Maya Forstater Tribunal March 2022- Thread 4

[Whatamesssss]

Thread one, here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4498167-Maya-Forstater-hearing-starts-Monday

Thread two, here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4505825-Maya-Forstater-Tribunal-March-2022-Thread-2?pg=1

Thread three, here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4507443-Maya-Forstater-Tribunal-March-2022-Thread-3

Abbreviations:
BC = Ben Cooper QC, counsel for
MF = Maya Forstater - Claimant
AP = Anya Palmer, assisting BC
OD = Olivia Dobbie, counsel for the respondents
EJ = Employment judge, leading the panel
Panel = any one of the 3 members

CGDE (CGD Europe) – Respondent 1

CGD = Centre for Global Development – Respondent 2

LE = Luke Easley, Vice president for HR and operations at CGD, first witness for CGD
AG = Amanda Glassman, Chief Operating Officer, Senior Fellow and Board Secretary of CGD and a Trustee of CGD(Europe), second witness for CGD
MP = Mark Plant, Chief Operating Officer of CGD Europe, third witness for CGD
MA = Masood Ahmed, President of CGD and Chair of the Board of CGDE – Respondent 3, fourth witness for CGD

EM = Ellen MacKenzie, an off-stage character at CGD, involved in much that went on.

Maya's website has lots of relevant information and is collating the live tweets.
www.hiyamaya.net

twitter.com/tribunaltweets is the account to look at for the live tweets. Plus some live posting and discussion on these threads.

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

They will send you pin number and a link to log in to the tribunal.

We are all given at least one talent. :)

I'm just reading the Allison Bailey complaint to Garden Chambers from Stonewall. Punctuation never their strong suit.

Thanks for the new thread and tabby 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Thank you Tabby, Maya and all contributors.

Only just managed to catch up on today.

What a case and how much it means!

Thanks again Maya for your determination and fortitude.

Will funders be happy to see that they've sung from the correct hymn sheet of 'inclusion' and 'tolerance' in the face of the nasty TERF Islanders?

Maybe. I was just reading this piece, and maybe the things we still permit to happen in the UK legal system might be a bit of a shock to American sensibilities.

The Takeover of America's Legal System (The kids didn't grow out of it)

Law firms also worry about losing their corporate clients, which, like many American institutions, have grown more stridently ideological in recent years. “I knew of and heard of clients protesting cases we were taking,” the recently retired lawyer said. “If you were going to do a gun rights case, you would incur the wrath of other clients.”

Since 2011, law firms have been pressured to drop or turn down a long list of clients: fossil fuel companies, foreign universities, a GOP-controlled House of Representatives, employers challenging Biden’s vaccine mandate, and, of course, Donald Trump.

These pressures—both internal and external—have had a chilling effect. If defending anti-vaxxers can cost you business, law firms reason, imagine the blowback of defending a transphobe or a racist.

“It doesn’t even occur to people to take controversial cases,” one lawyer in Washington, D.C., said. Religious liberty cases, for example, are “totally off the table. I wouldn’t even think to bring it up.”

@BoreOfWhabylon

Has anyone used an ipad to follow the proceedings? Does it work ok?

I'd very much like to observe BC tomorrow but don't have a laptop/PC.

Mine wouldn’t oblige today, Bore, which was infuriating - I had no problems at all on my PC on Friday, just breezed straight in. Got the black screen with theiPad, though.

It could have been because my OS isn’t the latest version, though - might be OK for you?

@foodfiend thank you for that, you have managed to put into words the gnawing feeling that this is all wrong yet no one else dares admit it.

I genuinely believe that this is the world correcting itself rather than a new era. Led by Butler and Money (and money, for that matter), we got lost. This is us finding our way back.

@foodfiend I see the attraction of crony beliefs. I'm especially struck by social incentives are the root of all our biggest thinking errors.

Throughout the various testimonies, I had echoes of Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle (2013) essay about class and identity politics (some of the original formatting lost from quotation).

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.
…
The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is …

The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.

www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/

Can someone catch me up pleeeeeess? I was following but started a new job today so couldn’t keep an eye on it today - and am completely zonked out.

So am I right in thinking that Ben's summing up tomorrow afternoon and Olivia is summing up Wednesday morning?

I think it's the other way round, Corgi - it appears to be opposite to a criminal court in that sense.

to Tabby and to Maya, of course!

the belief that sex and gender are both entirely determined by self ID clearly performs the useful function of signalling that they are 'doing right think' and are the right kind of people.

This very much seems to describe intelligent gender ideology followers I know in academia and publishing. Some are even people who work with things like statistics and psychology. They have no excuse for not seeing phenomena that they would instantly be able to understand in other contexts - things like social contagion or misrepresented stats.

But the need to be morally right and to feel like a good person is stronger than an interest in being factually right. This often goes along with being white and middle-class, because they feel guilty for being privileged so are powerfully drawn to a way to be an "ally" to an oppressed group - and GI hands you those tools on a plate – state your pronouns, insist that TWAW, shun bigots etc.

The fact that there has never been any actual evidence that inherent gender identity is a real thing, or that anyone has ever changed sex, or that there's no other material thing you can magically become just by saying you are, or that people detransition so this can't actually be true - these are pushed into the background and not thought about.

When faced with questions they can't answer, they just get cross and blame the "bigot" for asking, because they are scared of being the bigot. Being the person who says "but that's not true" and being shunned. And they are right to be in many contexts, and it's understandable because humans generally are powerfully motivated by emotion. Fear, a need to be seen as nice, and a need to be accepted in the group are real and normal motivators.

Thanks @Zeugma. That's disappointing but I might give it a try anyway.

Thank You once again Tabby

Signing in while I go back to reading todays events. Actual job annoyingly stopping me from following live.

This often goes along with being white and middle-class, because they feel guilty for being privileged so are powerfully drawn to a way to be an "ally" to an oppressed group - and GI hands you those tools on a plate – state your pronouns, insist that TWAW, shun bigots etc.

Bingo

Thank you to everyone posting the court details (esp Tabbycat)

@HardyBuckette

This often goes along with being white and middle-class, because they feel guilty for being privileged so are powerfully drawn to a way to be an "ally" to an oppressed group - and GI hands you those tools on a plate – state your pronouns, insist that TWAW, shun bigots etc.

Bingo

A MNer who had formerly been at the bar made a similar comment about why the unequal treatment of women in the ETBB was effectively nodded through.

The vast majority of judges are decent men. They want to do the right thing. They also tend to be MC, white and privileged with little to no understanding of the trans issues raging.

It’s a dangerous combination. They don’t want to say or do the wrong thing so they lap up the training given by lobby groups, legitimately believing in what they’re told and genuinely fearing that they might actually be bigots when they find this stuff doesn’t make sense.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/a4379444-Maya-back-in-court-tomorrow-20th-Oct?msgid=111785546

Would someone who has been joining the proceedings so far please be so kind as to tell me what sort of voice and accent Ben Cooper QC has so I can have a more accurate screenplay running through my mind?

Oh, I think I need to see Ben's Summing Up tomorrow.

@PearPickingPorky

Would someone who has been joining the proceedings so far please be so kind as to tell me what sort of voice and accent Ben Cooper QC has so I can have a more accurate screenplay running through my mind?

@NecessaryScene

Will funders be happy to see that they've sung from the correct hymn sheet of 'inclusion' and 'tolerance' in the face of the nasty TERF Islanders?

Maybe. I was just reading this piece, and maybe the things we still permit to happen in the UK legal system might be a bit of a shock to American sensibilities.

The Takeover of America's Legal System (The kids didn't grow out of it)

Law firms also worry about losing their corporate clients, which, like many American institutions, have grown more stridently ideological in recent years. “I knew of and heard of clients protesting cases we were taking,” the recently retired lawyer said. “If you were going to do a gun rights case, you would incur the wrath of other clients.”

Since 2011, law firms have been pressured to drop or turn down a long list of clients: fossil fuel companies, foreign universities, a GOP-controlled House of Representatives, employers challenging Biden’s vaccine mandate, and, of course, Donald Trump.

These pressures—both internal and external—have had a chilling effect. If defending anti-vaxxers can cost you business, law firms reason, imagine the blowback of defending a transphobe or a racist.

“It doesn’t even occur to people to take controversial cases,” one lawyer in Washington, D.C., said. Religious liberty cases, for example, are “totally off the table. I wouldn’t even think to bring it up.”

But the whole point of most legal systems is the right to representation? How can lawyers say no to any case, its money after all. Unless those offended that others may require legal help are paying lawyers to not take cases. Aren't legal people supposed to represent with no fear or favour? Are purity spirals now a thing in legal circles?

I so wish I could watch and read this tomorrow in real time but alas, I cannot. I am in awe at the detailed analysis of legal discussion and issues by the posters here - a lot of it goes way above my head!

Here's hoping tomorrow goes well.

PMK.

Thank you everybody, and to Maya.

Are purity spirals now a thing in legal circles?

Purity spirals have definitely arrived in the next generation of US lawyers, scarily enough.

bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-takeover-of-americas-legal-system?s=w

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10625581/Yale-Law-DEFENDS-students-shouted-Ill-fight-b-tch-conservative-debater.html

Just to thank tabby et al for their sterling work.

Gosh, that's depressing @altforvarmt. The principle of fair representation for everyone is so important and profound.

And @tabbycatstripy - you're a hero! I'm watching and I find your transcripts help me understand because you've stripped out all the distractions. Absolutely outstanding job.

@MoonOnASpoon Yes, I think there's a lot of 'let me get in there first with the denouncing'. (I'll be safe then.) And learning a load of labels, flags and pronouns is much easier to get 'right' (have a sticker for being a Good Ally) than really listening to people with diverse and conflicting needs and thinking deeply about balancing them. dh's work keep sending round emails about 'neurodiversity week' or 'wellbeing day' whatever and it's a list of conditions or something. What exactly is anyone meant to do with that? Win a round of 'name that mental health condition'? How about eg practical guidance on running meetings in a way that's more inclusive? It's all so shallow, focused on superficial checkbox things, rather than actually trying to make anything better for real people.

Oooo-errrr DomesticatedZombie.