I recently needed to book a temporary flat in the UK. I turned to AirBnB as this is the company which has the monopoly market position. In order to open an account I had to agree to this nonsense:
Our community commitment
Airbnb is a community where anyone can belong
To ensure this, we’re asking you to commit to the following:
I agree to treat everyone in the Airbnb community – regardless of their race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, skin colour, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age – with respect, and without judgement or bias.
For a start Airbnb is not a “community”. It is a business. That is just a lie. (They want, of course, to distract you from the fact that it is a business and is all about money. – Many other US corporations use similar tactics to distract you from the ruthlessly commercial nature of their operations).
The second issue is that, it turns out, to use the services of this business you have to agreed to this ridiculous statement. As far as “treating people with respect goes” – that isn’t unreasonable at all. But why not just ask customers to agree to “treat all people with respect” and leave it at that? Why exclude, for example, straight people with red hair? This is, basically, the fetishization of minorities (at best) and psychological sickness (at worst). Apart from anything else, it is insulting to minorities, and as far as ‘race’ goes, subtly racist.
“Without judgement or bias” takes the whole thing to a new level. This, essentially, forces you to accept at face value the way that, for example, transgender people present themselves. By agreeing to the above you are in essence being required to agree to accept transgender ideology, in order to book a room.
My readers might protest that this site is supposed to be about International Relations. Of course, this is just me ‘having a rant’. But; in a way, this is about International Relations. This really is very weird; a cult belief (that gender is something you can pick and choose), is imposed, by an international business, as a condition of transacting with them. This is precisely the kind of weird cultural denegation that, increasingly, part of the world feels it needs to defend itself from.