Can we have rights too?
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie has banned a women’s group from office facilities made available to community organisations because of its “exclusionary” views on transgender issues.
The federal member for Clark allows community groups to use his taxpayer-funded photocopying facilities in Hobart. Until recently this included feminist group Women Speak Tasmania.
WST has in recent years clashed with transgender activists over law reform, with the group concerned about the sanctity and safety of female-only services and places. Mr Wilkie has now banned the group from using the facilities, telling The Weekend Australian he sees its views as “discriminatory” and “exclusionary”.
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WST is furious over the ban, accusing Mr Wilkie of discriminating against the group, while allowing “radical” trans groups to continue to use his office facilities despite their attacks on women’s rights to female-only services.
“There is clearly a direct attack on women’s sex-based rights at the moment,” WST spokeswoman Isla MacGregor told The Australian.
“Australia is in the grip of a psychosis whipped up the by gender lobby that (says) ‘trans women are women and anybody who opposes that is a hate group’.
“I think that Wilkie has fallen for that ploy and it’s tragic that he has … He needs to do more homework.”
She said WST’s opposition to “male-bodied” people accessing female-only services and places was about defending women’s rights and safety, not inciting hatred towards transgender people.
If we keep saying it maybe some day they will hear.
Here is something conceivable:
Trans gender activists are concerned about protecting the rights of trans people: fair housing, no job discrimination, an end to violence and bullying. Trans gender individuals do not insist that sex isn’t real, or that it’s not a binary, or that they’re really the opposite sex. Trans women see themselves as men who prefer to identify and live as women; trans men consider themselves women who feel more comfortable identifying and living as men. While they both welcome being included in some single sex groups, they understand and respect that they shouldn’t and needn’t be included in all. Pronouns are a preference, and a courtesy. Nobody talks about transitioning children; it’s an adult decision.
So here is a hypothetical situation where I think pretty much every objection made by gender critical feminists disappears — and yet trans people exist and have rights and feminists agree they exist and have rights. The point of the exercise then isn’t to say “ this is how trans people ought to be,” but that “gender critical feminists aren’t transphobic.”
If they were, there couldn’t be a logically possible scenario where trans people exist and have rights, and feminists agree. In contrast, a religious-based transphobia would not accept men living like women, and women like men, under these or any other conditions.
(The rebuttal might be “ it’s transphobic to refuse to allow trans people to define themselves.” Which I don’t agree with, but at least the debate has moved into different territory.)
I of course agree with the broader point about fairness, but it strikes me as kind of crazy that the specific point of contention is who gets to make free photocopies.
Maybe it’s an Australian thing, where all decent people get to make free photocopies, and only the most despicable people are denied that right, thus making it the gravest of insults when said right is taken away?
It’s not the photocopying per se, that’s just the service this member of parliament happens to provide gratis out of his office. This was only made into a thing by the usual shouty TRA types. It could have been any service or courtesy at all; no matter how trivial, the TRA types will oppose actual feminists having access to it.
At this stage I’m more surprised that photocopying is still a thing than I am about people popping up to stop women from doing it. I can definitely say that it’s been well over a decade since I photocopied anything or heard about anyone photocopying anything.
It seems surreal but there’s a very grim consequence, isn’t there? Obviously Women Speak Tasmania is not a well-funded group or they wouldn’t be in the market for free photocopying to help spread their message. Cutting them off because that message is attacked as politically unpopular is an immensely sinister thing to do. I’d have thought that people providing a service such as free photocopying would be on the underdog’s side every time. It’s Opposite Land again, where the Under- (cat-identifying) dog is somehow the greedy over-dog.
Full disclosure: mrs latsot is a lawyer and does an enormous amount of business by fax because that’s how things have ‘always’ been done. She gets cross when I call it ‘quaint’. And yeah, they still tie up files with pink ribbons even though it makes them enormously more difficult to store, archive and access. Not that my profession has learned anything over the last 50 years. We still think there’s such a thing as ‘software architecture’. Well not the way I write it, there isn’t.
latsot, a lot of people still photocopy. Not all necessary things are digital, and I frequently photocopy. A good example is when my students are each out collecting data, which is handwritten, and they all need a copy of each other’s data.
Using computers to collect the data is not currently feasible, because our school is not going to pay for the individual data loggers. So we collect by hand.
What? You mean you don’t generate a detailed, multilevel UML description of every software project? Monster!