6 Comments

Very nicely done. All of this is also about authoritarian attempts to control what can and cannot be thought, much less openly discussed and debated.

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Of course. That is what got Rowling into the debate to begin with. She did not believe that Forstater should be fired based on expressing her views on gender.

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Am a bigger fan now. Was a fan but she has added her voice for woman's rights and she is a woman

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Same for me. I’m interested in reading her works outside of the Harry Potter books!

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Your described 4th premises, along with its linked premise #5, are the contentious ones, in my understanding of the gender issue, though your nuanced phrasing of #4 opens up this aspect of it to productive debate. As far as I know, Judith Butler agreed that sex was biological, but gender was "fluid" and "performative." This theoretical position on gender then proved to be the thin edge of the wedge that, illogically, led to the claim that one could (and even should) change one's sex. So perhaps the only way to work back to the core premise (that sex is biological) is to question Butler's original arguments on gender?

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I think much of the gender-critical feminist camp has taken Butler to task, which is not difficult since all they need to do is write clearer than her. My objective in this article is merely to revisit a case in the UK court some years ago, and propose the question of whether the gender-critical view is discriminatory to trans people, and should it be categorized as hate speech under the law, UK or otherwise?

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