Letters - 19 January 2024
From ‘Double belonging’ to Antisemitism awareness
‘Double belonging’
Dana Smith’s article (‘Words of prayer’, 5 January) interested me very much, and, in principle, I agreed with it. So thank you, Dana.
However, she and other Quakers may be interested in my experience of such matters.
I’m a relatively active member of a Local Quaker Meeting, also of a Zen Buddhist Sangha, and a ‘Centring Prayer’ group.
Several other Quakers I know belong to at least two of these groups. Our Sangha includes, also, a Church of England (CofE) priest, as well as several Quakers.
We find all these gatherings quite compatible with our values.
We also have Roman Catholics and CofE members who regularly come to our Meetings for Worship. I wonder if this ‘double belonging’ is rare.
It pleases me to have learned that the ‘Holy Spirit’ appears in different forms at different times, so tight boundaries seem unnecessary.
Kate Allen
Rights with responsibility
All rights come with responsibilities. All needs have to be balanced against other needs. There is no hierarchy of needs.
I rely heavily on lip reading. I walk into a room and ‘case the joint’. Ideally I need: to sit with my back to the window to maximise face contrast for lip reading; to sit in a circle so all are visible; and people to not be unnecessarily spread out, so sound is maximised. At a rectangular table, the shorter side is best for me.
But what happens if, say, there is a wheelchair user and the only place is at that short end of the table, or in front of the window? If I see that is the only way for the wheelchair user to be included, I accept a need – at that point – that is greater than mine.
That choice to recognise balance of needs is with everyone at each specific point of time when we are being true to inclusiveness.
‘Give me the courage to change what can be changed, the humility to accept that which can’t be changed and the wisdom to know the difference.’
In the current exchanges about women’s rights and trans rights I am failing to hear about responsibilities – and that means looking at specific situations and acknowledging where total inclusion in every situation is not possible or desirable.
I value the advice in Quaker faith & practice 20.71 about handling conflict through the three steps of naming, listening, and letting go.
Pamela Brunt
Trans people
Abigail Maxwell’s reply (22 & 29 December 2023) to Anne Wade’s letter (8 December 2023) suggests that biological women are never affected by the access that transwomen have to services that exclude men.
But there still is a debate. Trans people’s rights intersect with women’s rights.
There remain issues about the safeguarding of biological women and girls – in hospital wards, prisons, women’s refuges, and dormitories. Their privacy needs to be assured. They need to be listened to and their views respected.
I believe in the right of conscientious objection to extreme gender ideology.
How we reconcile the rights of different people is the subject of the ongoing debate.
David Harries
Not anti-trans campaigners
Abigail Maxwell (22 & 29 December 2023) is mistaken in thinking that some recent letters to the Friend have been from ‘anti-trans campaigners’.
They have been from people, such as myself, who have genuine worries and concerns about the way trans ideology is being interpreted in society in general, and about what exactly is supported by the Yearly Meeting minute to ‘acknowledge and affirm the trans and gender-diverse Friends in our Quaker communities’.
For instance, the Religious Society of Friends gave no publicity at all to 2023 being the 200th anniversary of the Gaols Act of 1823, which, after long campaigning by Elizabeth Fry, legislated for single-sex prisons in order to protect female prisoners.
Is that because the Society no longer supports single-sex prisons?
I think Abigail Maxwell has misunderstood my mention of ‘coaching’ children (29 September 2023).
I didn’t mean that anyone is carrying out deliberate coaching.
I meant that well-meaning people are taking some very young children’s non-conformity to the stereotypes associated with their sex as evidence of their being trans.
The resulting years of the child being treated in all ways as the opposite sex from reality have the effect of coaching the child into a belief that they really are the opposite sex.
Rather than use words like ‘anti-trans campaigners’ and ‘intemperate language and allegations’, it would be helpful if those taking other views could understand that our concerns are genuine.
Then we could all try to do as minute thirty-one of 2021 says – keep listening and searching together.
Moyra Carlyle
Books
Banning books has a dire history, yet it is happening within Quakers.
A Quaker academic, active locally and nationally in the Religious Society of Friends for thirty years, arranged a book launch and signing at Friends House.
Subsequently the event was cancelled, without a reason.
The Quaker Bookshop has always stocked books written by Britain Yearly Meeting members, yet now it rejects such books if they say that sex is real, or if they challenge the notion that men can become women.
This author writes well on the philosophy of Foucault and on queer theory, the gender theory that underpins transgender. The staff say that ‘stocking those transphobic books makes us unsafe’.
Who makes the Bookshop policy? Who authorised this discrimination? Is it reasonable to assume that Quakers now believe in gender, not sex?
Have we discerned that men and women no longer exist, and that everyone can become whatever gender they want? Was this what minute thirty-one said?
Are Quakers in Britain happy to discriminate against Friends who believe that sex is real – or at least against those who won’t keep quiet about it?
And who is threatening the Bookshop staff? Not women, or Quakers. If Friends House fear the gangs of masked, hooded, black-clad transactivist men who target women’s groups, they should challenge them, not pander to them, if necessary involving the police.
Friends House is in an unassailable position to stand up against their antisocial behaviour, as small groups of women are not.
Anne Wade
Antisemitism awareness
I agree with Ol Rappaport (15 December 2023), insomuch as I think it would be helpful for antisemitism awareness training to be made available throughout Britain Yearly Meeting.
An anti-racism course run recently by my Area Meeting was generally helpful but it did not address antisemitism. In my experience, antisemitism rarely features in anti-racist training.
I attended many courses on diversity and inclusion during thirty-eight years of employment in the public sector.
My colleagues and I saw ourselves as being very proactive in relationship to issues of racism, sexism and homophobia, but none of us ever challenged the lack of any attention to antisemitism. Not once!
What I am about to say could be controversial, but I feel that there is a tendency for those of us on the liberal left (as many Quakers and public sector workers are) to see the Jewish community as part of the establishment, and therefore we unintentionally overlook the issue of antisemitism, due to unconscious bias.
Given the tragic past of the Jewish people, this is a glaring omission which possibly echoes the failure of some early Quakers to see the evils associated with the slave trade.
These are difficult issues.
Richard Pashley
Comments
“there is a tendency for those of us on the liberal left (as many Quakers and public sector workers are) to see the Jewish community as part of the establishment, and therefore we unintentionally overlook the issue of antisemitism,”
Yes, yes there is.
In 2020 Andrew Murray explained Jeremy Corbyn’s position like this in a widely reported interview:
“[Corbyn] would have had massive empathy with the Jewish community in Britain in the 1930s and he would have been there at Cable Street, there’s no question. But, of course, the Jewish community today is relatively prosperous”
Which suggest to me that the left in Britain aren’t opposed to racism because racism is a moral defect, not because it is wrong, not because it is a denial of human dignity; they are opposed to racism only in so far and only for so long as it materially disadvantages the victims.
As it happens, a Jewish family owns the land my house stands on. I do not myself consider this to be a mitigation for antisemitism!
Not to mention that “Jews are wealthy” is at least flirting with an anti-semitic trope in itself.
By Keith Braithwaite on 18th January 2024 - 10:04
Richard Pashley makes several important points about antisemitism and racism.
In 2020 Meeting for Sufferings agreed this minute: “We are called to commit to becoming an actively anti-racist church.”
In 2021 Yearly Meeting minuted that “We declare our commitment to becoming an actively anti-racist faith community. We are still wrestling with what this means for us.”
I hope and pray that a commitment to becoming an actively anti-racist faith community will include a commitment to including antisemitism in that active anti-racism.
Keith Braithwaite’s comment is perceptive “[the Left] are opposed to racism only in so far and only for so long as it materially disadvantages the victims.”
Without material disadvantage ‘Jews Don’t Count’ in too many people’s minds.
By Ol Rappaport on 18th January 2024 - 11:09
We also in 2021 minuted our affirmation and welcome of transgender and non-binary Friends and attenders. I don’t normally comment on the letters pages, but I would have thought the Friend would stop printing correspondence that doesn’t actually reflect British Quakers’ discerned positions?
By titan_monarch on 18th January 2024 - 16:40
Commenting on titan-monarch’s contribution:
The 2021 minute was quite long and included this passage:
“These discussions and reflections have not always been easy. Our consideration has coincided with wider consideration of legislation reform in Britain, and the associated conflict has been reflected among Friends in our yearly meeting. We recognise that we need to keep listening and searching together.”
I think the three letters in this week’s edition are excellent examples of the need to continue to listen and search, and not to seek to silence dialogue.
By Ol Rappaport on 18th January 2024 - 20:15
I am utterly distressed by yet more letters from anti-trans campaigners in The Friend.
Is Moyra Carlyle an anti-trans campaigner? Well, on 5 January in The Friend she alleged that there was a “danger” that exploring feelings around gender identity or their body in counselling might become illegal under some putative conversion therapy Bill.
Exploring feelings with a counsellor could not become illegal. The only type of “counselling” that might become illegal is if a counsellor consulted by a parent, having explored feelings and considered other mental health issues of a child, utterly refused to accept the only explanation of their feelings- that they were trans. No counsellor, psychotherapist or psychiatrist I have seen has ever failed to explore my feelings around trans, and some have robustly challenged my belief that I am trans. And yet I am, as my gender expression for the last two decades shows.
On 5 September she asserted that Quakers seem to be supporting every aspect of transgender identity, that being “born in the wrong body” was a fiction, and that medicines doctors and parents reasonably believe will help a child’s mental health are “harmful”. She also shared “concerns” about the rights of biological women. In this letter, she calls transition “the opposite sex from reality”.
Being “born in the wrong body” is not a fiction, but a metaphor. Years ago it was used by trans people to explain the phenomenon of trans, but we now tend to find it problematic. The phenomenon of trans exists across the world and across history: it is not a fiction. Trans people are people with a long-term identity. We exist. It is Moyra who is denying reality.
Anti-trans campaigners like to think they are people with “reasonable concerns”. But if all their concerns are about limiting trans rights, they are anti-trans campaigners.
Moyra says she has concerns about “the way trans ideology is being interpreted in society in general”. Well, in Parliament Conservatives have stopped recognising foreign gender recognition from France and Greece, and propose that trans women’s passports should specify our sex as “M”. In The Times you can read more than weekly about the threat of “gender ideology” or of trans.
She wonders if our Society no longer supports single-sex prisons. There is no threat to single-sex prisons. Earlier prison guidance said that trans women might sometimes be placed in women’s prisons, but this has been getting more and more restrictive. If Moyra believes a women’s prison would not be “single-sex” any more if there were one trans woman prisoner in it, that seems to me to indicate too great a concern with trans people, at the expense of prison issues such as that they are unfit for human habitation and have less and less rehabilitation, and that they have a lot of short-term nonviolent prisoners better dealt with by community punishment.
She suggests that people are taking gender nonconformity in children to mean they are trans. That was the case under 1990s issues of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, where children were referred to gender clinics for gender nonconformity, but is not the case now. Trans children now, under the English proposed schools guidance, would be forced to wear the uniform of the gender assigned at birth.
All her “concerns” imply solutions involving restricting trans people and trans rights. None are based in reality. Therefore, she is an anti-trans campaigner. Her campaign consists in letters in the Friend and commenting elsewhere.
By Abigail Maxwell on 19th January 2024 - 9:53
David Harries referred again to “extreme gender ideology”. I wonder what he considers that is? Our rights come from the Equality Act, piloted through the House of Commons by Harriet Harman, centre-left feminist. Her interpretation, confirmed by the EHRC code of practice from 2011, and based on an understanding of trans confirmed by the WHO and the International Classification of Diseases, is entirely mainstream and not “extreme”.
Anne Wade wrote of Heather Brunskell-Evans’ book launch in 2020. Heather’s book, “Transgender body politics”, put “gender critical concerns” strongly. Its preface discussed me, under a pseudonym. I would accept the bookshop staff’s judgment that it was transphobic.
Anne asks, “have we discerned that men and women no longer exist”? Oh, God. Where to start.
That trans women exist and are recognised as existing does not mean that sex does not matter, or that women, or sex, do not exist. It means that society benefits when trans women, with our long-term unshakeable belief that we are trans women, are treated as women. It subverts gender stereotypes and makes everyone slightly freer to be themselves. Conversely, men do not pretend to be trans women in order to enter women’s services, and a narrow, rigorous exclusion of every trans woman from every women’s service does no good to anyone, not even Anne Wade.
I am a Quaker who believes sex is real, and experience no problem asserting this among Friends.
Pamela Brunt wants to hear about responsibilities, “where total inclusion in every situation is not possible or desirable”. I am sad to inform her that she can hear that from the Government, whose guidance on “gender questioning” children in schools places great restrictions on social transition. She can also hear it from the EHRC, which has strangely issued non-authoritative “guidance” which some read as contradicting its authoritative Code of Practice”. Trans people’s voices are rarely heard, but one, Debbie Hayton, regularly gets published in The Spectator, Unherd and such sites, because she argues against trans inclusion. But, I would like to hear from Moyra Carlyle, Anne Wade, David Harries and Pamela herself where they consider trans women should be included in women’s services, and which trans women- those with a diagnosis? Might those on the five year waiting list who have not had a diagnosis yet be included too?
I am utterly distressed because generally among Friends I experience inclusion, but every week it seems there is yet another letter from an anti-trans campaigner. Some have written several times, around the same narrow set of issues. Acceptance by Mount St Quaker meeting gave me the courage to transition. It is sad that some Friends work so hard against trans people and our rights. Or, at the very least, “raise concerns” arguing that our established rights should be taken away.
There are other points I have not addressed, but life’s too short.
By Abigail Maxwell on 19th January 2024 - 9:53
If Abigail considers the letters in this week’s THE FRIEND to be anti trans people then I think it futile to continue discussion with her. The letters are perfectly rational in my opinion.
By ERIC WALKER on 20th January 2024 - 16:13
Having said I would not comment further ( by the way this comment like my previous ones is from Eric and not Lydia as our subscription to The Friend is a joint one, both our names appear) on Abigail’s posting I feel I have to reply to this sentence from her letter above. “Trans children now, under the English proposed schools guidance, would be forced to wear the uniform of the gender assigned at birth”. Here is that confusion of the words gender and sex again. At birth, normally, and I do stress normally, nothing is ‘assigned’. The sex of the baby is observed and recorded. The assignment takes place at the moment of conception when the sperm enters the egg.
By ERIC WALKER on 20th January 2024 - 16:30
Hi Eric. Mmm. Rational, in your opinion. I hope people will judge for themselves. Gender is assigned at birth not by a quick look between the legs, but by pink and blue babygros, the different ways people talk to boy babies and girl babies, the demand to know the child’s name if the clothes don’t indicate gender.
That would be the Lydia who wrote on 15 September that “the requirements of trans women are directly opposed to women’s rights”. No, we seek inclusion for a small minority- no loss to rights at all. Human rights are not a zero sum game- when we become freer, everyone becomes freer.
Letters here show a huge amount of fear of trans people and trans rights- as a threat to women, to children, to truth and to the Society. What’s the Greek for fear, again?
By Abigail Maxwell on 20th January 2024 - 18:54
Abagail I think it is not very nice of you to alter what Lydia wrote to make it sound hateful. Consider, Is it right to take this statement
“we have to remember that many of the requirements of trans women are directly opposed to women’s rights, such as women-only shelters, sports events and changing rooms. The more we improve things for trans people, often the worse it is for the rest of us. I hope we will be aware of the effects on biological women while caring about our trans friends.
Lydia Vulliamy” Wrote on Sep 14
and turn it into this
“the requirements of trans women are directly opposed to women’s rights”.
You have deliberately distorted what Lydia wrote. Shameful. Eric
By ERIC WALKER on 20th January 2024 - 21:17
I directly quoted Lydia Vulliamy. The context indicates greater detail, but not difference in meaning. But I am glad you admit that it sounds hateful. If I cannot change, how can I swim, or go to a gym? And how does my presence in a changing room cause any difficulty for anyone else, except someone prejudiced? It is like the prejudice against lesbians in women’s changing rooms in the last century.
By Abigail Maxwell on 20th January 2024 - 21:35
Posted on behalf of Moyra Carlyle.
There was progress being made against the stereotyping that Abigail Maxwell describes as ‘gender’.
Now it’s been massively hindered by the demands for stereotypes to supersede physical sex.
Wouldn’t it be preferable for people to be able to present themselves however they like, without having to claim to be the opposite sex, or no sex at all?
I’m in favour of a gender neutral school uniform or else choice of skirt/trousers uniform available to all. Some schools already have one of these things.
A women’s prison, or hospital ward, or shelter is not single-sex if it admits people of the male sex whether that is one or fifty people.”
By Ol Rappaport on 21st January 2024 - 14:50
Ol, Moyra:
I know you imagine you’re just stating facts, but trans people exist, and a lot of people find your rigid trans-exclusion repellent. But take heart. You have strong allies in the Conservative party, which looks to grub for votes through hate of refugees and trans people, and knows what really reinforces gender stereotypes.
By Abigail Maxwell on 21st January 2024 - 16:33
I would like to quote the following passage from Advices and Queries.
22, Respect the wide diversity among us in our lives and relationships. Refrain from making prejudiced judgments about the life journeys of others. Do you foster the spirit of mutual understanding and forgiveness which our discipleship asks of us? Remember that each one of us is unique, precious, a child of God.
By Richard Pashley on 24th January 2024 - 15:36
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