LETTER TO A FRIEND

I was astonished to discover recently that you support the “reforms” proposed by the Scottish Government to the Gender Recognition Act of 2004.

Surely you see that this is a matter of the most basic ontology and epistemology.

This is what is proposed, as I assume you know:

Grounds on which application to be granted by Registrar General for Scotland

(1) The Registrar General for Scotland must grant an application under section 8A(1) [for a gender recognition certificate] if—

(a) the application includes a statutory declaration by the applicant that the applicant—

(i) is aged at least 16,

(ii) meets the condition in section 8A(2) [that the person is the subject of a Scottish birth register entry or is ordinarily resident in Scotland]

(iii) has lived in the acquired gender throughout the period of three months ending with the day on which the application is made, and

(iv) intends to continue to live in the acquired gender permanently…

You will have noted, I’m sure, that the entire process will now be one of self-certification.

Thus, if a man aged 16 or over with a Scottish birth certificate or living here self-certifies that he is in fact a woman and intends to remain a woman, he cannot be refused a gender recognition certificate. Same thing for a woman who says she is a man.

Nothing else whatsoever is required. Using their gender recognition certificates, the man will become legally female on his birth certificate and the woman will become legally male on hers.

The reference to “gender” is of course a quite deliberate obfuscation. The self-certifying person legally, and quickly, changes sex.

Nor do those proposing these reforms regard this as a legal fiction. They vehemently believe — and demand that the rest of us also believe — that ontological reality has been observed. The man is now a woman and the woman is now a man. The fully intact male-bodied person is female and the fully intact female-bodied person is male.

I have fought the hegemony and its lies all my adult life — as you have for much of yours. In the face of everything ranged against us, all we have is the truth.

All we have is reality — the ontological facts — and the epistemology that is the genetic inheritance of all human beings to know what that reality is.

Being either a man or a woman is one of the most overdetermined realities there is in what Kant called “things for us” as human beings (as opposed to things for frogs or insects or giraffes, which we can never know, or “things in themselves”, which only a handful of particle physicists have even the remotest handle on).

If someone is prepared to surrender that reality for any reason then I’m at a loss to see what reality they won’t surrender. If what every fibre of their being (itself the product of millions of years of evolution) tells them is a man is standing in front of them (and if they know what’s more that the modern science of chromosomes, gametes, bone density, skull shape and size, estrogen and testosterone etc etc etc could also confirm it instantly) and they are prepared to say that this ontological entity is a woman, then there is simply no reality that is secure in their epistemology.

Bluntly, that person has demonstrated that the hegemony can tell them anything and they’ll believe it.

Indeed, their grasp on reality is actually at a level far below that of climate change deniers or believers in the literal truth of the Bible who at least have the excuses of complexity of the facts (climate change) and faith (Bible) for their credulity.

I honestly don’t know what excuse someone who thinks a man can be, or turn into, a woman, or vice versa, has for that denial of ontological reality or, as I say, what there might possibly be that they couldn’t be induced to believe.

I’m utterly baffled to think that this person could be you.