Pablo de Lora, Professor of Philosophy of Law at the Autonomous University of Madrid, reflects in his books on the implications of gender identity in the legal and cultural framework. His last two works, ‘Sexual is political (and legal)’ and the most recent ‘The labyrinth of gender: Sex, identity and feminism’, both published by Alianza Editorial, address this issue, but have not escaped controversy. In December 2019, an intervention by De Lora at Pompeu Fabra University led to a boycott encouraged by trans activists.
-What happened in Barcelona?
-I was invited to a presentation at an international seminar organized by the Pompeu Fabra University because I had written the book ‘Sexual is political (and legal)’. In the days before the seminar, someone informed me that there were some tweets circulating from people scandalized by my presence and because I was going to talk about gender issues without belonging to the LGTBI collective. At first, I thought it was not too important, but as the seminar approached, I realized that the matter was taking place. The day before, they told me that a student had approached the so-called Equality Unit of the university requesting my disinvitation and that he be invited as a speaker because he is trans. After some goings-on and it was accepted that they could protest during the seminar and then be able to continue with the lectures, when the time came for my intervention, a group of students appeared, joined by a teacher, who began to distribute leaflets that said: ‘Out with Pablo de Lora, out with sexists from the university’. From there, everything is lacerating, hostile, a scenic ridiculous. That academic event turned into an assembly and I decided to leave, among other reasons, because I was missing a train. What hurt me the most, because there are no precedents in democracy, is that an academic, in this case, an academic, prevents another from speaking. In my department I could not work with a colleague who is dedicated to blaming another for not sharing the same opinion on an issue. La Pompeu decided to open a file and at some point the possibility of an expulsion was raised, but everything remained in a pantomime.
-How do you define yourself politically?
-Ufff (silence) They are a freethinker, with an egalitarian sensibility, not to say a social democrat, which has always accompanied me, but which life experience has nuanced: we grow older and check the scope of utopian horizons. But basically I am a liberal with great sensitivity for equality and if something characterizes me is my absolute rejection of ideological ‘packs’, shopping lists, ideological chapels, something typical of late Francoism. If you were on the left, you had to hate American cinema and you couldn’t be from Real Madrid.
-Do you hate transsexuals?
-Yooo? Not at all, they are people who deserve the same respect as anyone else, although I think that many of their claims are deeply wrong.
-Are you a radical?
-I have defended Vox in some matters because I believe they are right, just as I say that their position against prostitution or surrogacy brings them very close to an important sector of feminism. I don’t think I can easily be pigeonholed as a radical. I do not believe in the rights of groups, collectives and nations and I think that individuals are centers of moral imputation, in that I am radical. But I am an agnostic, if not an atheist, I think that in the public space the considerations based on faith have no relevance. That makes me incompatible with people on the right. Oh, and I’m also anti-bullfighting and in fact, I spoke in the Catalan Parliament about bullfighting.
“Neither victims nor affected people can have the trump card in a public debate”
– For what reasons do you think it was boycotted?
-These people have an extremely exacerbated, mistaken sensitivity, and an encyclopedic ignorance. In the public debate today in Spain my opinions are canceled because immediately the discrepancy turns into another type of non-academic argument. They tell me: ‘With your objection you are violating my basic human rights and furthermore, you contribute to causing suffering in people who have a problem of gender dysphoria or channeling their self-perceived gender identity that can lead to suicide.’ That’s blackmail. They believe that if I say that there is no human right to gender identity, that it does not seem clear to me that hormonal treatments should be allowed in adolescents, that people who claim to be trans women and men are biologically what they are and that something else is the institutionality of that condition or the institutional conception that we want to give it, all of this can be canceled because it contributes to the uneasiness of certain individuals. That cannot be, in the same way that when we discuss the limits of freedom of expression we know that the victims of ETA can feel bad. Yes, but it is the democratic game. Neither the victims nor the people affected nor anyone who feels so intimately the consequences of that debate can have a trump card, based on their rashes, that blocks the debate. That can not be. Come on, there are no groups that support mockery, like Catholics …
-You have defended that the Hazte Oír bus has the right to circulate.
-It is an exercise of freedom of expression that can only offend those who mistakenly think that sexual dimorphism does not exist. It is a proclamation that is objectively not offensive. Someone may think that having a penis feels like a girl, but the reality is that having a penis is one of the circumstances that makes you a man. There is nothing objectively offensive in that message and we cannot assess the offenses in which someone is offended. Here the blackmail is that children can commit suicide. Well, if they can commit suicide, what we need is better psychological treatment.
-What do you think of gender self-determination?
-Gender self-determination means that one figures in civil life identified with the sex to which he feels he belongs, regardless of his biological condition. But biological sex is decisive. Men produce more testosterone, which affects our muscle mass, vigor, and that is decisive before a sports competition or a physical test to be a policeman or firefighter. We register sex in the civil registry because the segregation of the sexes matters, even today, and more so in the past: it has been a condition for the distribution of roles. Being a woman has mattered, to be discriminated against, not to be able to vote, to ask for a marital license. Is it still as decisive? Much less, but that hateful discrimination based on sex is only corrected by doing some type of positive discrimination, taking that into account for the benefit of women. If you say at will in the civil registry that you are a man or a woman, these positive discrimination measures, which in any case should be temporary, evaporate. Any statistic that raises the feminist struggle is based on the civil registry, and not on whether one feels like a man or a woman. The wage gap, women who die at the hands of their partners … These victims are not asked if they felt like a man or a woman or if they had self-determined. Striking cases are beginning to appear. In Argentina, a man named Sergio Lazarovich changed his name and gender identity in 2018 and shortly after he applied for a retirement pension, which is marked for men at 65 years of age and for women, at 60. Thus, he He retired at 60. It’s one of many possible scams.
-How should gender self-determination be treated?
-In the same way that there are channels for the distribution of dangerous information about eating disorders, and that the public power does well to prevent (it is not tolerable for anorexic YouTubers to influence eating patterns), the same should happen in self-determination of genre. Normally, the cultural and media imaginary only exposes the beautiful stories, but we have to know the other side. There is already a historical journey to know that a part of the people who have undergone hormone therapy and surgery later have repented and have wanted to ‘detransition’. I believe that it is a disaster, in terms of public health, that a 13-year-old girl starts taking pubertal blockers and it is also a disaster that the new law that is upon us imposes absolutely unacceptable burdens on reluctant parents. I think that must be disassembled
-But there are people who really suffer in a biological sex with which they do not feel identified. What should be done?
– From the age of 18, a person can do whatever they want and to me, as a liberal, it seems perfect. But that boys and girls of 10 and 11 years old are put in the lane of the pharmacopoeia and then, after the surgery, it seems completely out of place. Are there cases of adolescents with gender dysphoria? There are. How should they be treated? With the best professionals, endocrinologists, psychologists and psychiatrists, but not by activists. The ‘trans law’ expels the best medical evidence. Furthermore, it is absolutely incompatible to preach the depathologization of transsexuality and, at the same time, to demand that public health cover these treatments precisely because public health is dedicated to pathologies. If you tell me that your trans condition is not a pathology, I do not understand that there are provisions in the health services folder to cover these pharmacological or surgical treatments.
-What do you think of the #MeToo movement?
-I believe that in some of the cases the movement has been revealed as an important knock against abusive practices. But in many others hypocrisy is distilled -people who, without maintaining any dependency relationship, could perfectly have resisted the “offers” and did not do so and therefore escalated or triumphed- and also a scant adherence to the principle of presumption of innocence since Many of the alleged culprits have been tried and convicted with little opportunity to have their explanations or reasons taken into account.
-What is the deep reason for defending your postulates, knowing that they can create problems for you?
-It is a philosophical and academic concern. In the light of the normative changes that are proposed, of the new philosophical currents, I try to see what their institutional consequences are, what is the coherence of these claims and how they marry with other beliefs. The political struggle does not move me.
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