Quakers are just one step removed from humanists, but with an even greater commitment to social justice. I like that, although I could never join a group with any vestige of god-belief. Still, I appreciate them.
The Quakers in Britain have been promoting equality and tolerance for a long, long time, to the point where one subgroup has split off and formed their own little sect, Sex Matters to Quakers, which is associated with a broader group called LGB Christians. Notice the missing “T” — they’re one of those groups that makes a special point of not recognizing trans people. It’s like supporting Black Lives Matter except for the Senegalese (I have no problem with Senegal, I just picked a random African nation), which really just says you’re bigoted against one group. You’re still a bigot. I don’t like these Quakers.
We reached a point about three years ago when there were enough of us to attempt to become a ‘Quaker recognised body’. Our primary aims were to bring Quaker members and attenders together: to speak truth to power, that is, biological truth to gender-ideological power; and to state that women are adult human females and men are adult human males.
SMtQ fired off a letter to their parent organization protesting the existence of trans-inclusive restrooms, which is another signal that they are not good people. The Quakers in Britain got the letter, which was also broadcast all over the place, and so the Quakers responded with a long letter rejecting their request. It’s a good letter, maybe a bit over-long, but thorough in shutting down the protest. I’ll pull out a few points that I thought were particularly clear.
• Deliberate misgendering of a person is transphobia.
• Referring to trans women as men is transphobia.
• Assuming a trans person poses a risk simply for being trans is transphobic.
• Stating that trans men are vulnerable and “groomed” into transition is a
transphobic trope.
• References to “trans activism” as anything other than the legitimate effort to
protect and advocate for the rights of people who are trans or non-binary is
transphobic.
• Alleging that Quakers have been “infiltrated” by trans activists is a transphobic
conspiracy theory and we are particularly offended by it.
• The notion that supporting and advocating for the safety, wellbeing, and
inclusion of trans people could be damaging to the Religious Society’s
reputation, or even “might be the thing that finally destroys them” is shocking
and dangerous. It is fearmongering, threatening, and extreme.
It concludes with a statement of principle that I can agree with.
“As Britain Yearly Meeting, we have minuted commitments in recent years: to care for our planet, to become an anti-racist church, to make reparations for historical injustices, to welcome and affirm those who are transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse. Much work has been done on all these by some individual Friends and Quaker meetings, as well as by our yearly meeting staff and committees. However, some have disagreed with the actions and approaches of others. This has been a cause of pain and anguish. We have heard in ministry that the strength of a church lies in how it is able to disagree with itself. In Quaker discernment, unity is not the same as unanimity. Minority views may well continue to exist. Among ourselves, we need to find kinder ground for our disagreements.
Can we find joy? Can we bring joy?”
You go, Quakers! Excepting those weirdos among you.
Oh FFS. yeah, the dirty old divide and conquer trick again where the bigots they think they can split the Queer community by separating and attacking Trans people first and think the rest of us will forget that they still want to come after us all next..
Sad thing is that old and disgusting trick does work far too often..
LGB Christians are part of the LGB Alliance.
The LGB Alliance is part of the 55 Tufton Street Looney Tunes right wing group of “think tanks”, funded by the likes of the Koch Brothers.
Other groups at Tufton Street include Restore Trust (lobbying to ensure the National Trust only promotes “traditional” history), the Global Warming Policy Foundation (lobbying against green policies), Migration Watch UK (lobbying for strict immigration policies), the New Culture Forum (fighting against “cultural Marxism”), Leave Means Leave (lobbying for a hard Brexit) and the Tax Payers’ Alliance (taxes are Marxist)
The most influential group is the Institute for Economic Affairs, a bunch of batshit crazy free marketeers that influenced Liz Truss’s insane budget and cost the UK £40 billion in less than a week.
So, yes, hurrah for the Quakers!
I think I’ve decided that hate doesn’t exist. There is only love.
“I hate broccoli,” you might say. You don’t really mean it. You love complaining and are fishing for agreement.
If you’re tied to a chair and you think the person pulling the fingernails out of your hand hates you, you’re wrong. They love what they’re doing. They find it fulfilling.
It annoys me when people who obviously know nothing about science attempt to harness it for their pet cause.
An interesting historical footnote. Back in the antebellum period, there were a number of Quaker slave owners, both in the North and South. There came a point in the late 1700s-early 1800s when most Quaker congregations became part of the abolition movement. This put enormous pressure on slave owning Quakers to manumit their slaves. Most did so, even though they took a serious financial hit. However, those that did not wish to do so, left the Quaker movement and often became Methodists instead. Methodists, especially in the South, were much more tolerant of slavery. There had already been a Quaker-Methodist connection in England, so this step was not all that radical for the former Quakers. The influential Snowden family of Maryland is a case in point.
Well, now I’m doubly glad I left my Methodist church as a teen.
@2. fishy : I so wish hate didn’t exist.
Both unjustfied hate and hate sowell deserved by words and actions.
If only.
Both unjustified hate and hate so well deserved by chosen hateful words and actions.
“I like that, although I could never join a group with any vestige of god-belief”.
There are many non-theist Friends. They make up a plurality of the Britain Yearly Meeting and, if anything, using Christian terminology marks one as a bit weird in the UK.
In “Liberal-Liberal” Meetings in the United States, Christian language is not discouraged, but Christian Quakers often have a harder time struggling with Jesus’s divinity than an atheist like me. I went to a Bible study once and the passage was about Jesus telling the disciples that he was going to be killed and none of them being able to understand what he meant. All the Christians were wringing their hands over the beginning of the Crucifixion and apotheosis story. Meanwhile, being raised an atheistic Jew, my reaction was simply “This is a story about how hard it is to hear something you don’t want to hear.”
At my Meeting the only “qualification” for becoming a member is a commitment to engaging with the testimonies within the community. Those’s testimonies being “Simplicity”, “Peace”, “Integrity”, “Community”, and “Equality”. As for the divine, it’s up to each individual to come to that in one’s own way (mine is basically a psychological understanding of how human’s unconsciously connect with each other).
All in all, I think “Liberal-Liberal” Friends are doing a better job than New Atheists at pushing back against gender essentialism. There’s no equivalent of Sam Harris going on about social contiagion. Moreover, allowing space for faith in unprovable/unfalsiable things about the divine—we cannot know why the universe began—is more in line with Stephen J Gould’s concept of differing magisteriums. Science can tell us a lot about the world but it cannot tell us how to live within it.
Every group of people are going to have its assholes—it really is about whom the mainstream of the community prioritizes. And certainly reading the response of the Britain Yearly Meeting, the mainstream there is prioritizing sanctuary and safety of all people over the discomfort of some Members. (In NYC, the Quakers opened their Meetinghouses to provide sanctuary during Stonewall and marched in the first Pride parade. “Liberal-Liberal” Friends have been far ahead of mainstream culture when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights).
(I used “Liberal-Liberal” friends to refer to Meetings that prioritize a Liberal approach to the divine and a Liberal approach to community. There’s a large variety of Quakers around the world, including many who are Evangelical with beliefs that are close to other Evangelical Christians. In fact the country with the largest number of Friends is Kenya and, while their social views are progressive for Christians in Africa, they would be quite conservative in the United States).
I hung out with a Canadian Quaker group for a while about 20 years ago shortly after I transitioned. They were very welcoming. There were a few Christians there, but also many atheists. There was also one who was both a lifelong Quaker and Wiccan, who had a Quaker-blessed same-sex union in the 1970s.
@ ^ Trickster Goddess There are so very many good people in the world.
Such a pity the jerks always seem to be in power.
Cap’n Obvs sory .
Nixon was a quaker. So yeah, sometimes they suck.
I will always be grateful for the help provided by the Quaker-based, American Friends Service Committee back in the early seventies; putting me in touch with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors or CCCO for short.
;-)
The letter includes
” Indeed, there are some trans women Friends who have been using these facilities for decades.”
Pointing out that the new policy on bathroom access was just codifying their actual practice.
It also ends with the signatures
Marisa Johnson (she/her), Clerk
Kit King (they/them), Assistant Clerk
Note the context is that the UK Supreme Court in April ruled that only “biological women” are women in the law and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) then issued interim guidelines that can be read as banning trans people in certain circumstances from all gendered facilities, including those associated with their birth sex. The BYM Quakers then issued their policy about restrooms on their property which people or person in “Sex Matters to Quakers” protested.
Back in the days of nationwide active resistance to nuclear power plants, I worked with the Clamshell Alliance in New England opposing the Seabrook (NH) nuke.
Clamshell, as we all called it, had grown from Quaker roots, and still tried to operate within Quaker customs. That required, among other things, reaching 100% consensus on all issues before acting – a framework perhaps well-suited to small local groups of people who already know each other well, but disastrous in a six-state organization facing active and organized opposition, with a need for quick decisions.
At the (top) Coordinating Committee level, when delegates from one area had firm instructions from their locality to oppose X and those from another area had a mandate to block anything not including X, we sometimes had to tell both sets of delegates to take a walk while X was on the table.
Modern Quakerism has great intentions and severe limitations.
Historic Quakerism seems quite different: in colonial New England, f’rinstance, facing de facto outlawry, on some occasions Quakers of both sexes protested by crashing the services of other denominations – in the nude. Dunno if they got consensus from their various Meetings for such actions…
Nemo@13–
It would be more accurate to say Nixon was raised a Quaker but steadily stripped away Quaker principles as they became politically inconvenient.
There’s a bit of the No-True-Scotsman in this piece, but it’s hard to reject its central argument that Nixon’s show of his Quaker roots was just piety theater for the evangelicals.
Can we just universally make all public toilets uni sex? It would rob the bigots of their main talking points, make the provision of facilities cheaper and remove a number of inconveniences.
@18
A new library was built in my neighbourhood a couple of years ago. The washroom is a row of 6 rooms with full doors containing a toilet, which face an alcove with sinks. The hand washing area is visible from the passing hallway. There are no gender labels on the doors — just the symbol of a toilette and/or a urinal.
Last weekend I went to the outhouse at the trailhead, sat down, and while doing my business I noticed that carved into the door, there was what appeared to be a figure of the opposite gender from mine.
…
Why the hell are we gendering holes in the ground?
@ Nemo – 30th August 2025 at 3:16 pm : “Nixon was a quaker. So yeah, sometimes they suck.”
Huh. Didn’t know that – thanks. Confirmed
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon
Although what #17 chrislawson says is spot on too I think.
As a birthright Quaker, having grown up in a Quaker household and having attended First Day School and Meeting for Worship for years as a kid, I’ll put in a small plug for Friends. When I was a kid in the dark ages, we still had members of our meeting who looked like they came right out of some sort of Hawthorne novel — gray and black, stern, and religious. Very religious. As the years went on, and especially during and after the Vietnam era, our membership shifted to focusing more exclusively on social justice, peace, community, etc, as “bruceld” described, with little attention to religious — i.e. supernatural — issues. The persistent problem is that sensitivity to peace, equality, etc, in Quaker theology derives from reflection on the “Inner Light,” the presence of God in each individual that we are supposed to contemplate in the silent meeting for worship. Many of us realized in adolescence that we didn’t need some kind of supernatural divine sanction for principles that were self-evident.
So why remain Quakers? For many of my friends growing up, it was a community of close consociates, a built-in network of friends who shared aspects of their background, etc. Membership in a local Meeting was a social act, not a religious one, like a pacifist version of the Scouts. I still know many of those old pals, and not one of them is religious in any sense.
Many years, the anthropologist David Schneider published a short article pointing out that, in those days in the U.S., religious identity, and even political identity, were like kinship: you inherited kin from your parents, and you also identified with the religion of your parents’ unless you consciously and intentionally converted, kind of like being adopted by another family. I always thought of Nixon as someone who acquired his Quaker identify as a simple matter of inheriting his parents’ religion, but I was not sure he ever displayed any adherence to the fundamentals of the religion. I’d call him an orphan in that sense.
chrislawson @ # 17: … Nixon was raised a Quaker but steadily stripped away Quaker principles as they became politically inconvenient.
His entire generation experienced World War II; an awful lot of young Quaker men reconsidered their pacifism (etc) after Pearl Harbor.
Only one of them turned into Richard M. Nixon, fortunately.