RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-fiscal-strategy-of-the-feminist-left-fines-and-ultimatums/

It’s old news by now. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, has laid down the gender law, stating at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the investment giant will not “take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women.” The scuttlebutt is that the investment bank is trying to redeem its “vampire squid” reputation, cleaning up the fallout from the notorious 1MDB scandal implicating seventeen former and current Goldman executives. In addition, the firm is obviously catering to the “social justice” trends of the day, with its emphasis on so-called “diversity”—women, gays, people of color—at the expense of straight white males. As William Sullivan writes in American Thinker, what we are witnessing is “an openly discriminatory policy to pacify the woke mobs.” The new news would have to do with whether Goldman Sachs’ largest competitors, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, decide to follow suit.

Solomon goes on to claim that “the performance of IPOs where there’s been a woman on the board in the US is significantly better than the performance of IPOs where there hasn’t been a woman on the board.” This avowal is meant to function as justification for its clearly prejudicial policy by appealing not only to conventional sentiment and presumably “better governance” but to fiscal considerations, higher profits and overall improved performance, “help[ing] to move the market forward.” Woe betide an all-white, straight male Board, regardless of fiduciary competence and market effectiveness.

California Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson is an emphatic ally, having concurred with former governor Jerry Brown’s bill “making California the first state to require public companies to have at least one woman on their board of directors to advance gender equality.” Corporations, she declared, “will be more profitable” once they diversify their Boards of Directors and hire women. As reported in The Mercury News, “The legislation would mandate that all publicly traded California companies have at least one woman on the board by the end of 2019. By the end of 2021, it calls for at least two women on boards with five directors. At least three women will be required on boards of companies with at least six directors. Companies that don’t comply will be fined $100,000 for their first violation.” Jackson gushed: “This is a giant step forward for women, our businesses and our economy.” Companies would be “more successful, more productive, more profitable” when they add women to boards.

https://quillette.com/2020/02/02/i-may-have-gender-dysphoria-but-i-still-prefer-to-base-my-life-on-biology-not-fantasy/

Feelings and opinions have displaced facts and evidence in many areas of the liberal arts. This is nothing new. A more recent phenomenon, however, is the extension of this trend into the realm of biology, which has fallen victim to the idea that men can become women—and vice versa—merely by reciting a statement of belief. It is an insidious movement that combines the postmodern contempt for objective truth with pre-modern religious superstitions regarding the nature of the human soul.

The subordination of science to myth was exemplified in the recent British case of Maya Forstater, who’d lost her job after pointing out the plain truth that transgender people like me cannot change our biological sex by proclamation. “I conclude from…the totality of the evidence, that [Forstater] is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate,” concluded Judge James Tayler at her employment tribunal. “The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

I’m not sure where that leaves me, a British transgender person who agrees with Forstater. As I know better than most, sex is immutable. I may have transitioned socially, medically and surgically, but I am as male now as I was the day I was born (and the days I fathered each of my three children). As a scientist, I know this to be a fact. It’s Judge Tayler who’s the absolutist here: Under the guise of tolerance, he’s put the force of law behind a cultish movement that treats biological reality in much the same way that the Catholic Church once treated Galileo and his heliocentric ideas. Just like its medieval forbears, this neo-religious crusade demands that adherents chant an absurdist liturgy—in this case, “Transwomen are women. Transmen are men.”

In July 2019, before the Forstater controversy broke, I made up a t-shirt with my own slogan: “Transwomen are men. Get over it.” It caused considerable outrage. But my question was sincere: Why can’t we, as trans people, just get over it? It’s merely another political slogan. What does it matter if we are men or women in some technical sense, so long as we can live our lives in peace, free from abuse, harassment and discrimination?

In recent months, I have been accused of hate speech and reported to my professional colleagues, while newspaper reports suggest that I am at risk of being banned from an LGBT committee connected to my trade union.

By now, many readers will be familiar with the basic elements of the officially enforced system of dogma that sometimes is referred to as “gender ideology,” and which is now legally encoded in many jurisdictions under the policy known as “self-identification” or “self-declaration”: