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Comment by Erwin | Hacker News Reader

Current UK situation seems to be that being "Gender Critical" is a protected belief, based on the ruling case of a case where a tax expert lost her job for tweeting about how men cannot just change into women: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Forstater_v_Centre_for_Gl...

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Note that the court held two things: 1) Strongly held philosphical beliefs have much the same protection as religious beliefs in law and 2) That doesn’t mean you get to express those beliefs to other people in workplace.

In other words, anti-trans (or GC) beliefs occupy much the same position in law as anti-gay Christian beliefs. You can /believe/ them all you like & can’t be sacked for that belief, but if you express those beliefs in the workplace you’ve just created a hostile environment for other employees & your employer can simply fire you (after going through the appropriate disciplinary procedures where required by law) due to your breach of the Equality Act, under which being trans (specifically in law: gender reassignment) carries protected status in the same way that being a different skin colour or sexuality does.

Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile? There are plenty of things that would argue against on a moral basis, that are important parts of the lives of some of the people I've worked with. I'd never harass them directly or indirectly for one of these things, but it would be hard to keep them a complete secret either.

On the other side of the coin, I recognise that the people I work with will surely have some deeply-held beliefs about the wrongness of some aspects of my life. That's inevitable when you have some minimum diversity of viewpoints, and of course "reasonable people may differ" on many of those topics. I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them. (Assuming that just having a belief isn't harmful.)

> I don't think I have the right to insist they supress these beliefs, as long as they're not trying to harm me with them.

The argument from the trans community would be that misgendering and encouraging other employees to misgender them(which will happen if the belief is propaganda-ised) will cause significant emotional harm, risk mental health, cause problems in fulfilling job etc.. I'm not sure about how true this would be, as I'm in the closet and I'm a bit indifferent about what other people think, but can imagine it being very difficult for others.

Incidentally, threatening suicide to get what you want is a form of emotional abuse.

Good thing nobody does that, isn’t it?

I have been on the receiving end of it.

I suppose I made a big generalization there. Yes, people do sometimes use the threat of suicide to gain social leverage. That in no way is equivalent to saying that people who suffer from chronic pain, chronic depression, who are gay, trans, or work in high stress jobs have much higher than average suicide rates. If you hear statistics around suicide broken down by those demographics and see yourself as a victim of terrorism then that says more about you as a person than about anyone else. If someone directly tells you that what you are doing to them makes them feel suicidal then call 911 and walk away from that person. Beyond that, it's not your responsibility. If you keep feeling terrorized by a situation like that, I suggest talking to your mental health professional who can help you develop better coping skills.

> Is being philosophically critical of something automatically hostile?

Not in terms of the Equality Act. You can be as critical as you like in private, or outside the workplace as I understand things.

But if you voice those criticisms directly to someone in the protected class in the workplace, then you’ve crossed the line.

So, eg, telling a gay person to their face that you oppose gay marriage & all gay people are going to hell might be your strongly held philosophical (or religious in this case) belief, but the act of voicing it to the individual in the protected class breaks your employers obligations under the Equality Act in the UK & they would be entitled to fire you for it. The same goes for persistently mis-gendering a trans person (quite apart from it being extremely rude of course!) as gender re-assignment forms a protected class in law.

(Obviously, this is as I understand things & not the opinion of a legal expert in these matters.)

I'm not sure that's relevant; the case was a Tweet, was it not?

I think it was significantly more than just a single Tweet. You’d have to go back to the original judgement (some of which is quoted in the judement I linked to) to see.

Fair enough!

Yeah see this is a great example as I have no clue what anybody’s position is there upon a quick skim, and I’ve never even heard the term Gender Critical

Being "gender critical" is the view that trans women are not women. Not to be confused with the "anti-gender" movement, which opposes anything other than traditional male/female roles, or with "postgenderism", which argues the complete opposite, namely that traditional gender is irrelevant.

TL;DR is that Maya was (apparently) fired for the first opinion, lost a first court case over it because being gender critical is not protected under UK, and won the appeal because it was after all.

That just seems weird to me. Most people want to have kids later in life. Of course trans women are different wrt that life goal.

Not all trans people undergo or desire surgical intervention. Also, a transgender woman who desires biological children and surgical intervention could freeze her sperm before surgery.

Remember the story a few years ago about the gay couple where one of them was a transgender man and gave birth to their child? I'm sure similar situations do sometimes arise with transgender women.

Your argument is somewhat tangential - are you arguing women are defined by their ability to give birth? Seems fairly obvious that doesn't hold up even when we aren't talking about trans people

There is a bimodal distribution of biological traits related to reproduction. Traditionally, women are defined as members of one of those clusters, the one whose members are generally able to give birth during some period of their lives. This doesn't mean that all members of the cluster can or have or will give birth, but nonetheless the clusters are fairly well-defined for nearly 100% of the population, with trans people being an exception.

Some of the more extreme trans activists seem to want to pretend that these clusters don't exist, which puts them at odds with reality.

Other seem to demand that the clusters shouldn't matter, which I find rather optimistic since they're relevant for reproduction.

Trans rights are a noble goal, but some of the statements made by trans activists are a bit out there.

If by "shouldn't matter" you mean something like "it's ridiculous to define what a woman is as having a capability that literally all women lose around middle age" then I'd have to count myself amongst those people. Your argument is an extremely weak one for defining what it means to be a woman.

It doesn’t hold up if you talk about cis women either. I know plenty who cannot have children. Menopause also then would make women not-women, right?

"Gender critical" is the anti-trans movement. The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.

I feel that the trans community has largely been forced into defending "trans women are women" (TWAW), even if it has holes as a philosophical argument, because they need to fight the transphobic "trans women are men" rhetoric and downstream policy decisions. How can someone live as a woman without constant risk of being outed? They need an "F" on their passport and to use the women's toilets, etc. without having a constant risk of being "caught", because that ends badly.

> The reason you can't tell their true position is the usual one: they daren't say "we want to eradicate trans people" in public, so they take the "just asking questions" route.

That's an interesting statement from the POV of falsifiability. Is there an experiment we could theoretically perform to find out if a person who's stating that he's "gender critical" really wants to eradicate all trans people?

So has Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it? Is it similar to TERF?

I think you're correct in your second statement. This whole area seems very polarising. The edge case of women's sports is the obvious situation where a principle of 'Live and let live' doesn't work.

> Gender critical been defined as a group in such a way that no-one will admit to being in it?

No, that's what they call themselves. You can see plenty of people using that label on twitter.

Polarize_d_, in that people have gone out of their way to polarize it. The last major legal advance was in 2004, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Recognition_Act_2004 with broad support, and it's only in very recent years that this backlash has sprung up.

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