Are Trans Rights Human Rights? A Philosopher Stumbles
By Paul Tyson
For reasons of long habit and relentlessly crushed optimism, I was listening to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s RN in the car yesterday. (RN stands for Radio National, a.k.a. Rainbow Nation.) A talk by the progressive atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling from the Melbourne Writers’ Festival was being aired on “Big Ideas”. It was a defence of what Grayling called “wokism”, as centred around upholding trans rights as human rights.
What struck me in listening to it was what very shoddy reasoning and factually false claims Grayling was happy to put forward. Even so, what he said was fawningly applauded by the Melbourne Writer’s Festival crowd and lauded by the ABC presenter endorsed by ACON (our Stonewall).
Grayling was purporting to “make peace in the culture war” by defending trans rights as human rights against those he characterized as the Far Right and despicable opponents of Progress. In other words, the supposedly convivial “peace” that Grayling is offering to both sides in the culture war is the total annihilation of all opposition to Progress. Grayling is on record in proposing that democratic processes should be rigged to prevent referendums on anti-progressive options like Brexit taking place at all. He also argues that democratic processes should not permit the election of anti-progressive politicians like Donald Trump. Apparently, it’s a no-brainer to work out who should win in any contest between Grayling and the adult voting majorities of the United Kingdom and the United States. Of course, Grayling knows better than the majority of Brits and Americans who should represent them politically. So, the “democracy” that Grayling advocates is one in which elite academic progressives always hold and impose power, while the popular conservative majority should have no say in what happens to them. Whatever that is, it is not liberal democracy. A philosopher should know this.
Grayling goes on to make the simply false claim that all that trans people want is to exercise their minority gender-identity rights without fear or persecution. Transgender-identity non-discrimination laws, as they are currently upheld in Australia, are not minority rights laws that only impact a tiny subclass of Australians; they express a whole-of-society reform agenda. If one allows that a transwoman is in all legal and social contexts identical to a biological female, this means that sex-based rights for all females have been revoked. Trans rights are not a tiny minority rights issue, they erase all sex-based realism from legal, social, and therapeutic contexts, impacting every aspect of Australian life. A philosopher should be able to work that out. And again, a tiny minority dictating unwanted normative terms to the entire society is not a democratic form of progress; it is an elitist power play overriding the popular will of the majority.
Grayling goes on to assert that trans rights are human rights. This is philosophically indefensible. Let me explain.
Is being a Jew a universal human right? No. This is because not everyone is Jewish. But do Jews have the universal human right to be treated with the same intrinsic human dignity as everyone else? Yes! Being a Jew is exactly no reason at all to be treated as unworthy of life, dignity, and the protection of law. Any person – whether a Jew, a Muslim, an Atheist, or of any racial or religious identity – has exactly the same intrinsic and universal human dignity as any other person. Categories of human rights must be universal and applicable to all people. Significantly, categories that are applicable to all people are natural rather than cultural, objective rather than subjective, and applicable to all races, all creeds, all ages, all language groups, rather than being especially for only some categories of identification. Trans is not a universal trait; it is unnatural (when artificially performed), it is subjective, and it is of a unique and identitarian nature. It is not a universal human trait. (Note: being “cis” is not a “gender identity” that anyone who cannot believe in the anti-scientific performative fantasies of postmodern gender theory identifies as.) Trans rights are not human rights. One has no universal human right to the personal gender identity of being trans. A philosopher should know this.
Someone who “gender-identifies” as trans has precisely the same universal and natural human rights as anyone else, but they do not have unnatural and subjective identitarian “rights” that are unique to them, which they must be able to exercise at the expense of the universal and natural rights of other people (such as actual biological females). I have no natural human right to identify as a horse, which is exactly the same sort of magical thinking and contrary-to-nature “right” as identifying as female when I am in fact male. (Sex is natural, objective, and objectively verifiable, but gender is cultural, subjective, and not objectively verifiable.) Subjective identity “rights” are no more universal human rights than are racial or religious identity rights. If racial and religious identities are not universal human rights (which they are not, because they are not universal) then neither are gender-identity “rights”.
For a philosopher, Grayling is astonishingly bad with basic reasoning, factual truth claims, civic consciousness appropriate to liberal democratic forms of government, and fundamental moral intelligence. As regards moral intelligence, when it comes to the actual safety needs of all female humans to have safe single-sex spaces that respect the relative sexual vulnerabilities of women as a natural group, as distinct from men as a natural group, Grayling is unconscionably daft.
Speaking as an academic, I can say with solidly verified empirical confidence that it is indeed possible for popular intellectuals to be brilliant idiots. Or, as George Orwell put it, there are follies that only intellectuals could commit, “no ordinary man could be such a fool.” And certainly, no ordinary woman – such as Sandie Peggie – could be such a fool as to believe that the man identifying as a woman in her changing room is really female.
Trans “rights” are not universal human rights, but all women indeed should have the right to safety from sexual predation by all males, including males who falsely claim to be females. Grayling should take a few basic scientific atheist lessons from Richard Dawkins here. The objective facts of human reproductive biology are that there are only two sexes, and however much a person gender-identifies or subjectively feels that they are anything other than the sex that they objectively in fact are, such identities are factually false delusions.
One has no universal human right to make other people pretend to believe the truth of one’s personal and factually false delusions. More seriously, I have no right to make you believe that Christian doctrines are true just because I am a Christian. But requiring women to pretend that they believe that transwomen are females, because transwomen believe themselves to be female, is exactly what the claim “trans rights are human rights” seeks to require. Trans “rights” are not human rights. No identity category that is not universal, and not naturally and objectively universal, is a human right. Trans “rights” cannot be human rights.
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