Summary: <br> <a rel="noreferrer noopener external" href="https://jessespafford.com/" target="_blank" data-wpel-link="external">Jesse Spafford</a> is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL – Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on ethics and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state. <br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="http://blog.hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Jesse-Spafford-scaled.jpg" data-wpel-link="internal"></a><br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> I was talking to someone last night. I won’t say who, but someone fairly well known, known for taking part in public debate, robust, intense debate, debates where people are strongly committed to their side of the argument, and aren’t afraid to let you know that.<br> <br> <br> <br> They’d been listening to the podcasts that I did a while back on trans rights and the associated issues with Aoife Gallagher, and they said to me that although they had talked publicly about a number of thorny political topics, they had steered away from what is called the trans debate. I don’t think that’s a very good name for it, but I don’t have a better one, so I’ll go with that. They had steered away from what is called the trans debate, not because they don’t have opinions on it, not because they don’t think it’s interesting, but purely because they were afraid of the potential backlash if they said the wrong thing, and they didn’t really believe the ‘right’ thing, so they said nothing.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> This isn’t the first time that this has happened. Previously I talked to a well known public figure, someone whose name I’m sure every listener would recognise, and again, someone not shy to state their opinions strongly in robust debates on all sorts of topics.<br> <br> <br> <br> That person had also decided never again to comment on the trans issue. They had commented on it previously; what they said was in no way hateful, in no way bigoted, and for the most part supportive the pro-trans position. But, in an attempt to sensibly analyse the topic, had strayed from some details of what is sometimes sarcastically called the ‘orthodox’ pro-trans rights position, and had received a barrage of abuse and name-calling for as a result.<br> <br> <br> <br> That person decided that they would not discuss the topic publicly ever again.<br> <br> <br> <br> So to be clear, someone who is an opinion former, an influential person, who publicly supported vindicating the rights of trans people will not now discuss the topic, because of the abuse they received for not supporting trans rights in the perfectly acceptable way.<br> <br> <br> <br> This is not the way a healthy debate happens.<br> <br> <br> <br> And this has consequences.<br> <br> <br> <br> One of the consequences – and it’s only one of them, there are many negative impacts of this – but one of the consequences is that the quality of the debate on this topic is poorer for it. I got feedback from a couple of listeners to the interview with Aoife Gallagher who remarked on one question that I asked had made them think. Aoife couldn’t answer the question – she was very straight up about the fact that it hadn’t occurred to her, but it’s interesting that such an obvious question hasn’t been teased out. The question was this:<br> <br> <br> <br> Why is organising groups by sex, by biological sex, seen by some as unacceptable discrimination, but organising them by socially-constructed gender is seen as required to vindicate trans people’s rights. That’s especially curious when the rationale for the separate groupings is based in sex characteristics. So the rationale for having separate rugby teams, or separate changing rooms, or separate services for new parents,
