Number 76

Addendum to #75

In preparing to write #75, I poked around the internet and 'borrowed' the factual information on the Maya Forstater court case from an article I came across written by Dr. Veronica Ivy. At one point, I intended to include many of her observations in that entry, but that would have made a long entry even longer. Instead, I decided to offer some of them by themselves, as a separate entry. The link to the entire article is at the bottom.

JK Rowling's Maya Forstater Tweets Support Hostile Work Environments, Not Free Speech
Dr. Veronica Ivy

... After that series of Tweets, in a... conversation published by the court, Forstater reiterated that her stances — "'women are adult human females' or 'transwomen are male'" — are "basic biological truths," and "'transwoman are women'" is one of a number of "literal delusions.” 

"I have been told that it is offensive to say 'transwomen are men' or that women means 'adult human female'. However since these statement are true I will continue to say them." But [Forstater] said that, since she did not wish to be rude, she would "respect anyone’s self-definition of their gender identity in any social and professional context" — her tweets about Bunce notwithstanding.

Forstater's contract expired in December and was not renewed; she sued in March and waited for a ruling — while continuing to make transphobic statements, including (but not limited to) a link to a piece comparing the use of proper pronouns to the date rape drug rohypnol and her commentary in defense of not using people's preferred pronouns, a defense of using transgender people's prior names in public settings, another series of statements misgendering another gender nonbinary person and another defense of her right to refuse to use the correct pronouns and to openly misgender people.

Then, as part of her complaint, Forstater submitted the following statement: “I believe that it is impossible to change sex or to lose your sex. Girls grow up to be women. Boys grow up to be men. No change of clothes or hairstyle, no plastic surgery, no accident or illness, no course of hormones, no force of will or social conditioning, no declaration can turn a female person into a male, or a male person into a female.”

This, then, is what Forstater wanted the courts to uphold: Her right to make her co-workers uncomfortable; her right to place her nonprofit organization in an untenable position vis-à-vis potential donors (like Credit Suisse senior directors); her right to be, even as she defines it, rude and disrespectful in social and professional contexts; and her right to disrespect U.K. law, which defines transgender women as women and transgender men as men if they jump through the right legal hoops.

Courts, of course, tend to look askance at being asked to rule that an employee should be allowed to harm their employers and co-workers based on "philosophical beliefs" they've decided are both "biological truths" and tantamount to religious canon. This is especially true when major international organizations, including the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, World Health Organization and the United Nations all support respect for trans identities.

In other words, Forstater's repeated statements that trans women are not women — statements that by her own admission she knew were rude and disrespectful, and that she knew bothered her co-workers — violated the rights of trans women to be free from such harassment, and were a legitimate cause to not renew her contract. Trans people, and particularly trans women, are subject to daily indignities, including harassment, discrimination and violence, and U.K. law is designed to protect them from such treatment in the workplace and society more broadly.

Hate speech has no place in a free and democratic society. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from the consequences of that speech. And yet, constantly, people in a position of relative power or authority seem to be saying that they should have the right to say or write rude, vile, violent or discriminatory things about their fellow citizens. But even more, they think that they should be legally protected from any and all consequences of those actions, even if their speech has negative consequences on the people to whom it is addressed.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/j-k-rowling-s-maya-forstater-tweets-support-hostile-work-ncna1105201