Tempest v Rural Payments Agency Tribunal Thread 5

[fanOfBen]

Previous thread:
www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5549488-tempest-v-rural-payments-agency-tribunal-thread-4

TT substack: https://tribunaltweets.substack.com/p/tempest-vs-defra-and-rural-payments

Tempest (a TW) is claiming discrimination, harassment and/or victimisation on grounds of gender reassignment. Central to the claim is the existence of the Sex Equality and Equity Network in the Civil Service (SEEN). SEEN has been granted right to intervene. Parts of the original claim against the co-chair of SEEN (Elspeth Duemmer-Wrigley) and another party (Andreas Mueller) were struck out or narrowed. Another claimant, PQ, is no longer part of the case.
I will also note that Elspeth still has a garden in need of seeds and water to support the ability of SEEN to be an intervenor in this case. The claim originated because she said "only women menstruate" and a search with her name and those terms at the usual gardening website should point you to her plot.

OK, so if it is funded by central funds are there a set of rules that define what can be provided or are these payments discretionary?

Can it be shown that other cross-government networks are equally funded?

@MyAmpleSheep Would it not speak to ED's trustworthiness as a witness?

‘we see and hate you and we will work as hard as possible to make you unwelcome in the workplace and as you attempt to live you life’

Is clearly a nebulous dog whistle and as such does not require an actual font

Normal size font. It does mean their ID is hanging around just above their knees, like a sporran.

Doubtless ED has been up to all kinds of shady stuff. None of it relevant to DEFRA’s treatment of ST.

I don’t think the Judge wants the tribunal used as a fishing expedition to try to catch ED in a lie about something irrelevant. People lie about some things and tell the truth about others, don’t they? I’ll credit the Judge with having the measure of all the witnesses, for now.

You'd think so, but there are some who would indist she is a man. Just saw someone with a TERF username commenting under a post by Colin Wynter about ED's witness 'qualities':
"No women suffers from swyers. It's a MALE dsd. Facts & truth before lying-kindness."
I find the last sentence especially telling - this is not someone discussing the facts around this DSD (that afaik dev. biologists and clinicians see differently) but making a political point that ED must be seen as male (otherwise one would have to accept ST as female as well I suppose?)
I would suspect ED is aware of this strain of thinking and feels vindicated by it, although it cannot have been her starting point.

I realise the tribunal can't find that ED/ST were harassing SEEN, but it would make me very happy for the Cs to lose their case and be ordered to pay costs... <wishful thinking>

I was quite happily watching the other thread and noting it wasn't moving...until I realised it was 1000 posts at which point my face was this 😱

Thank you to everyone c/p from the TT.

I don't find it that surprising. The core belief of GI is not so much that sex is not real but that gender identity is much more important and is what determines whether one is a man or a woman.
One could call that a cope, but it harks back to what Helen Joyce has once described as a longstanding human tradition of seeing oneself as a 'disembodied soul being carried around in a meatsack'.
I think it's absolutely possible to square that with a belief about sex being the determining factor in animals, who are just mindless, soulless beasts anyway - not like us humans who are more noble than that, with a trans identity possibly being the pinnacle of humanness. (I think that was what the 'does a chicken cry' lady in the MW movie was trying to get at.)

I admit Swyer's is a difficult one (like some cases of PAIS), but her Y chromosome is (I believe) completely non-functional. She's been raised and socialised as a female human and, my point, would likely choose to use and comport herself in SSS as any other biological female would. She would never from choice use the male facilities.

ST managed to get to his middle aged self before his magical female essence manifested itself. Prior to that no-one would have ever thought to treat him as a female. The whole idea would have been laughable. There's a clear difference, men who claim to have a trans identity are still men. Claiming common cause with people with DSDs is like them glomming onto LGB, false teaming to try to accumulate legitimacy.

I saw a post quoting someone with a DSD, what a mindfuck it was that if everything had gone right, if they didn't have the DSD, they would have been male.

Other than that, all I can say is some of the people on the GC side can also be unpleasant. All part of life's rich tapestry.

Sounds like great questions for an FOI.

What is really scary is how certain people (I’m sure you know who I’m referring to) were trying to track down people posting on MN that they suspected were employees of various departments.

Tallisker · Today 12:57

...but the judge wouldn’t let NC deliver the killer blow/smoking gun proof of collusion and corruption.

I wonder whether that could be grounds for an appeal, if it goes the wrong way? Preventing her from interrogating a witness fully. Had she winkled it out, that could have led to a GDPR prosecution.

The core belief of GI is not so much that sex is not real but that gender identity is much more important and is what determines whether one is a man or a woman.

Thanks for the attempt to explain, but I still find it mystifying.

We wouldn't bother to define 'man' and 'women' if humans reproduced asexually.

Ally as a word has interested me since I had to explain to my 2 autistic young adults that an ambulance with 'proud ally of LGBTQIA' on the side didn't mean that the ambulance service was an enemy of anyone that LGBTQIA didn't like. Technically, of course, they're right, and it explains a lot about the captured sector.

Other than that, all I can say is some of the people on the GC side can also be unpleasant. All part of life's rich tapestry.

Agree and many clueless people post on X.

It should be possible to accommodate the nuances of rare disorders without suggesting that sex classifications don't exist or are irrelevant.

Again, I think TRAs are responsible for this. No one would have cared before men started to use women’s spaces regardless of how we felt about it.

That's the irony. The whole ideology is dependent upon the existence of sex and upon people knowing it exists.

We wouldn't bother to define 'man' and 'women' if humans reproduced asexually.

Nail on the head.

Whatever Genderists might think they believe, ultimately in practice their vision is entirely based on so-called "cis" people being exactly the same as they are today, keeping all the sex-based structures and indeed sexism in place, but just letting a handful of special people pretend they are actually the opposite sex.

They do not in reality want the open, gender-fluid world they claim to, because how can special people be gender fluid or trans if there's no boring old "cis" people doing sex-based differences like always for them to identify into?

There's no honest intellectual effort to reimagine a world where "men" and "women" actually are mixed sex gender identities and what single-gender provisions (should we even need any) might look like in practice, it's just literraly "Well they'd be exactly the same as we do for women today, only we'd let some cocks in"

So little ability to think through the implications of what they say they believe. So little imagination!

This. It's the open lie.

What is the point of a man identifying as a woman if no one knows what a woman is, and it's not a definable thing? What is he transitioning from and to? What is the purpose of the stereotypical stuff that forms a performance of 'woman' if not clearly associated with members of that biological sex?

For all the waffle, it means wishing to be the biological sex he is not.

Agree

Additionally, I wish she had been asked what ‘gender’ means if it’s different from sex when she got animated that ‘woman’ was gendered as opposed to a description of sex. I think it would be useful to have a definition in evidence to compare to hopefully will be Elspeth’s evidence about the reality of sex.

Not all people with Swyers will present as ED does or be in the same situation as ED. Unfortunately though we live in a time where these very rare cases are used as a crowbar to force men into women's spaces, and case by case is becoming increasingly difficult because of that political movement and it's determination to making protecting women and women's rights and equalities so hard that it's abandoned.

The answer is probably the development of proper TQI facilities and resources in addition to single sex facilities and provisions, and considering that ED strongly embraces the TQI political position and identity this would likely be their preferred option anyway.

Thinking about it, I suspect there are different sorts of people, who want different things from gender ideology.

One lot covet the opposite kind of sexed body (and its associations). They don't really want to change society's approach to sex, they just want to carve out rule-breaking privileges for people like them.

Some just don't want rules, or want them for the thrill of transgressing them.

Another lot don't much like being embodied at all and want to silence all reminders of it.

(Edited because I managed to Post while I was part way through typing!)

I was not trying to dispute that the cases of ST and ED are fundamentally different, that the T are using the topic of DSDs for their own gains, or that noone would care or know about Emma's Y chromosome if she didn't make it the core of her identity.
I was simply reacting to the 'no one would ever' because there is a (at this time rather fringe, and only existing as a reaction to trans/inter propaganda) view that people like Emma are male, and that any other standpoint on that is a danger to women's rights. I did not quote that comment because it is particularly nasty (it was no attack on Emma, no insulting words) but because it is so insistent that only one position in this complicated question is the right one, and the other not just wrong but dangerous. I just hope this position does not become more prevalent to fuel Emma's and other's victim narrative.