Trans Ethics: The Fight Over Facilities
Fairness comes from basing our rules on clear principles.
For those people not familiar with my work, I am an anti-prejudice, anti-discrimination campaigner. At the same time, however, I am opposed to political-correctness — the idea that we should decide our ethics, not according to clear principles, but according to what other people (often irrationally) deem to be acceptable or unacceptable.
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of debate about trans-related issues. And one of the biggest, fiercest debates at the moment concerns how trans women, in particular, should be treated, when they wish to have access to facilities designated for ‘women.’
On the one side, we have people who believe trans women should have every right to use women’s facilities. And on the other side, we have some ‘feminists’ — some of whom get very agitated and angry about this issue — who wish to exclude them and reserve women’s spaces entirely for females.
There’s a lot of emotion surrounding this debate. But what if we made a real effort to focus on following clear, ethical principles? What conclusions might we then reach?
So let’s try to sort this out from basic principles:
