Free Speech?

We tend to think about free speech as being able to say anything you want to say, but the courts have put limits on what is covered by “free speech” you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater and you cannot use “fighting words*.” However, it becomes a fine line between fighting words and tree speech.

UK transgender rights row intensifies as book fair is cancelled
Accusations of ‘transphobia’ have led to bitter divisions within Labour and the Women’s Equality party, feminist and anarchist movements
The Guardian
By Ben Quinn and Dulcie Lee
November 25, 2017

An annual book fair that has served for more than three decades as the most important meeting point for the British anarchist movement has become the latest casualty of widening splits over the issue of transgender rights.

Organisers say that they no longer have “the appetite or the energy” to stage next year’s London Anarchist Bookfair, following fraught scenes at the event last month. A group of feminists were confronted by other activists who accused them of distributing “transphobic” leaflets that promoted prejudice against transgender people.

But first a definition of anarchist from the Merriam-Webster dictionary,

1: a person who rebels against any authority, established order, or ruling power
2: a person who believes in, advocates, or promotes anarchism or anarchy; especially : one who uses violent means to overthrow the established order

The article goes on to say,

The acrimony follows highly publicised splits in universities, women’s organisations and political parties over the issue. Lily Madigan, a 19-year-old who has just won a vote in Kent to become Labour’s first women’s officer from a transgender background, has been at the centre of a row within the party.
[…]
Meanwhile, the Women’s Equality party has confirmed that its executive committee is considering complaints about one of its members, Heather Brunskell-Evans, an academic whose invitation to speak at King’s College in London was cancelled after she took part in a discussion on transgender issues on Radio 4. On the programme she called for caution to be exercised in relation to children who expressed confusion over their gender. Brunskell-Evans said the party told her that three members had alleged her “conduct” on the programme had “promoted prejudice against the transgender community”. She is also alleged to have said on Twitter: “we have to #ROAR about the harms of transgenderism for children and young people”.

So back to free speech; is it free speech to deny the existence of a group of people? Is it free speech to argue over the use of bathrooms? The questions are related but different, first question is about margination and oppression and the second question is about who can use what space.

If you believe that we does not exist then our use of bathrooms is a given. But if you believe that we exist then the question becomes are we women or not.

Here are my thoughts…

First medical science has proven that gender identity is not the same as birth sex, that our brains reflects more of our true gender than our birth gender. I believe that gender dysphoria is a form of intersex.

Second I believe that since we are intersexed that we should use the bathrooms of our gender identity.

Third, I believe that to deny us of our gender identity is a form of “fighting words.”

* Cornell Law School in Ithaca, NY Legal Information Institute,

Fighting words are, as first defined by the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), words which "by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality."