Amnesty International turns its mission and approach inside-out to push gender ideology

Enshrining ideas and claims that can't withstand scrutiny in the law threatens the very basis of liberal societies.

As a student, I volunteered with Amnesty International -- this was several years into the genocide in Darfur -- and I remember we wanted everyone to know and everyone to care what was happening 7,000 miles away.

Seeing Amnesty International now endorse campaigns that purposefully avoid public oversight and seek to shut down inquiry is surreal to me. I'll never get over it. This should be a red flag to Amnesty — why sneak around? Why is it necessary to lie? What are you doing?

At a basic level, we had faith that if people understood what was happening, they would care and take action. What's happening now is quite different. The public isn't trusted to understand — in fact, the less that the public understands, the more successful the campaign.

Understanding isn't what's being sought. The entire campaign to enshrine gender ideology in our societies openly defies the possibility of understanding and celebrates the abdication of independent judgment. "They know better than you" about sums it up.

Compliance is what's being pursued here, enforced by social, economic, and legal sanctions if necessary. Gender ideology seeks to destroy the very possibility of good-faith disagreement and public dialogue. The message to the public boils down to: "Don't look too closely. You're not capable of understanding what you see. Just trust us."

And, indeed, gender ideology is quite difficult for non-believers to make sense of. If gender is fluid and can change over time, why do we carry out untested and often irreversible medical procedures on kids at younger and younger ages? Why should women be redefined as a mixed-sex class based on gender identity that privileges the identity claims of male people over the lived experiences of female people? Why is there so much lying, obscuring, silencing, and manipulating by trans activists to prop up false claims, enforce anti-scientific dogmas, and shut down debate?

It's true — the claims and demands of gender ideology are hard to understand. And an ideology that refuses to be understood, refuses to submit to questions and inquiry, is hard to square with liberal societies and liberal institutions. Perhaps that why every state and institution that embraces gender ideology ends up warped beyond recognition.

It's utterly surreal to see Amnesty International campaign against basic civil liberties like freedom of speech and conscience. In thrall to gender ideology, organizations like Amnesty International have abandoned their missions and lost their way. Oaths of allegiance are taking the place of inquiry in universities, nonprofits, and government commissions. The more preposterous the oath, the greater the demonstration of allegiance. That applies whether the preposterous oath concerns the crowd size at Trump's inauguration ("This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period") or the favored preposterous oath of the Left ("TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN," often repeated in all caps for effect).

Enforcing 𝑎𝑛𝑦 ideology at the expense of truth-seeking processes and institutions leads us nowhere we want to go. Enshrining ideas and claims that can't withstand scrutiny in the law threatens the very basis of liberal societies.

The Amnesty-endorsed open letter circulating in Ireland is a clear example of threat we're up against: "We call on media, and politicians to no longer provide legitimate representation for those that share bigoted beliefs... These fringe internet accounts stand against affirmative medical care of transgender people, and they stand against the right to self-identification of transgender people in this country."

To be clear, the thoughtcrimes here include

• questioning the medical experiment we're running on kids, many of whom are simply lesbian or gay

• asserting that sex matters, independently of subjective gender identity claims

Whether gender ideologues like it or not, these are pressing questions for democratic societies to consider, in the open, without fear of harassment. That gender ideologues don't have good answers to these questions does not mean that asking questions is wrong or "bigoted."

It's unfortunate for the gender lobby that the under-the-radar and burn-the-witches approach they've taken so far is starting to fall apart. Nonetheless, these are questions that need to be asked and a dialogue that needs to take place.

* * * * * *

And let’s talk about how Ireland came to pass self-id in the first place, shall we? The letter-writers praise the open, democratic process to gender recognition in Ireland:

In particular, the road to Gender Recognition was long and public, and we in the trans community are thankful for the support of the many who stood by our side... We are thankful our community was given a chance to present our case to the country, and that we secured so much support for inclusion and legal recognition.

Among much, much else that's wrong with this letter, wasn't Ireland described as a model for avoiding public scrutiny in passing self-id policies that were drafted by lobbyists? "Long and public" process, my ass.

"... many believe that public campaigning has been detrimental to progress... In Ireland, activists have directly lobbied individual politicians and tried to keep press coverage to a minimum in order to avoid this issue." (p. 20)

"The most important lesson from the Irish experience is arguably that trans advocates can possibly be much more strategic by trying to pass legislation “under the radar” by latching trans rights legislation onto more popular legal reforms..." (p. 54-55)

The source is this quite extraordinary guide to best practices for gender lobbyists. Extraordinary for a purported human rights campaign, that is. It looks quite a bit like pharmaceutical industry playbooks, especially with recommendations like:

• Get ahead of the government agenda

• Tie your campaign to more popular reform

• Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure: "Another technique which has been used to great effect is the limitation of press coverage and exposure."

It's clear that the lobby fears facing real public scrutiny in Ireland, for the first time, and now appeals to one-time champions of freedom of speech and conscience to silence those who object to self-id and irreversible medicalization of kids as evidence of harm piles up.

Shame on Amnesty International for signing on to such a pack of lies and libels, in an attempt to censor a vital public debate on the issue of gender ideology.