#this is truly excellent#and also so rare like there is no way to stress enough#that this is a last resort move for BYM
like yeah that's an important point. for better and worse, this is not, like... the first step BYM or BYM trustees have taken here. Sex Matters has been stirring shit with Yearly Meeting, Meeting for Sufferings, and other Quaker bodies for at least a couple of years now afaik (my mum was on Sufferings until the end of 2023 and they were definitely being a pain in the arse then as well)
it has taken a lot for the clerks to reach a point where they're this blunt and targeted, and as the letter suggests, part of that is that the Sex Matters convener not only reached out inappropriately and outside the proper channels, but also shared it with a whole bunch of people. I saw the Sex Matters letter weeks ago (it was attached along with the Sufferings report in July) which, in hindsight: yeah that was weird actually
side note but the Sex Matters letter is so bad. like. not just in the ethical regard. it contains a massive """""equality impact assessment"""" to support them on how totally unsafe mixed-gender bathrooms are. they have marked every equality group as severely negatively affected, including on the basis of gender reassignment. (their argument for this was, i believe, essentially "this might upset detransitioners" with no further evidence or explanation). none of the "risks" are evidenced. many of them are just questions of "could this affect...?". i think i found maybe 5 risks that were actually founded and all of them had been considered in BYM's own EqIA. as someone who has done a lot of equalities paperwork in professional contexts and takes it seriously i was personally offended by the lameness of the paperwork but also they were directly accusing BYM of not fulfilling their legal requirements to assess impact under the Equalities Act, and they then circulated that through BCC and socials. this was a clear attempt at intimidation. it's also hilarious because like. this is the Bureaucracy Religion. if you come at bym staff on the basis of paperwork you had better be so fucking sure.
the point being that this is kind of the nuclear option for BYM, and it's been earned. Sex Matters have already been heard in Meetings, and it has not changed the feeling of the Meeting; they have already been spoken to privately by elders and pastoral care in at least some cases; the existence of their viewpoints has already been noted in minutes on the subject.
One of the reasons that this sort of thing doesn't happen often internally (this kind of bluntness is usually reserved for external statements, like the statement on the Westminster police raid a few months ago) is that usually it doesn't have to. On a national level, Quakers usually don't go further than saying "Friend, you have been heard" and either discouraging or ignoring things that are outside of the main business processes (Meeting for Sufferings, Yearly Meeting sessions, Area Meetings, etc.) until they go away. is this ideal? probably not. but it is why you rarely see this kind of thing.
Back in the day (like, up until the 19th century, when Quakerism was a much more insular and controlled group), irreconcilable dissent might have got people (including the Public Universal Friend, actually) kicked out of the Society. we... don't really do that any more. I'm not sure we could do that any more, the approach to membership has got a lot more relaxed and people really only leave membership when they choose to resign it.
So in a lot of ways, this is the most BYM can possibly do - be blunt, be categorical in their condemnation, and make it publicly available to Friends to make up their own minds.
(That publicity is also very unusual. Typically, we would only see these things addressed through minutes, epistles, or other notes addressed to the record rather than to an individual. We would also usually expect them to come from a Meeting rather than individuals - I'm not entirely clear whether this letter is from Trustees as a whole, or from the Clerks individually, but it looks like it's from the Clerks. I imagine there must have been a lot of discussion before they decided to publish this to the website.)
this is not a casual thing for BYM Clerks to do. they have committed here. I've been involved in Quakers since I was a small child, and I don't remember anything like this happening before, not even following the (quite polarising) decision on gay marriage BYM took in 2010. The severity here really speaks both to how hard Sex Matters have been prepared to push their agenda (and how little they have been prepared to accept Quaker discipline*) and to just how little patience BYM Clerks have left. This isn't just a sternly-worded letter: this is more or less the harshest BYM can get without themselves stretching the bounds of Quaker discipline*.
I don't think Sex Matters will back off. If there's one thing about transphobes: they are fucking tenacious. So while I am hype as hell about this letter, I'm also kind of watching with bated breath to see what comes next, because if Sex Matters continue to fuck around, I actually don't know what they'll find out.
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