The French have a phrase for it: la fausse bonne idée.
Which is to say, an idea that seems, in the eyes of many, to be enlightened, is pursued vigorously and turns out to be a dud.
This captures pretty well the disastrous history of gender ideology in the past quarter century.
Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling that brought much-needed light to a controversy that had become a furnace of heat. As Lord Hodge, the court’s deputy president, said in his statement: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex”.
Admirably, he was no less clear that this was a legal decision, not the endorsement of a particular tribe, identity group or campaign. He also emphasised – as does the full 88-page ruling – that trans people are still, and always were, extensively protected by the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act 2004.
As Baroness Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, made clear on the BBC’s Today programme the next morning, much granular, practical work lies ahead, as public services, businesses, sporting facilities and other organisations seek guidance on how to comply with this judgment. There is no one-size-fits-all template: the adjustments ahead will require imagination, resources and goodwill. But there is now a clear basis upon which to proceed, delivered by the highest court in the land.
The question progressives should be asking themselves is: how did it get so bad? When did so many liberals forget that the essence of a pluralist society is the negotiation of conflicting rights? As Isaiah Berlin wrote, such collisions of values are not only “an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life” but “are of the essence of… what we are”.
The fundamental error in this case was one of wilful blindness: the refusal of trans rights activists (TRAs) to acknowledge that there were two vulnerable groups involved in this controversy. On the one hand, trans people wanted, quite rightly, to be treated with dignity, respected in the workplace and elsewhere, and protected from harassment. On the other, women – distinguishing biology from gender – wanted their hard-won same-sex spaces and rights to be preserved.
But the TRAs simply refused to recognise that such a conflict of rights existed. Anyone who contested this was a “TERF” (“trans-exclusionary radical feminist”), a bigot, a transphobe, a Nazi. It was routinely said that feminist groups trying to protect same-sex rights were, in fact, seeking the “erasure” of trans people (nobody was, ever).
Article continues at https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/matthew-dancona-how-did-it-get-so-bad/
Can also be read in full at https://archive.is/5Woca
(Not saying it is the best article but given some of the references you might think that FWR had been used as a source!)