Unfortunately the problems here are very practical, not metaphysical. Many friends of mine now have an even lower chance of existing in public without being the target of violence, especially if they need to use a public toilet - and that's both trans people and people who just don't entirely match the stereotypes for their biological sex.
The harms are just not equivalent here. The people fired for their anti trans actions were generally not fired for their beliefs - they were fired for persistently harassing their colleagues under the cover of that. If I eg aggressively tried to contaminate my Jewish colleague's lunch with pork, or even just kept forcefully informing my coworkers that they were going to hell or their deity was a demonic power when talking about it was completely irrelevant and out of nowhere, I would similarly expect to be fired.
The two stories I remember following were Kathleen Stock and J.K. Rowling. I don't recall any accusations of harassment in the manner you describe above. It was simply that people claimed they shouldn't be allowed to express their beliefs, and attempted to silence them. Am I misremembering this?
Of course the people who actually harass trans people also think gender critical views shouldn't be silenced, but we all agree the actual harrassers should be fired for harassment. If I'm following your argument correctly then as applied to this post (we should silence disagreement, and demand displays of orthodoxy because over there are some people committing harassment) is the equivalent of saying we should end religious toleration because a Musilm blew someone up over religion. It is entirely possible to be anti-terrorism and pro-religious freedom!
'The harms are not equivalent' is only relevant if we have to trade the harms off against each other - if our only options are either all faking being pro-trans, or harassment. But as our host's religious example shows, we are perfectly capable of disagreeing with people without harassing them. This only breaks down if you claim that act of believing something different while standing near someone is itself an act of harassment. As our host pointed out, if you believe this then in a pluralistic society we are all unavoidably harassing people every day. This seems ... obviously false?
I actually think the effort to force conformity on trans beliefs has backfired by creating cover for real harassers. They can pretend to just be people of good conscience being unfairly silenced, and that's plausible because the people attacking them also unfairly attack people who disagree and won't lie about it!
Neither JK Rowling nor Kathleen Stock even lost their job for their beliefs. JK Rowling is still highly successful and about to launch a TV show, Kathleen resigned of her own accord - you could say she was constructively dismissed, but that could also apply to many trans people who have been pushed out of their workplaces due to the kind of disrespect and threats enabled by anti trans rhetoric.
Yes, some of the pro trans side went too far in sending violent threats to people who were not actively engaged in harassing them - but this is somewhat understandable given the actual threat that has now been realised where they are being excluded from public life due to not being able to safely use public conveniences, and the many people who have issue violent threats against them have been emboldened.
It's easy to not feel safe unless you are fully accepted when people continue to threaten your actual safety on a regular basis.
>The people fired for their anti trans actions were generally not fired for their beliefs - they were fired for persistently harassing their colleagues under the cover of that.
A quick google search didn't turn up any evidence of your statement. Where the women named in the article above were fired, the firings largely seemed to be about employers objecting to statements on social media. Which of those people persistently harassed their colleagues?
Biological sex isn't binary, as a matter of easily provable science. It involves complex interactions between chromosomes, hormones, and gonads. There are a significant number of biologically intersex people who don't even know they're intersex ("women" with a Y chromosome and "men" with an extra X chromosome). This is before you get into unusual combinations of gonads (testes instead of ovaries, but an otherwise "standard female" set of reproductive organs); or hormonal variations that mean a set of reproductive organs match one biological sex, but when the child goes through puberty, they get flooded with oestrogen instead of testosterone or vice versa, and all of their secondary sex characteristics are a mismatch with their reproductive organs. Where do intersex people who present as women fit into your proposed worldview?
Our host did speak to intersex in footnote 13. I don't think he answers your question directly - the note is about relevance rather than a dive into the complex but niche world of intersex. Quite possibly you've already read it, and my comment is a complete waste of space, but since Substack broke footnotes for mobile I thought it was possible you hadn't and would want to.
Large visitor attractions should provide 1/3 women's toilets, 1/3 men's and 1/3 gender neutral. As well as making it easy for trans people to visit, it also means that there are more toilets for women to use, which is a common complaint.
A small number of gender neutral changing rooms would also mostly solve the problem (for places that had the space to provide them).
Hopefully that would provide for trans people without other people feeling like they were being discriminated against.
No, they should provide a lot more women's toilets than men's - there are always lengthy queues for women's toilets for a variety of reasons and it's about time designers stopped just thinking hey equal numbers, that works
My recollection was that "equal provision of toilets" was interpreted to mean "equal floorspace" and urinals take up much less room.
The advantage of gender neutral toilets is that it addresses both problems. Women who don't want to share toilets with trans people don't have to, women who don't care can use gender neutral ones, and there are more overall for women to use.
I don't think this problem should really be solved by legislation and different places can decide on different numbers.
Not all women will want to use gender neutral toilets but many are fine to do so - many men won't want to either. Providing all three (in whatever exact proportion) should be an acceptable compromise.
I don't think men and women do have exactly equal toilet needs - because women will always take longer in the toilets for obvious reasons. It's one of those things where equality isn't fair
> I recognise this is a contentious issue about which emotions can run high - so please keep things polite in the comments.
This post was not polite. It is superficially polite, but you know it's going to hurt people at a time when they're suffering a lot of harm.
I'm not sure if we'll actually achieve any understanding from any reply I could make, which is a shame because I know you are very thoughtful in a lot of ways.
One approach is to ask you, how would you explain this to a trans teenager, someone who's been living happily as a non-birth-assigned-gender with no problems for several years, whose friends and family have no problem with them, who AFAIK has never threatened anyone in any way, but now has become more likely to be singled out, mocked, attacked and denied medical care. Would you assume they were deluded about the gender presentation they use? Would you try to convince them of that? Would you express compassion about the risks they faced, even if you think they're wrong?
Another approach is to lay out what I think is fact, social construct, and metaphysical.
I think this is a factual question, I think it is true, I think there's lots of evidence both personal experience and studies: Just like most people have an inner compass telling them a sexual orientation, most people have an inner compass telling them what genders to present as.
I think this is a factual question, I think it is true, I think there's lots of evidence both personal experience and studies: If people want appropriate medical care for having a mismatching body and inner compass, including puberty blockers and hormones, we've already exercised more than enough caution, treating them appropriately is helpful, doesn't do any harm, and massively improves their lives and reduces the chance of suicide.
(Like, I know people who've been trans for decades. It's not at all obvious. They've been fine all this time. No second guessing or anything. I don't think it's reasonable to believe they've been imagining it.)
I think this is a factual but less objective question, I think it is true: whether the above facts are true or not, letting trans people be trans doesn't harm anyone else (except possibly extreme bizarre edge cases).
There is a practical question whether laws and social expectations designed to enforce single-gender spaces can most appropriately adapt to these facts.
And there's a social question of, how should society use words like "man" or "woman"? Is it more 'accurate' to have the word reflect someone's general sexual characteristics? To reflect their inner compass? To just let people use whatever pronouns they like, whether it matches people's expectations of their birth, just like we let people use whatever name they like, whether it matches people's expectations of their ethnicity.
2) It's important that people defend the right to free speech (including the right to "misgender" people). It's important that people say loud and clear what is factually true, and don't allow themselves to be browbeaten into repeating things they know to be false. And it's important that the victims of gender identity ideology are not ignored (are we ever going to see a film or TV documentary about a detransitioner?).
But I want to point out that the people who are publicly critical of gender identity ideology have a variety of motives. Some people genuinely believe in free speech, some people have a genuine commitment to the truth, some people genuinely want to prevent people being harmed.
But also, some people are feminists - many of whom are just rightfully angry that the rights of women and girls have been ignored in various ways, and some of whom take "all men are rapists" as both their starting point and their conclusion for everything they think. Some people believe that God created men to be men, and women to be women. Some people just don't like it when people don't conform to gender norms. And some people just enjoy being mean and abusive towards people, and transgender people, being "weirdos", are exactly to sort of people bullies like to pick on.
When the gender-critical feminist movement took off I took an interest in it. I've read The End of Gender, Irreversible Damage, Trans, Material Girls and Tomboy, I subscribed to Graham Lineham's Substack, Kathleen Stock's Substack and the Substacks detransitioners such as Michelle Alleva. There was a time when I would describe myself as a gender-critical feminist. I hate bullshit, I could see that a lot of what trans rights activists believed was bullshit, and I was happy that people were standing up to them and speaking truth to power.
However, I also noticed that sometimes a well-known gender-critical feminist would say something that was demonstrably untrue. As time went by, I saw less and less people in the gender-critical movement on Substack and on Twitter who were motivated by a belief in free-speech, a desire to find out the truth, and/or empathy with people who were being harmed, and more and more people who had other motivations - people who had zero interest in free speech for people who disagreed with them, people who were happy to spread lies as long as the lies made the other side look bad, and people who had zero empathy for anyone who was gender-nonconforming.
My attitude now is "a plague on both your houses". The public discourse on BOTH sides is dominated by the sort of narrow-minded, self-righteous, shouty people I have no respect for. I also believe that "transgender people" are a diverse group, and any attempt to generalise about them will misunderstand many people.
You quote J. K. Rowling. She deserves praise for having stood up against the trans rights activists when no-one else was doing so. I know she is a feminist. But it's clear, looking at her Twitter, that a part of her motivation now is that she just enjoys being mean to people online. She is genuinely witty person and every time she says something mean about the hated outgroup she will get tons of attention, likes and praise. She's a "mean girl" type. It's a consistent part of her character. Before transgender people were the hated outgroup it was Brexiteers and before that it was Scots Nationalists. And she doesn't actually believe in free speech:
On International Asexuality Day (April 6th) she wrote "Happy International Fake Oppression Day to everyone who wants complete strangers to know they don't fancy a shag".
Why did she do that? If you can "Call yourself whatever you like" why can't you call yourself asexual? If someone has no interest in sex, what harm does it do anyone if they are open about that fact? What's the difference between saying that asexual people should shut up and pretend to be normal, and saying that gay people should shut up and pretend to be normal? Well, the difference is that gay people have widespread social acceptance and legal protections against hate speech, and asexual people don't.
Actually, I'm sure 2025 Rowling has different views to 2019 Rowling. Spending every day on social media getting abuse from one side and praise from the other side has radicalised her. Many such cases!
It would be nice if people could notice that a lot of the anti-trans movement is motivated by bigotry and meanness, and it would be nice if people could notice that at the same time as noticing that some of the beliefs of the trans-rights movement are nonsensical. Social media has done a good job of putting us all in filter bubbles where we only get exposed to one side's "truth".
3) I read Mania by Lionel Shriver recently and I loved it! I'm planning to read it for a second time soon. I think you might like it.
That's really thoughtful. Thank you for sharing. I haven't followed this at all closely and so hadn't picked up the transition or dilution of motives on the anti-trans side. I think it's realistic, sad and helpful to point out how being demonised/lauded is likely to twist people over time.
Unfortunately the problems here are very practical, not metaphysical. Many friends of mine now have an even lower chance of existing in public without being the target of violence, especially if they need to use a public toilet - and that's both trans people and people who just don't entirely match the stereotypes for their biological sex.
The harms are just not equivalent here. The people fired for their anti trans actions were generally not fired for their beliefs - they were fired for persistently harassing their colleagues under the cover of that. If I eg aggressively tried to contaminate my Jewish colleague's lunch with pork, or even just kept forcefully informing my coworkers that they were going to hell or their deity was a demonic power when talking about it was completely irrelevant and out of nowhere, I would similarly expect to be fired.
The two stories I remember following were Kathleen Stock and J.K. Rowling. I don't recall any accusations of harassment in the manner you describe above. It was simply that people claimed they shouldn't be allowed to express their beliefs, and attempted to silence them. Am I misremembering this?
Of course the people who actually harass trans people also think gender critical views shouldn't be silenced, but we all agree the actual harrassers should be fired for harassment. If I'm following your argument correctly then as applied to this post (we should silence disagreement, and demand displays of orthodoxy because over there are some people committing harassment) is the equivalent of saying we should end religious toleration because a Musilm blew someone up over religion. It is entirely possible to be anti-terrorism and pro-religious freedom!
'The harms are not equivalent' is only relevant if we have to trade the harms off against each other - if our only options are either all faking being pro-trans, or harassment. But as our host's religious example shows, we are perfectly capable of disagreeing with people without harassing them. This only breaks down if you claim that act of believing something different while standing near someone is itself an act of harassment. As our host pointed out, if you believe this then in a pluralistic society we are all unavoidably harassing people every day. This seems ... obviously false?
I actually think the effort to force conformity on trans beliefs has backfired by creating cover for real harassers. They can pretend to just be people of good conscience being unfairly silenced, and that's plausible because the people attacking them also unfairly attack people who disagree and won't lie about it!
Neither JK Rowling nor Kathleen Stock even lost their job for their beliefs. JK Rowling is still highly successful and about to launch a TV show, Kathleen resigned of her own accord - you could say she was constructively dismissed, but that could also apply to many trans people who have been pushed out of their workplaces due to the kind of disrespect and threats enabled by anti trans rhetoric.
Yes, some of the pro trans side went too far in sending violent threats to people who were not actively engaged in harassing them - but this is somewhat understandable given the actual threat that has now been realised where they are being excluded from public life due to not being able to safely use public conveniences, and the many people who have issue violent threats against them have been emboldened.
It's easy to not feel safe unless you are fully accepted when people continue to threaten your actual safety on a regular basis.
>The people fired for their anti trans actions were generally not fired for their beliefs - they were fired for persistently harassing their colleagues under the cover of that.
A quick google search didn't turn up any evidence of your statement. Where the women named in the article above were fired, the firings largely seemed to be about employers objecting to statements on social media. Which of those people persistently harassed their colleagues?
Biological sex isn't binary, as a matter of easily provable science. It involves complex interactions between chromosomes, hormones, and gonads. There are a significant number of biologically intersex people who don't even know they're intersex ("women" with a Y chromosome and "men" with an extra X chromosome). This is before you get into unusual combinations of gonads (testes instead of ovaries, but an otherwise "standard female" set of reproductive organs); or hormonal variations that mean a set of reproductive organs match one biological sex, but when the child goes through puberty, they get flooded with oestrogen instead of testosterone or vice versa, and all of their secondary sex characteristics are a mismatch with their reproductive organs. Where do intersex people who present as women fit into your proposed worldview?
Our host did speak to intersex in footnote 13. I don't think he answers your question directly - the note is about relevance rather than a dive into the complex but niche world of intersex. Quite possibly you've already read it, and my comment is a complete waste of space, but since Substack broke footnotes for mobile I thought it was possible you hadn't and would want to.
How does an intersex person who passes for a woman differ from a trans woman with a gender recognition certificate who *also* passes for a woman?
Large visitor attractions should provide 1/3 women's toilets, 1/3 men's and 1/3 gender neutral. As well as making it easy for trans people to visit, it also means that there are more toilets for women to use, which is a common complaint.
A small number of gender neutral changing rooms would also mostly solve the problem (for places that had the space to provide them).
Hopefully that would provide for trans people without other people feeling like they were being discriminated against.
No, they should provide a lot more women's toilets than men's - there are always lengthy queues for women's toilets for a variety of reasons and it's about time designers stopped just thinking hey equal numbers, that works
My recollection was that "equal provision of toilets" was interpreted to mean "equal floorspace" and urinals take up much less room.
The advantage of gender neutral toilets is that it addresses both problems. Women who don't want to share toilets with trans people don't have to, women who don't care can use gender neutral ones, and there are more overall for women to use.
Well there wouldn't really be more for women to use as men could also use them.
I think there should be 50% women's toilets, 25% mens and 25% gender neutral
I don't think this problem should really be solved by legislation and different places can decide on different numbers.
Not all women will want to use gender neutral toilets but many are fine to do so - many men won't want to either. Providing all three (in whatever exact proportion) should be an acceptable compromise.
I don't think men and women do have exactly equal toilet needs - because women will always take longer in the toilets for obvious reasons. It's one of those things where equality isn't fair
We may disagree about trans, but that is nothing to the searing heat of our passion about toilet provision for cis men and women!
> I recognise this is a contentious issue about which emotions can run high - so please keep things polite in the comments.
This post was not polite. It is superficially polite, but you know it's going to hurt people at a time when they're suffering a lot of harm.
I'm not sure if we'll actually achieve any understanding from any reply I could make, which is a shame because I know you are very thoughtful in a lot of ways.
One approach is to ask you, how would you explain this to a trans teenager, someone who's been living happily as a non-birth-assigned-gender with no problems for several years, whose friends and family have no problem with them, who AFAIK has never threatened anyone in any way, but now has become more likely to be singled out, mocked, attacked and denied medical care. Would you assume they were deluded about the gender presentation they use? Would you try to convince them of that? Would you express compassion about the risks they faced, even if you think they're wrong?
Another approach is to lay out what I think is fact, social construct, and metaphysical.
I think this is a factual question, I think it is true, I think there's lots of evidence both personal experience and studies: Just like most people have an inner compass telling them a sexual orientation, most people have an inner compass telling them what genders to present as.
I think this is a factual question, I think it is true, I think there's lots of evidence both personal experience and studies: If people want appropriate medical care for having a mismatching body and inner compass, including puberty blockers and hormones, we've already exercised more than enough caution, treating them appropriately is helpful, doesn't do any harm, and massively improves their lives and reduces the chance of suicide.
(Like, I know people who've been trans for decades. It's not at all obvious. They've been fine all this time. No second guessing or anything. I don't think it's reasonable to believe they've been imagining it.)
I think this is a factual but less objective question, I think it is true: whether the above facts are true or not, letting trans people be trans doesn't harm anyone else (except possibly extreme bizarre edge cases).
There is a practical question whether laws and social expectations designed to enforce single-gender spaces can most appropriately adapt to these facts.
And there's a social question of, how should society use words like "man" or "woman"? Is it more 'accurate' to have the word reflect someone's general sexual characteristics? To reflect their inner compass? To just let people use whatever pronouns they like, whether it matches people's expectations of their birth, just like we let people use whatever name they like, whether it matches people's expectations of their ethnicity.
"whether or not it happens or not" has at minimum got a bonus 'or not' and the sentence as a whole arguably has more fundamental problems.
Enjoyed Bigfeet. The humbler but much larger cousins of the Proudfeet!
1) I thought this was very well put.
2) It's important that people defend the right to free speech (including the right to "misgender" people). It's important that people say loud and clear what is factually true, and don't allow themselves to be browbeaten into repeating things they know to be false. And it's important that the victims of gender identity ideology are not ignored (are we ever going to see a film or TV documentary about a detransitioner?).
But I want to point out that the people who are publicly critical of gender identity ideology have a variety of motives. Some people genuinely believe in free speech, some people have a genuine commitment to the truth, some people genuinely want to prevent people being harmed.
But also, some people are feminists - many of whom are just rightfully angry that the rights of women and girls have been ignored in various ways, and some of whom take "all men are rapists" as both their starting point and their conclusion for everything they think. Some people believe that God created men to be men, and women to be women. Some people just don't like it when people don't conform to gender norms. And some people just enjoy being mean and abusive towards people, and transgender people, being "weirdos", are exactly to sort of people bullies like to pick on.
When the gender-critical feminist movement took off I took an interest in it. I've read The End of Gender, Irreversible Damage, Trans, Material Girls and Tomboy, I subscribed to Graham Lineham's Substack, Kathleen Stock's Substack and the Substacks detransitioners such as Michelle Alleva. There was a time when I would describe myself as a gender-critical feminist. I hate bullshit, I could see that a lot of what trans rights activists believed was bullshit, and I was happy that people were standing up to them and speaking truth to power.
However, I also noticed that sometimes a well-known gender-critical feminist would say something that was demonstrably untrue. As time went by, I saw less and less people in the gender-critical movement on Substack and on Twitter who were motivated by a belief in free-speech, a desire to find out the truth, and/or empathy with people who were being harmed, and more and more people who had other motivations - people who had zero interest in free speech for people who disagreed with them, people who were happy to spread lies as long as the lies made the other side look bad, and people who had zero empathy for anyone who was gender-nonconforming.
My attitude now is "a plague on both your houses". The public discourse on BOTH sides is dominated by the sort of narrow-minded, self-righteous, shouty people I have no respect for. I also believe that "transgender people" are a diverse group, and any attempt to generalise about them will misunderstand many people.
You quote J. K. Rowling. She deserves praise for having stood up against the trans rights activists when no-one else was doing so. I know she is a feminist. But it's clear, looking at her Twitter, that a part of her motivation now is that she just enjoys being mean to people online. She is genuinely witty person and every time she says something mean about the hated outgroup she will get tons of attention, likes and praise. She's a "mean girl" type. It's a consistent part of her character. Before transgender people were the hated outgroup it was Brexiteers and before that it was Scots Nationalists. And she doesn't actually believe in free speech:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/welcome-to-the-world-you-created-j-k-rowling
On International Asexuality Day (April 6th) she wrote "Happy International Fake Oppression Day to everyone who wants complete strangers to know they don't fancy a shag".
Why did she do that? If you can "Call yourself whatever you like" why can't you call yourself asexual? If someone has no interest in sex, what harm does it do anyone if they are open about that fact? What's the difference between saying that asexual people should shut up and pretend to be normal, and saying that gay people should shut up and pretend to be normal? Well, the difference is that gay people have widespread social acceptance and legal protections against hate speech, and asexual people don't.
Actually, I'm sure 2025 Rowling has different views to 2019 Rowling. Spending every day on social media getting abuse from one side and praise from the other side has radicalised her. Many such cases!
It would be nice if people could notice that a lot of the anti-trans movement is motivated by bigotry and meanness, and it would be nice if people could notice that at the same time as noticing that some of the beliefs of the trans-rights movement are nonsensical. Social media has done a good job of putting us all in filter bubbles where we only get exposed to one side's "truth".
3) I read Mania by Lionel Shriver recently and I loved it! I'm planning to read it for a second time soon. I think you might like it.
That's really thoughtful. Thank you for sharing. I haven't followed this at all closely and so hadn't picked up the transition or dilution of motives on the anti-trans side. I think it's realistic, sad and helpful to point out how being demonised/lauded is likely to twist people over time.