As if women are completely invisible
Holly Lawford-Smith on bad news out of Australia:
I know the sex self-id bill was expected to pass, but I’m still kind of in shock that it did, 56 v. 27 at Lower House yesterday. It’s just surreal, that Labour & the Greens are supposed to be progressive parties (whose members would probably call themselves feminists), and yet they’re pushing through legislation that replaces sex (an objective characteristic that affects how people are treated) with gender identity (a subjective characteristic that may play no role at all in how you are treated). Women in Australia still face a range of serious issues, including but not limited to pregnancy and breastfeeding discrimination, insufficient research into female-specific medical problems, subjection to domestic violence, subjection to rape, sexual assault, & harassment, underrepresentation in politics.
These parties have been acting like women are completely invisible. They never talk about what this legal change means for women, unless it’s to dismiss (always without evidence) the idea that there is any risk to women or women’s spaces. They talk incessantly about how important it is for trans people to have their “identities affirmed” on legal documents. What is identity affirmation worth, though, if you put it on the scales against all the interests that are protected by an accurate category of sex in law? (Including those interests women have in single-sex spaces). It makes me feel sick to think that it’ll take a range of horrible incidents like have happened in the UK, Canada, and US to show just how bad sex self-identification really is as a policy. Why should women have to lose their businesses (Canada), have to go through human rights proceedings (Canada), be assaulted in female bathrooms (Scotland), be re-traumatised in women’s shelters (Canada), be assaulted in women’s prisons or be re-traumatised by having to share intimate spaces in women’s prisons (UK), lose places in non-competitive sporting competitions (US, New Zealand)? And what about all the other ways in which women will start to self-exclude, from women’s gyms, or women’s groups, as male-bodied people start to self-include?
I’m just lost for words. Judith Butler wrote a stupid book, some academic disciplines liked the stupid book a bit too much, and now somehow here we are, with the completely mental idea that your sex is a matter of your beliefs rather than your body and your biology, making its way into state law and stamping out sex-based protections. I am furious.
For years, decades, centuries women have been struggling to get men to stop speaking over us, and now we’re expected to stop that struggle if the man says he’s a woman. Now we’re expected to share even our feminism with men. We’re expected to go back to having men speaking over us, but now they’re doing it in the guise of actually being women, when they’re not. We can’t even have our own fucking sex, even while we continue to be domineered over and silenced because of it.
I wish more people in the press would stop framing these laws as adding to the rights of trans males, and instead talk about what they really are: laws that take the right away from women to decide for themselves when and how much they’re willing to accommodate trans-identified males in their spaces. The trans lobby pushes the idea that all trans-identified males are genuinely as harmless as women — analogous to gentle, effeminate homosexuals. (I’m picturing that naive cosmologist from yesterday and her “keep being fabulous!” comment and how inappropriate it is to apply the word “fabulous” to the likes of Karen White or Jonathan Yaniv — men who couldn’t possibly be further from the fun-loving “fabulous” purse-collecting, sassy-heels-strutting pseudo-gay stereotype she seems to imagine all transwomen are.) I wish I could talk to people like that cosmologist face-to-face and show them that the majority of trans-identified males maintain behavioural characteristics in line with other males: a higher propensity for violence; a sense of entitlement; etc, etc. I wish I could remind her that in a social context, she already has the right to welcome trans-identified males into her social circles and affirm them as women as she sees fit, and that she should also have the right to not welcome certain trans-identified males if she perceives them as a possible threat, if they make her uncomfortable, or for any other reason.
My favourite example of male-pattern trans behaviour is from last fall: the WSJ undertook a massive exit poll during the US mid-term elections in order to better understand who the hell is still supporting Trump two years into his term. Unsurprisingly, lesbians and gays voted overwhelmingly Democratic. But people who identified as “trans” were far more likely to vote Republican: possibly as many as 40% did, given the margin of error. That’s pretty much in line with non-trans males when you consider that the poll didn’t distinguish between male and female trans-identifiers, and that the female ones are erstwhile-lesbians and thus very unlikely to vote Republican.
I’d like to ask that cosmologist: are you sure you think it’s “fabulous” to legally force women to accommodate everyone in a cohort of middle-aged straight males who tend to be sexually attracted to women, tend to support Donald Trump, are just as likely to commit assault as their non-dress-wearing male counterparts, have no concept of patriarchy and couldn’t care less about feminism?
With respect to sports at least there is a way around this problem. Since all that is necessary for gender assignment is to make a claim of gender and apparently it should be done using Latin, cis women will have to stop being cis women and have the new gender of poceratwom, an awkward but undeniable category deriving from the Latin words potes (can’t), certatim (compete), apud (with), trans (across, beyond or through) and the English words, “woman”, “or” and “man”.
Who would dare deny the existence of such a gender when someone has declared themselves to be just that. It would be exclusive of anyone to do that.
It would also mean that in order to be inclusive, as inclusiveness is paramount, trans women would have to find teams that have no one of this gender to compete against for to do otherwise would be to deny that person’s very existence, a pain that they can certainly relate to and have no business causing in another.
There are those of us who will miss the many cis women who will have discovered that they are really poceratwom but we will support them in any way we can.
I’m still waiting to see when some employer tries to defend a gender discrimination suit by saying “sorry, we don’t keep any statistics on what percentage of our employees are women. We have no idea, because we’ve never asked them how they identify.”
[…] a comment by Artymorty on As if women are completely […]
Dare I suggest that is a feature, not a bug? Men have been trying to push women back out of the business, academic, and sports world ever since the first woman showed up there. Now they will do it by making only men who identify as women feel safe there, or maybe it will eventually get to where women are told “Sorry, but to hire you would be to discriminate against Sheila, the large bearded woman behind you who never had the privilege of being born woman”.
Screechy Monkey, I like the way you’re thinking head, but I’m afraid the outcome might be a new dictum, “Ignorance of the gender identity is no excuse.”