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Trans rights activists have argued that trans people have a right to be recognised as their preferred gender in both the private and public spheres and that the law should protect this right.
Gender critical groups, however, claim that efforts to undermine single sex spaces put women’s safety at risk while attempts to police language on this issue constitute a threat freedom of speech.
This panel event disentangled this debate by giving speakers from both sides the opportunity to present their case for whether transgender ideology is necessary outgrowth of liberal values, or a threat to them.
On the Panel:
Peter Tatchell – Human rights campaigner and activist.
Freda Wallace – Political commentator, freelance writer and host of the Gender Nebulous podcast.
Helen Joyce – Former finance editor at the Economist, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and director of advocacy at Sex Matters.
Marc Glendening – Head of Cultural affairs at the IEA and author of the Transgender Ideology report published by the IEA in August.
One of the curses that progressives that have gone awry (the woke) bring to the table is often the disregard of objective fact. For the faux-progressive sets, the more oppressive factors that you happen to bring to the situation makes your insights somehow more relevant and more important (‘truthier’) than someone who has experienced less oppression. So much of faux-progressive time is spent comparing, ordering, and reordering postures and arguments in accordance with perceived levels of oppression that the actual truth of the matter becomes lost in the internecine conflict that inevitably occurs.
We as a society need to decide that objective truth matters and strive to base our decisions on the version of events/details that most closely coincides with the material reality we all share. In short we need to return to and reaffirm the ideas of the Enlightenment and of the Classical Liberalism that followed.
“At this moment, the liberal basis of most progressive movements is impeding our ability, individually and collectively, to take action. The individualism of liberalism, and of American society generally, renders too many of us unable to think clearly about our dire situation. Individual action is not an effective response to power because human society is political; by definition it is built from groups, not from individuals. That is not to say that individual acts of physical and intellectual courage can’t spearhead movements. But Rosa Parks didn’t end segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Rosa Parks plus the stalwart determination and strategic savvy of the entire black community did.
Liberalism also diverges from a radical analysis on the question of the nature of social reality. Liberalism is idealist. This is the belief that reality is a mental activity. Oppression, therefore, consists of attitudes and ideas, and social change happens through rational argument and education. Materialism, in contrast, is the understanding that society is organized by concrete systems of power, not by thoughts and ideas, and that the solution to oppression is to take those systems apart brick by brick. This in no way implies that individuals are exempt from examining their privilege and behaving honorably. It does mean that antiracism workshops will never end racism: only political struggle to rearrange the fundamentals of power will.”
Lierre Keith. – From the Essay Oppression and Subordination.
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Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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