Naomi Cunningham; interview in Holyrood magazine

[IDareSay]

Fascinating stuff:

“When the Gender Recognition Act passed in 2004, I was already kind of 10 years into being an employment lawyer, and I was aware of it. It vaguely clipped my radar. I kind of thought, very niche, that’s not going to cross my desk, and shrugged it off. So, I didn’t wake up until about 2017, 2018 and what woke me up was Anya Palmer, who is a barrister at Old Square. She was Maya Forstater’s barrister, and she was one of the group of people I was talking to. I was following her on Twitter and she was tweeting about this subject, and it started to educate me on it. She was the person who had the brilliant idea of running a case on religion or belief discrimination, on what’s now called gender critical belief. And I remember pulling some very sceptical faces about that when she was first discussing it, even before she found Maya, before she found a client."

www.holyrood.com/inside-politics/view,naomi-cunningham-im-fuelled-by-rage-and-ive-been-lucky

Just read this, really nice interview

Thank you - really interesting article.

It's a terrific article. Great all the way through and then a very strong ending.

An absolutely fascinating read. Thank you for sharing it.

I didn't know that a few years ago she had grown tired of the law and was thinking of retirement. Until she read the first instance judgment in Maya's case and felt a white hot fury at the blatant gaslighting. And the fire hasn't gone out.

Thank goodness.

Thanks for the link, nice to find out more about NC. She is amazing.

Holyrood is edited by the formidable Mandy Rhodes who has published consistently some highly critical commentary on the Scottish Government and its GI zeal.

Totally agree about the term 'Gender Critical'.....it can easily be used to side-line what amounts to the common, reality based view of matters when it comes to sex, biology, male and famale.

“I don’t like the phrase ‘gender critical’, if I’m honest. It is one of the astonishing coups of the gender identity theory campaign, that the thing that everybody knows is true, that everybody on the planet knows that they’ve got a mother, and that their mother could only have been a woman, and that human beings only come in two types, the sort that can gestate and give birth to children and the sort that can beget children. Everybody knows that. And yet there is a mad niche idea that gender identity somehow trumps reality. And somehow, these things have been flipped. So, the mad, niche cult idea hasn’t got a name that everybody recognises, I call it gender identity theory, but it hasn’t really got a well-recognised name, and the mainstream, ordinary acknowledgement of reality and fact has a name, gender critical. They don’t need another name for it – it’s reality."

That's a cracking article.

Brilliant article.

That's a fantastic article, thank youbfor posting.

On the term "gender critical" that others have raised, I think it serves a purpose. Conservatives might be sex-realist but also gender-essentialist if they think people should fulfil stereotypical roles. Gender critical highlights that gender stereotypes shouldn't be enforced, which is linked to sex realism but coming at it from a different angle.

So wonderful to read. The clarity of mind you achieve when you finally come to understand that gender is all fabricated nonsense is astonishing and it shines through here.

I’m so glad she has found work that she loves so much. Must be wonderful, even though it must also be exhausting.

In my experience of working with UK Conservatives and USA Republicans ('conservatives' seems to be used as shorthand for both groups) I have not come across any who would be considered 'gender-essentialist', apart from one or two old buffers. They were the exceptions.

In fact, in my experience it is often left-wing/socialist men who meet the definition of 'gender-essentialist' with their 'after the revolution love' attitude when it comes to women's rights. I have met a fair few of those.

Just my two'pennorth. I don't think the term 'conservative', with a big or small 'c' is particularly useful, much like left or right wing. All the historical definitions just don't apply.

What a wonderful article, thanks for posting.

Thank you for posting. This got more interesting as it went on, couldn't stop reading.

Does anyone else on here follow Alessandra Asteriti on Twitter? She is gender-critical but seems always to be angry at other gender-critical women. She has a particular dislike of the way that Maya won her case by arguing that gender-critical views were a protected belief in law, because, in her view, the idea that humans can't change sex is a scientific reality, not a belief, and that by arguing it's a belief, Maya's lawyers created problems for other gender-critical feminists further down the line.

She's been tweeting about this article today, noting that it mentions that Anya Palmer was looking to make the legal argument that gender-critical views were a protected belief before Maya's case came along.

Just wondered what other people's thoughts were.

I do follow Alessandra, and I agree with her that the GRA needs to be repealed. I know quite a lot of GC women who don't necessarily agree with the Forstater/Sex Matters approach and I can see why that is, but I don't agree on all points.

There was a lot of discussion on that point at the time. I think the outcome was that we really really don't want courts ruling on what reality is or isn't. I have come around to the "belief" argument.

great article. I think this sums up language very well.

”“I am harder core now than I was at the beginning. It’s been a journey and it’s been gradual. I mean, I started thinking that the people who wouldn’t use preferred pronouns were a bit mean. That it wasn’t kind. And why can’t we just be polite? I remember actually saying to my husband, something like four or five years ago… on a walk, can you explain to me why people get so het up about the language, and frankly, he understood better than I did at the time how important it was to keep hanging on to reality. You can’t say what the problem is with finding a man in the room at a rape crisis centre, for instance, who says he’s a woman, unless you can say the problem is that he’s a man. If you have to say the problem is she is a transwoman, then it sounds as if you’re objecting to a certain sort of woman, and it misses the point that what you’re objecting to is a man. You’ve got to be able to use real language. And I was thinking about that in relation to a number of these cases, because I’m getting more and more determined to use real language in court, in a tribunal. And it’s a worry, because people who haven’t been in the trenches of this for years think what I thought at the beginning, that it’s not polite and a bit beastly, but that is ignoring reality, the truth, and we are lawyers.”

“Language is important and there’s also a very good reason why, for years, the strategy on the other side was basically no debate because you don’t have to be that clever to poke holes in its nonsense, because there’s nothing there. Once you start poking it, it just falls over. I was teasing one of my colleagues in chambers the other day about his rather middle-aged holiday habits and in retaliation, he joked about my approach to the law which he summarised as, ‘you’ve got a willy, so you’re a man, innit’? And it’s true, my legal arguments boil down mostly to you’ve got a willy, so you’re a man, innit?”

I often wonder if those using the term ‘ultra’ as a negative divisory descriptor will look back and regret the label being coined and used.

I agree that it isn't ideal. But it's been a means to an end.

What's weird is that there isn't a protected characteristic for 'fact' or even 'mainstream knowledge' so how can you argue using this as the main point?

To some extent everything factual, gravity, the big bang, evolution etc is a 'belief' that some people will disagree with. The only difference is that some beliefs e.g. religion are taken on faith and some are explored and evidenced scientifically and are accepted by the population as 'fact'. As we can see though 'fact' has become a nebulous term these days e.g. twaw so perhaps it's best we don't base law on what most people think of as 'fact'.

Rage does still fuel me because there are so many things to be profoundly angry about: the grooming of children into mental ill-health and physical mutilation; the gas-lighting; the bullying and silencing and cancelling; the corruption of so many of our institutions; the sheer waste of time, money and energy on dealing with such obvious nonsense. But the thing that really tipped me into the white-hot fury that has lasted ever since was the first instance judgment in Forstater. That felt personal to me because I couldn’t put a cigarette paper between mine and Maya’s beliefs on this. The blatant gas-lighting of a judgment that told me that acknowledging the obvious truth about biological sex being immutable was not merely wrongheaded but so toxic that it put me in the same category as Nazis… that is what really lit the fire, and it hasn’t gone out.

Brilliant article.

I'm over 60, spent my childhood in lower-middle-class suburban England and now live in rural Ireland, and am pretty sure I have never met a 'gender essentialist'.

Extensive reading of light fiction suggests they have been rare if not quite non-existent since the end of WW1.

Except now, of course, when the genderists are all about being gender essentialist, pretty much making it compulsory.

Thanks for the post on this OP because it’s unlikely I’d have read that interview otherwise.

She has an interesting biography, is clearly very self-deprecating, and is incredibly candid about falling out of love with the law before she found her ‘fire’ again. She sounds like she’d be a fascinating guest at a dinner party.

The idea that GC is a protected belief means that it has to be balanced with the gender belief.

In some circumstances the rights of men to perform their gendered belief will outweigh womens and girls right to believe GC. In reality that will mean that men will have to be treated as women in law. And women will be continually fight against these situations as they arise.

Thanks for sharing this, I really enjoyed reading it. She comes across so human, her self-depreciating manner just makes her even more of an amazing woman