“Cambridgeshire council admits to discrimination after a woman was labelled transphobic for criticism of a ‘gender-fluid’ dachshund”, reports the Telegraph, with relish.
Tim Sigsworth’s report says that:
A lesbian social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.
Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender-critical views at a meeting of the authority’s LGBT+ employee group.
She had disagreed with a male colleague who claimed his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog to provoke “debate about gender” in January 2023.
Ms Pitt, 62, was formally disciplined by management after complaints were made accusing her of making “non-inclusive and transphobic” remarks.
However, the council later admitted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of her beliefs.
I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case, but how did we get to a state of affairs where a county council actually believed that one of their employees taking a less than respectful view of another employee putting a dress on his wee dog and declaring it to be “gender-fluid” had had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of the complainants”?
When I read this account, I was surprised to find out that it happened as late as January 2023. Poor old Cambridgeshire County Council, puffing to keep up with trends that more with-it London bodies like the Royal Academy of Arts dropped in 2021. But the greater question is how and why this particular form of absurdity swept round the developed world so quickly. The wave is receding now, less quickly than it arose, but still very fast in historical terms. The “dropped in 2021” link describes how the Royal Academy of Arts abruptly withdrew the work of the textile artist Jess de Wahls from sale in its gift shop because she said “humans can not change sex”. After bad publicity, it backtracked. There is a certain irony about the way that progressive artists such as Ms de Wahls (“Her work is part of a movement to depict vagina and vulva in art”) spent their whole lives changing cultural norms with such success that their vulva-themed embroideries ended up in the Royal Academy gift shop, a development which might have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds, only to see the wind change against them in an instant. Why did that particular memo go around in 2020? It wasn’t directly related to Black Lives Matter, but maybe that movement had something to do with it.
’I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case…’
Me too, but I’d be much happier if her compensation came directly from the pockets of the idiots responsible, and not from the taxpayer.
A gender fluid dachshund is about as likely as a vegan cat.
A snippet of the lyrics from “I’m in with the in crowd”:-
I’m in with the in crowd (Do-do-do)
I go where the in crowd goes (Do-do-do)
I’m in with the in crowd (Do-do-do)
And I know what the in crowd knows (Da-da-da-da)
From 1963. The only difference in the 60 years since then is the rapidity of the switch from ‘in’ to ‘out’ perhaps.
I’m rather pleased this involved a sausage dog. Nowt these pride types like as much as a bit of sausage.
The Daily Mail also has this story…
Emphasis mine. He/she/they/whatever is enforcing an identity on the dog. The dog hasn’t chosen this. And isn’t a tutu a bit of a stereotype.
Anyway. I repeat my call for the 30s test. Unless a public employee can explain to a member of the public whyat they do and why it matters in 30 seconds they should be fired. No, notice, no pension and whatever gonks and crap they have on their desks gets chucked in the dumpster. I mean for God’s sakes this “case” took 18 months!
Some of my sympathy disappeared when I noticed this part.
It’s rude to go to a Flat Earth Society meeting and ridicule flat-earth theory, or go to Comicon and announce that only nerds read comic books into adulthood. I mean, yeah, sure, you’re RIGHT, but it’s just mean, like clubbing baby seals.
If she’s going to hit that particular meetup, she shouldn’t start attacking their central theses.
bobby b,
You’re assuming she had a choice. You don’t go to the DEI training etc you’re fucked.
bobby b: There’s a fundamental clash of interests between lesbians, who want to have sex with women, and transgendered people, who want to say that human beings with Y chromosomes, and even human beings with penises and testicles, are women and insist that lesbians accept them as such. So it’s only natural that such a clash would emerge at an LGBT meeting. In the long run I think that conflict is going to make the idea of “LGBT” nonviable.
I’m sympathetic with the lesbians. A person who claims that they have a right to another person’s sexual interest, and that the other person should be punished or condemned for denying it, is thinking like a rapist.
William H Stoddard,
A lot of them are acting like rapists. I’ve seen the placards, “Suck my trans dick you TERF cunt”. Quite a few actually are rapists.
I think this quote is pertinent…
– Germaine Greer
As always, when compulsion starts to be involved, everything turns bad. There doesn’t have to be a clash of interests between any of the subsets of L,G,B,T and people who are none of those things. There was a happy period (had we but known it) when the law had mostly got out of the business of penalising people for being LGBT and had mostly not yet got into the business of enforcing “non-discrimination” against LGBT people. But there is a horrible internal logic to “equality” law that ensures that different groups of people inevitably end up pitted against each other. What group you are defined as belonging to becomes of overwhelming importance when privileges and penalties are doled out according to group.
Natalie: Yes, exactly. That’s where the movement against segregation went wrong at the very beginning, when it changed from forbidding governments to COMPEL segregation to requiring private businesses and property owners to integrate—as Ayn Rand pointed out back in the 1960s, but not many people listened to her.
Nick M: I’ve also had a conversation where a woman told me, in response to my describing the Rotherham rape gangs, that I needed to recognize that those men came from a different culture. It’s a funny thing how we hear a lot about the horrors of “rape culture”—but when we’re faced with a literal rape culture, as with those gangs, or with the emergence of one, among transwomen, suddenly there’s no criticism of it; rather, the people who oppose it are the bad people. It seems as if rape culture is only bad when it’s attributed to straight white men of European heritage.
Regarding what William H. Stoddard said at 1:50pm, maybe there’s a rule to be derived from this?
A rule that should be kept in mind when trying to understand anything emanating from the Left.
The rule is
“All things bad in the world, now or at any point in history, are because of straight white men. The inverse is also true: if it’s not from a straight white man, it’s not bad.”
GregWA: I don’t think it’s that simple. Lesbians (now abusively called TERFs) are bad, and their refusal to let transwoman copulate with them is bad, but lesbians are not straight white men. But the left is now overwhelmingly collectivist, so their whole mode of thinking involves deciding that some groups are good and others are bad, and judging people by which groups they belong to, and not by what they individually have done or not done.
Why though?
She wasn’t expressing doubt as to the idea of gender-fluidity, just opposition to her coworker’s making fun of the concept. She got caught up by the machine she helped create.
Gluing T onto LGB was always a bad fit. LGB is about who people are sexually attracted to. T is about what people identify as. It is two completely different things. It’s like having a Huntin’, Shootin’ and Trainspotting society.
“Dogs don’t HAVE gender, Susan.”
The inventors of this stuff were deeply cynical people such as Herbert Marcuse and Saul Alinksy (and many others – such as my own half brother Tony Marks), they did not really believe in all this stuff – but they, correctly, thought it would be useful for the Marxist cause.
But that was a generation or two back now – these days there are a vast number of “educated” true believers, who really do think that “capitalist” society exploits and oppresses various racial and sexual groups – such as the “Trans”.
But there is also fear and bureaucratic inertia.
Fear – “if I do not denounce this person as an ist or a phobe, I myself will be denounced as an ist or a phobe”.
And bureaucratic inertia (the English speaking world is very big on bureaucratic inertia)….
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is POLICY, laid out in statutes, such as the Equality Act of 2010, and various regulations – therefore we must find a certain number of people to destroy as ists and phobes, it is nothing personal, it is POLICY”.
As Saul Alinsky explained in “Rules for Radicals” it is, ironically, vital for the Collectivist cause to find individual victims – so “the struggle” may be personalised – personalised around individual “reactionary bigots” to be destroyed.
And, if possible, the “support network” around the chosen victims must be destroyed – so, again if possible, their own fellow conservatives help destroy them (or at least stand aside and do not help them when they are in desperate need of help).
This would spread fear in conservative ranks – and lead to the general demoralisation of the conservatives, so their resistance to “Progressives” (remember Mr Alinsky did not admit to being a Marxist – he hid behind “Progressive” or “Radical”) collapses.
“But what if a the target is themselves a leftist?”
From the point of view of Saul Alinsky or Herbert Marcuse that is just collateral damage – a certain number of their own side will be destroyed (by their own campaigns) for the supposedly greater good of destroying “capitalist” society, in the name of “equity” and so on.
Revolutions eat the Revolutionaries themselves – this Marcuse and Alinsky (and the rest) knew, they would happily sacrifice their own lives (at the murdering hands of their own demented Comrades) if, by doing so, they destroyed “capitalist” society.
Also remember they never clearly explain what sort of society they want to create – Dr Karl Marx called the question of how socialism would work “unscientific” and refused to even try and answer it.
What matters to all these people is destruction – the destruction of “capitalist” society (or what little is left of it) – every other than destruction, is a side issue to them (a side issue of little or no importance).
Yes, and it is also necessary to justify non-jobs. Over the last twenty or thirty years the mainstreaming of LGB most be grossly difficult for people who require grievance for their daily bread and their own sense of identity. When there are no more -isms to conquer they invent them! It’s pathetic and it should be called out.
Amen. If the woman went to the meeting voluntarily, my point above stands. If there was any pressure – corporate or personal – for her to attend, not so much. Not a fun place for a proud TERF.
FWIW, several gay friends now have the hats that say “LGB w/o T”. It’s always easier to hijack an existing cause than to start your own, and those guys definitely feel hijacked.
Nothing that a few years of socialism will not fix.
Alisa – as you know, if the Marxists took over they would indeed drop the pretended concern for racial and sexual groups.
Indeed such groups might well be eliminated under Marxist rule – having served their purpose.
It is much the same with another movement that various racial and sexual groups have, foolishly, allied with.
“Queers for Palestine”, and so on, would not last long under Islamic rule.
As for the women who go about with signs saying “Refugees Welcome” – the military age men who are entering Europe in vast numbers, have their own plans for such women.
As “Stalin” said – “gratitude is an emotion felt by dogs”.
But bobbyb, as a lesbian she belongs at it just as much as he does. This is an internecine squabble ‘Popular Front Of Judea’ type stuff.
EVERYTHING is only bad when done by white western societies, William….
JuliaM.
“Revolutions eat their children”.
Or more correctly – Revolutionaries eat other Revolutionaries.