September 29, 2022 - 3:11pm
In Spain they call it La Ley Trans — a draft law that would allow anyone over the age of 14 to change their legal gender with no medical diagnosis. The debate has been furious and nasty, and the arguments will be familiar to anyone who has been following proceedings in the UK. On one hand, Contra El Borrado de las Mujeres — a women’s advocacy group sporting similar colours to Woman’s Place UK — has called for caution. Meanwhile, supporters of the bill have protested in their own way. Last year they hung an effigy of Carmen Calvo from a tree.
At the time, Calvo was First Deputy Prime Minister in Pedro Sánchez’s coalition government, and already a known heretic. This week she told El Mundo that “La Ley Trans can destroy all equality legislation,” adding that “there is no fundamental right to gender self-determination”.
To the terf-finders general out there, this is surely blasphemy. But Calvo is no transphobe. She understands the difference between protecting the rights of trans people — like me — and attacking the foundations of human society. Calvo was clinical:
Absolutely. But this is a political battle within the governing coalition. Calvo and Sánchez are from the PSOE — the mainstream Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party. The Minister for Equalities, Irene Montero, hails from Podemos – a junior party in government, but one with the power to drive La Ley Trans through parliament.
Montero retorted by proclaiming that La Ley Trans “will be law”, while a Podemas spokesperson accused Calvo of attempting to “torpedo” the bill.
Emotions are running high, but the question we must keep asking is why these bills are so important to so many politicians. At a time when there is real war in Europe, why are they fighting to impose an ideology that replaces fact with feeling, using emotion rather than reason?
La Ley Trans is particularly worrying because it opens the door to children to change their legal sex. Those under 16 would need parental consent, but they could take the matter to court if there was disagreement. In my view, children are too young to understand the consequences: being a man or a woman is far more than a feeling. I wonder if the same could be said for Montero. At 34 years old, does she grasp the value of the protections she seems eager to abandon?
For the sake of women and children in Spain, she should stop criticising Calvo and start listening to her. Sadly, I cannot see it happening. This is a debate between reason and emotion, and Montero is squarely on the side of the latter.
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SubscribePeople are likely to freeze to death this winter in developed advanced countries and we are STILL discussing this rubbish? In what ever area you choose our problems mount up daily. Is it already too late for western civilisation? Genuine question.
One can care about the decimation of Women’s Rights AND care about lack of heating access in “advanced” countries.
It will be too late for Western civilization if we continue to deny biological reality, for which women and children will pay the highest price.
Maybe with the right combination of hormones, you can get hot flashes so severe that you won’t even notice that you’re freezing this winter.
Once again Debbie is the voice of thoughtful common sense. She knows more than most that being Trans is not an easy decision and the road can be strewn with heartache. This is not something to be taken lightly and we will see a generation of young people in the near future who feel they have destroyed their lives for something that in their case was not real.
Genuine question, I do not understand what a “trans” is? To me, people naturally are either straight, gay, or bi. What else is there? No matter how you are, you can only be attracted to males or females, or to both. What else is there to be attracted to?
If you’re a bloke who likes traditionally culturally-feminine clothes and pastimes, that used merely to indicate that you may be gay. But suddenly nowadays, being gay is not enough.
Can’t shake the suspicion that trans is anti-gay bigotry in a trendy disguise. Nobody can be just pain old gay anymore, way cooler to be trans, and have a load of crazy doctors fussing over you. Plus, apart from a clownish bigoted minority, nobody in Western societies cares less about people being gay nowadays, hence it no longer has that victim chic. By contrast, call yourself trans and you’re part a proudly-oppressed minority once again, killing it in the oppression and narcissism Olympics.
I repeat – if “trans” is different from any of straight, gay or bi, what on earth is it?
Assuming your question isn’t rhetorical, I’ll have a stab at answering it.
From my point of view – and I am in agreement with Helen Joyce here – “trans” is short for “transgender”, and “transgender” means there is a mismatch between someone’s gender identity and the body it inhabits.
Gender marxism – the belief system from which this emanates – has an axiomatic doctrine of the Self – what may be called Expressive Individualism. Expressive Individualism posits that everybody has an inner core of feelings that are separate from their body – their body is a container within which these feelings reside, and it is these feelings that constitute the true, authentic Self. So to be truly authentic, the individual must express outwardly, and consistently with, those inner core of feelings.
This notion of an inner core of feelings and a bodily container is a denial of embodiment of the Self – that the body and Self are an integral unit. Hence the issue of a break in this embodied Self that is body dysmorphia.
Hence why I use “trans-identifying male” or “Trans-identifying female”. I have no belief in gender nor gender identity.
Thank you for an extremely interesting post that takes understanding the theory a step further. I can see that ‘Expressive Individualism’ is a term I will be using from now on.
Well yes, I think most people are aware that trans is a short form of transgender. (Although it could be trans anything really – transparent? Transatlantic?)
But I’m not sure it really answers the question, which was mostly rhetorical, and more about sexuality, not gender. It begs the question: what are men that want to be women but who then say they are lesbian? It’s totally bizarre for a straight man to ‘feel’ like a woman & then want to have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with men. Especially when the vast majority of ‘trans women’ still have a p***s & have no intention of getting rid of it.
It sounds like fetishism to me.
I don’t get the point of the 1st statement. Most people? How can we determine that? And does the “well yes, most people are aware…” mean I am stating the obvious? My answer was in reply to the initial, specific question and I prefaced my answer with the assumption that initial question was not rhetorical (a fair bet since it was a “genuine question”) and hence the questioner was not aware what “trans” is and so was asking for a direct answer.
They proceeded to answer their 2nd, rhetorical, question that took a different tack towards sexual orientation and then finished by again asking a direct question as to what trans is, if not sexual orientation. Hence my answer.
For the comedian JP Sears most creepy comedy on Trans ever allowed on youtube try watching this – you will never be the same again…
‘Leftist Teachers Going After Your Children!’ must watch to put this article in context…haha, just a couple minutes…… ‘And my Partner, Atticus-Moonflower-Zires-Seme*’
.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i8PYJfFbhw
Less dark, and funnier is JP doing his skit ‘Best Female Swimmer in the World’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sgjc29QCGo
Amazingly these are still up…….
Very good!
He/haw/victim – I’m going to be chuckling about that all day.
And I thought the Spanish were relatively sane!
They haven’t been sane since the 70s.
What is a woman?
… but the question we must keep asking is why these bills are so important to so many politicians. […] why are they fighting to impose an ideology that replaces fact with feeling, using emotion rather than reason?
Perhaps it is because so many politicians are in fact marxists?
As Calvo said … a queer theory that threatens to destroy … equality between men and women.
Is this a nod to queer marxism, which is waging a war on the identity marxist property of normal – normalcy, as in fitting within the broad norms of society, that is, statistical normalcy?
And queer marxism reckons on an ideology called heteronormativity, that reinforces and protects the property of normalcy and so it has to wage a war on it because a feature of normalcy is the recognition of a sex binary in humans – male and female, men and women.
Hence the attempted destruction of women’s sports and the coercion to put pronouns on everybody, because pronouns are meant to reinforce there is no sex binary. So no laws of equality between men and women.
It’s interesting reading this piece alongside Mary’s – since it exposes clearly that to be gender critical is not necessarily to be on the right or far-right. This is the case in the UK too though it’s tough to be a Labour member and gender critical…
Calvo misspoke, perhaps intentionally. The error is subtle but important.
”…threatens to destroy all the progressive laws that have established equality between men and women.”
What she avoided saying was:
”…threatens to destroy all the progressive laws that have established equity between men and women.”
https://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-equity/
When I see people outside wearing those face coverings I am afraid I cannot help myself from assuming that they are not very bright.
Yes, that is my immediate thought too. Feel a bit sorry for them really.
The best way to view trans-issues is through the lens of cult-formation. When your ‘common-sensical’ compass needle is so way off, it can only be due to being hopelessly possessed by cult-like thinking. I would assert that it is also the reason why trans-activists allow very little debate on this issue. They are gender-fundamentalists.