across the population as a whole than sex (and arguably also than gender). But it’s still a part of people’s identities that many regard as fundamental and which significantly shapes the way we experience society and culture while growing up (maybe more so in the past than now). It also can’t be proved or established wholly by reference to objective, observable facts.

I also have a colleague who is a trans man. He looks and sounds like a man, and I suspect many people at work who don’t know he’s trans assume he’s a cis man. If I believed that the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ relate to sex rather than gender, and that a person with xx chromosomes can never be a man, I would believe he was wrong and that he was in fact a woman. However, I don’t see why my personal beliefs about sex and gender should take precedence over another person’s, when it comes to their own identity and how they are referred to, any more than my beliefs about what it means to be gay/straight/bisexual. So in the sphere of gender and sexuality, I refer to people in the way that reflects their identity.

I get that there other important factors at play in relation to trans women. But to reduce it to always being a question of men using patriarchal power to force women’s speech is a gross simplification.

@Helen8220

Sorry, I have to admit I hadn’t appreciated the discussion was in the context of rape. I just dipped in and saw what appeared to be someone equating their own offence at a trans woman (I assumed any trans woman) being regarded as female, with a trans woman’s offence at being regarded as male. If I’d seen the comment was made in the context of how a rape victim regards the perpetrator I wouldn’t have waded in.

Nope. Transwomen are male. If they are offended by being regarded as such, they are offended by reality. And therefore by people living in reality.

I am offended by being forced to deny reality, to my own detriment.

There is no symmetry.

And no, reality doesn't come and go depending on the criminal behaviour of the person in question. Their dominance over me does of course.

I am offended by being forced to deny reality, to my own detriment.

Yes, this.

Updates....

My witness statement
(it's long!)

mforstater.medium.com/illustrated-witness-statement-by-maya-forstater-3181bb41258f

Opening statement from my legal team. You will like this a lot ☺️

drive.google.com/file/d/1VmFTUI7ZWb2KppbWFB9D8EeiQwdBiFEM/view

All the tweets hiyamaya.net/livetweets-from-the-tribunal/

Tomorrow it is Luke the HR guy from Washington DC (who also gave evidence in the preliminary hearing)

Thanks Maya good luck!

Tomorrow it is Luke the HR guy from Washington DC (who also gave evidence in the preliminary hearing)

Some of us recall Luke Easley very well… When shown a picture of Rachel Dolezal and asked about those circumstances, Luke said 'she appears to be white' but if she chose to record herself as black 'in reality she's black'.