Mick Hartley

A few days back the University of Strathclyde published a piece by Kenneth Norrie – Emeritus Professor and "expert in family law and LGBT rights" – under the title Gender Matters, on the Supreme Court Equality Act ruling. He was, as the title suggests, essentially accusing the Supreme Court judges of a "lack of basic kindness" towards trans people, which contributed to the vilification of a poor suffering minority. The piece was subject to much Twitter ridicule, and now Naomi Cunningham effectively hands the poor man his arse on a plate with her response: Gender doesn't matter.

It's worth reading in full, but…

Finally, Norrie claims that Court’s decision exacerbates bad relations between the trans community and those who insist that gender and sex are biological matters. Bearing in mind that this is chiefly a conflict between men and women — on the one hand, men who want access to women’s spaces, to bully or shame women into accepting opposite-sex intimate care, to elbow women aside in their own sports categories; and on the other, the women who say “no” to those men — the complaint that restoring women’s rights to them exacerbates bad relations is dismaying. If women would only be good and obedient, men wouldn’t have to get angry with them.

Conclusion:

The legal reasoning in Norrie’s blog post is surprisingly weak. In fairness to Professor Norrie, it should be remembered that this is in the nature of a “first pass” at a substantial Supreme Court judgment in an area of law in which he is not a specialist. What is more disquieting is his approach to a conflict between men’s wishes and women’s privacy, dignity, autonomy and safety which displays a tender empathy for men who want to be women while stereotyping women’s meticulously evidenced objections as feigned or hysterical. Norrie’s call for kindness is in truth a thinly disguised demand for submission.