“Needs” are irrefutable and cannot be deconstructed or challenged. Didn’t you know that?
The Brits, who seem generally to struggle with understanding what “free speech” means, are nevertheless beginning to get it right regarding totalitarian “woke” speech codes (also known as “political correctness.")
From the Daily Mail:
Judges have insisted that freedom of speech includes the ‘right to offend’ in a landmark ruling which could help to turn the tide on ‘woke’ intolerance after a feminist who called a transgender woman a ‘pig in a wig’ and a ‘man’ was cleared.
Presiding over a case in the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Warby said: ‘Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.'
They added that ‘free speech encompasses the right to offend, and indeed to abuse another’. The judgment from two senior members of the judiciary will set a precedent for future cases involving freedom of speech.
But this admission only came after the speaker was arrested at her home, in front of her children, imprisoned for seven hours, then released and ordered to pay compensation to the offended man (by which I mean, adult male human.)
The more concerning part of this is that such complaints are not immediately disregarded as frivolous and dismissed or ignored.
The fun part is that the defendant is a “radical feminist.” It has been delicious to watch leftist ideology implode, as people with conflicting grievances, “rights,” “boundaries” etc lash out at each other, each feeling violated by the other. Feminists don’t want men dressed as women competing with them in sports, and trans types know that this prohibition makes plain what ought to be plain to everyone, which is that there are real and immutable differences between men and women, which neither surgery nor dysphoria can overcome, and which give rise to their historically different roles, associations, preferences, achievements and many other things. Trans-types are even canceling feminists, shouting them down, and abusing them the way the left abuses everyone they disagree with.
This fracas ought to prompt leftists to ask themselves whether their identity-obsessed theory of “rights” and grievances is coherent. But it won’t. People that are prone to introspection and thoughtful self-examination do not often get involved in mass movements.
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