Getting to yes.

[JustSpeculation]

I bought and read "Getting to yes", a book on negotiation by Fisher and Ury, after Helen Joyce referred to it in Trans. It's an excellent book, which points out that if you negotiate from your positions rather than your interests your negotiation is probably doomed. "Interests" are characterised as the reasons why you took up your position. Sticking to your guns and insisting that everyone adopts your position will lead to deadlock, while a more thoughtful consideration of actual interests might lead to compromise and the establishment of common ground.

The Trans debate has been really interesting (as well as harrowing and exasperating). Stonewall's "no debate" mantra seems now to be disappearing over the horizon, which is good. So in one sense the real public debate has only just started. Labour have actually started making pronouncements, even if they are still at the stage of being ambiguous and incomprehensible. Sometimes just illogical. They still seem to believe that Teflon, non-stick blandishments will work. They ignore the fact that people (and I mean people, men as well as women) are often quite intelligent and can see beyond the end of their noses.

JKRs tweets are deeply satisfying, and have led me to make Posie Parker £12 richer by buying a pin off her, but they're still at the yelling stage.

How do we get to the "interests" and "common ground" stage? How do we get beyond positions?

You cannot safeguard prey by giving predators access to them.

Keep foxes out of henhouses. Their fellow foxes must "be nice" to them

Sorry to be repetetive, but there's no 'compromise' with predators and prey. Not All Foxes Are Like That, perhaps, but you still lock them out to safeguard hens.

I think it starts by acknowledging that there are some conflicts in what different groups want and need.

I couldn't agree more with this one statement - and it's actually a staple of any negotiating theory, not just the approach taken in "Getting to Yes" (which is, in fact, a very good book about negotiating, albeit not the Holy Bible).

The issues I see here are really twofold:

Firstly, any meaningful negotiation at all is most likely to succeed when it's being conducted in good faith. True, you can achieve a business deal with underhanded tactics and bad faith negotiation - it's likely to end up poorly for one or both parties, but it can be done. The likely fallout from trying this on a societal level is arguably a tad larger. I don't currently see anyone really doing this.

Secondly, any negotiation needs a ZOPA (zone of possible agreement - see en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_possible_agreement) in order to have any chance of being successful.

And that's where interests (rather than positions) become vital!

I suppose we can all agree that there is just basically very little to no overlap at all between "TWIW - and they must be treated as such in every conceivable situation" and "sex is immutable - you can't identify into it or anything based upon it".

Acknowledging the conflicting goals and the overarching interests that underpin the disagreement, in my opinion, are not beneficial but necessary pre-requisites for any good faith conversation with any likelihood of any success to even be possible.

Everything else is, basically, "winner takes it all, lots of collateral damage while the war rages on". And that can't actually be good for anyone in the long run - except perhaps for patriarchal power structures.

For the record, I'm personally GC. But I'm also a seasoned and successful negotiator IRL. In my professional life, I'll stick to the general idea of "never give in where it hurts your vitals - and be gracious and forthcoming where it hurts theirs but not yours". The problem here, surely, from that vantage point is that this is becoming such an entrenched situation that some players literally crave a fatal blow to the other side. You can't negotiate in good faith under such premises.

This is a good thread, but I share others' dismay about how far we have to go to get to a sensible negotiation. I keep going back to basic definitions, I think it's Kathleen Stock that talks about the different ways people define 'gender' so that they/we basically end up shouting past one another.

There's also confusion about what 'changing sex' really means, which is how we get David Lammy saying you can grow a cervix. I used have a vague sense that transition really did mean changing from male to female or vice versa, but once I realised the full extent to which it is not possible to change your DNA/skeleton/internal organs, the TRA arguments simply don't wash any more.

There have been some great replies in this thread, and so, thank you!

Especially, thanks to @SoManyQuestionsHere for the ZOPA link. That's what's missing.

Stephen Daisley has an interesting article on EA2010 in the Spectator at the moment.

www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-uncertain-future-of-the-equality-act

If we do get drowned in the kind of illiberalism he writes about, from both left and right, then it's not only women's rights which are going to go up in smoke. We'll be in a place where it doesn't matter whether arguments are right or wrong, only whether they support the cause or not. We're facing a puritanical, unreflective unreason in which the only conceivable conflict is that of "erroneous" belief with "the truth". Justice is substantive, and the only possible cause of disagreement is incorrect ideas. The idea that different people in society may have legitimate interests which conflict is becoming literally unthinkable.

I'm pretty well in line with the GC positions on almost all issues, though I don't call myself a feminist as I'm male and I believe that feminism should be something that women do. Not men. We can be with you, but not of you. But what lies under all this is an irrational fanaticism which really frightens me.

I think finding the ZOPA should be a priority.

And that's where interests (rather than positions) become vital!

Yes. If there were a list of what people want, we'd have to work out how :

women can maintain their rights to single sex spaces for safety, privacy and dignity.

and

transwomen can maintain safety, privacy and dignity.

This is why so many feminists have suggested third spaces: unisex spaces in addition to single sex provision. These could well prove useful for various needs as well as those of transwomen. And indeed it looks the way prison provision is most likely to go - separate wings for trans prisoners.

The problems tend to crop up when people insist that third spaces are not acceptable because transwomen need to access women's spaces with women in them.

I suppose the issue here is when people demand the consent of women. Consent is not consent unless its freely given.

The issue of, for example, HCPs, police officers, prison officers being treated as their preferred gender rather than their sex and being permitted to override women's requests for same sex providers etc would be another issue. I mean for example the GP who is registered as 'female' and treats female patients who previously were only seen by natal females. This is obviously unacceptable.

Part of the problem it seems to me is that the current ideology among many progressives simply doesn't leave any room for negotiation. Because they can only see things in terms of oppressor and oppressed, and siding with the oppressor is a non-starter.

It's part and parcel with the idea of "rights are not a pie" and no debate. You can see the same thing at work with people like Robin DiAngelo - there is no negotiation in that kind of worldview.

That worldview has been ruefully propagated. Where else does a slogan like 'no debate' cone from?

Ruefully? Carefully.

Likewise the equally sensitive and compassionate 'get over it'.

Women(xx's) need safeguarding from rape, impregnation or murder by men (xy's).

If the xy is wearing a beard or if he is dressed up as an xx, he is matched for strength and fighting ability with any of his fellow xy's.

He can explain he is not really an xx i.e. woman i.e. prey object, in the very unlikely case he is genuinely mistaken for an xx. He can then instruct his fellow xy men to be kind to him.

@DomesticatedZombie

Ruefully? Carefully.

Likewise the equally sensitive and compassionate 'get over it'.

Lots of people actually believe this, it's not just something that is attached to this issue. People who don't want to "take the knee" especially in the US. Someone who thinks that police shootings aren't all mainly about racism or objects in some way to the BLM movement. Someone who thinks surrogacy is wrong or ssm is a bad law.

It won't matter what the details of these positions are. It's like Robin DiAngelo's book - the only correct response is for those in the "oppressor" position to accept what they are being told by members of the oppressed group (who are assumed to represent all such people except, of course, those with false consciousness.)

It may be a power play by some but there are many people who sincerely think that giving any ground is to perpetrate crimes.

@MangyInseam, I don't disagree as such, but I do take a slightly different angle from the PoV of this thread, i.e. "how to negotiate".

My take - again, supposing we were negotiating as per the thread title - would be a pragmatic "okay, so this whole 'oppressor opressed' situation appears to be important to my counterpart. Am I willing to formally concede the position of 'most oppressed' in favour of something that's of more value to me?"

Generally speaking, coming from the same angle, I suspect that the GC side at large underestimates, vastly so, how much value / strategic interest the notions of "validation and acceptance" hold for the other side. It's why "third spaces" won't be acceptable for e.g. changing rooms: they don't serve the strategic interest of the opposing side when that interest happens to be "validation".

OTOH, I also think any post-modernist influenced TRA perspective clearly doesn't get, on a very fundamental level, that material facts such as "chromosomes" trump factors such as "identity" to their opponents. That's just ... simply "not even that much of a thing" if you're coming from the angle of social constructivism. And, given that most of us have an innate tendency to project our own worldview upon others, tends to result in some ill-conceived notion of "those people have some sort of an identity-thing going on based on genitals". Hence arguments such as "sex is a spectrum" and the likes of it: if you believe that your opponent genuinely somehow links physical bodies to identity, it's actually a reasonable approach towards trying to bring them to your side. Of course, it works about as well as "third spaces, though" because it, too, misses the strategic interest of the other side quire spectacularly.

Now, I have my personal position in this debate. Very much so. Having said that, and coming back to the topic of the thread: if you're looking to carve out a ZOPA, the approach must not be based on "what I think the others want" but on genuinely listening, taking two, three or four steps of abstraction back, and from there: formulating what the others really want. And then, shaping your own strategy around trying to accommodate that without crossing your own red lines.

In all fairness: there are situations in which one or both parties' best option is to walk away from negotiating. In business, this tends to bruise egos but is rather simple overall: you simply pick another option (e.g.: putting the people you were going to have on project X to work for Y, where the client is more amenable to your terms, instead). In society at large, this is nowhere near as easy, but could include BATNAs (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) such as "okay, fine, we set up out own XYZ all over again".

Yes, I agree with you in principle as well.

But I guess my point is that I suspect this oppressor/oppressed business actually makes the whole idea of negotiation a non-starter for those who believe that. Because it means you are compromising with evil, essentially.

It's why this POV tends to run into purity spirals, or makes such a big deal out of people having even a passing relationship with those they consider bad. It's a kind of ritual purity.

I don’t think this concept could ever work in the context of arguing with TRAs, though it is interesting to think about. The other side aren’t actually arguing from their own interests. They are arguing from a position, TWAW, and it is inflexible.

The reason they want into women’s toilets, prisons, hospital wards, changing rooms etc isn’t because they benefit materially from accessing those spaces. It’s because not allowing them in is equivalent to saying TWANW.

They don’t want to change the language that women can use to describe ourselves and stop us from being able to talk about our bodies for any reason that actually helps or benefits anyone. Women talking about being women reminds them that TWANW. It cannot be borne.

The entire agenda is forcing the rest of the world to adopt their position. If material interests like safety and well-being of trans people were the stakes it would all have been resolved with third spaces a long time ago.

It is true I think that because they are arguing from their inflexible position and not their interests, the TRA movement is doomed in the long run. But of course in the long run we’re all dead. It’s a question of mitigating how much damage is done in the meantime.

I just can't see where there is a ZOPA.

One side wants validation that TWAW, so 3rd spaces are unacceptable as they imply that TWANW.

The other side wants acknowledgement of the primacy of biology and wants sex-based spaces that don't include TW.

Can anyone else with a bit more imagination than me see a ZOPA?

If not, I guess we are in 'winner-takes-all' battle.