Michael Foran: 'Thinking it from within the perspective of the groups that might be affected'

Five days ago, a YouTube video was posted in which Michael Foran explains how he ended up on Julie Bindel's anti-transgender side.

“I initially wrote a short blog post," he begins, "in a specialist constitutional law blog about the definition of sex in the Equality Act, and how that feeds into what, at that point, was an ongoing trajectory of legislation through the Scottish Parliament: the Gender Recognition Reform bill, which would have introduced self-ID as a legal policy into Scotland.” At that time, he wasn’t interested in activism, he says; rather, he “just kind of posited...that there was a legal mechanism here that the UK government could have relied on if it wanted to block this bill.” He said that one could claim that the bill could have “adverse impacts” on equality law for “women and girls” and especially for “communities like Muslim women or Orthodox Jewish women.”

His blog post was published on “the second day of the reading of the bill in the Scottish Parliament,” and Pauline McNeill cited it on the floor.

Foran says it used to be that anti-discrimination protections only covered people who were “proposing to undergo, you are undergoing, or you have undergone a process, or part of a process, of changing aspects of your sex,” so that if they came out to their employer, their employer couldn't fire them just because they were starting a gender transition.

Bindel chimes in: “Which of course feminists have always supported. We shouldn’t discriminate against people because of the way they live their lives — in the sense that they live as the opposite sex. It started to get very difficult, didn’t it, when trans activists started to say ‘we are women, we are female, we will enter the spaces, and we don’t agree with exemptions.’” (She ignores the obvious fact that telling a transgender person that they do not belong to their own gender and that they cannot use a bathroom that corresponds to their gender is a form of discrimination. A person — transgender or cisgender alike — is made unsafe when others question or deny their gender and tell them they're in the wrong bathroom.)

Bindel refers to Foran’s blog post as “your baptism of fire.” She notes that he’s supported “organizations such as LGB Alliance, particularly with the vexatious case taken against them by Mermaids.” (Mermaids has been "supporting trans, non-binary and gender-diverse children, young people and their families since 1995," according to its website. LGB Alliance is a four-year-old anti-transgender hate group.)

Bindel says this has been “a very, very painful and bitter time for feminists, and has been for some years, because of the gender ideology and the capture of institutions and the like.”

Foran says he had been “following these debates” without “thinking it from within the perspective of the groups that might be affected by it.” (He doesn’t mean trans people. At no point in the 35-minute discussion is the perspective of a trans person ever considered. In this sentence, trans people are the "it" that requires "thinking," and cis people are the people with "perspective" who are in "the groups that might be affected by it," where the "it," again, is trans people.)

Regarding “Muslim women or Orthodox Jewish women,” he says: “In an ideal world, you might think, we" — he means people like himself, outside of the specified groups — "don’t want to have women wear headscarves, we don’t want to have women in contexts where they’re being separated. But in the world that we’re in, we have to deal with the fact that these women do exist and that they do believe these things and they find deep spiritual satisfaction from them. And they’re not going to alter their behavior in the way that people expect.” For example, he says, Muslim women realistically won’t remove their headscarves even if scarves are formally banned. (At no point does he say anything like: We have to deal with the fact that trans people exist, believe what they believe, find deep satisfaction in their own lives, and aren't going to alter their behavior in certain ways just because random strangers might expect them to.

Bindel adds that, “largely,” such religious women are pressured to wear headscarves and don’t choose to do it “from an absolute open vacuum of free choice.” (Does anyone engage in any behavior from a vacuum in which they make decisions free of anyone else's influence?)

Foran says “there’s slight parallels to be had between what happened to Kathleen Stock and an experience that I had.” He says “she was not safe on campus” and “now basically has police protection pretty much everywhere she goes.” He says he hasn’t suffered to that degree, but some people likewise tried to get him fired from his university. He adds: “I had a very senior colleague — Professor Adam Tompkins, who’s the chair of constitutional law at Glasgow — who very publicly said: You come for Michael, you come for me.” He said Kathleen Stock didn’t receive such support.

I haven't yet written about Kathleen Stock's book, but I'll do so soon.

Please see my essays on transphobia.