Mind the barrier
What are barriers? What do we mean by the word? What are we talking about when we talk about barriers?
For instance what do we mean by it when we’re talking about improving the representation of women?
The Scottish Government introduced its Gender Representation on Public Boards Act in March last year to “improve the representation of women on the boards of Scottish public authorities” and aim to ensure that at least 50 per cent of non-executive roles are filled by women.
However in the latest twist in the row over women’s rights and those of trans women, a new consultation on how the legislation should work in practice, has seen concerns raised about the government’s definition of the word “woman”.
So we know what’s coming. The government will have a fancy new definition of the word “woman” that allows it to “be inclusive” of some men. No longer will “women” mean mere adult human females – that’s far too stuffy and old-fashioned. No, now it means anyone who has a deep spiritual sense of being womany…so that lets most of us dreary old literal women out.
In the new Bill, the definition was changed from “a female of any age” – the definition in the UK Equality Act of 2010, which protects women against sex discrimination – to include a “person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment”.
Because?
A person can have “the protected characteristic of gender reassignment” (whatever that means) without being a woman, so why does the definition of woman need to be changed to include such a person? Does it also cover people with an allergy to horses, people who dislike cauliflower, people who have been to Burkina Fasso? Why is the definition of “woman” something that needs random expanding in this bizarre way? It’s like changing the definition of “dog” to include roses and ormolu clocks.
The then equalities secretary, Angela Constance, accepted the amendment because “we want the Bill to break down barriers and not create them”.
This is why I asked. What does that mean? What is she thinking? If you have a law to protect, say, people with disabilities, does that “create barriers”? Should that bill, once passed, be expanded to include people who identify as disabled but are not in fact disabled? Would continuing to restrict the bill to people with actual disabilities create a barrier?
According to the government’s Equality Impact Assessment, carried out at the time the legislation passed, the definition of woman was changed after the issue was “raised by respondents in relation to the inclusiveness of the language used”, to include non-binary people as well as the “definitions used for female and male in it, which it was felt should be ‘identify as female’ or ‘identify as male’ to avoid issues for transgender people.”
Thin end of the wedge, wasn’t it, and now here we are, with women being told to move over to make room for men who claim to be women when they want to compete against them in weightlifting competitions. There’s such a thing as too much inclusiveness.
Or anyone who claims to have a deep spiritual sense of being womany. There don’t seem to be any standards anymore except “I say I feel like a woman, so you must accept me as a woman or you are a brute, a genocidal monster, and WORSE!”
Most of us who are women cannot define what it means to ‘feel like a woman’. It’s just what we are, and we live it every day without defining it (other than adult human female). It doesn’t feel the same to someone else as it does to me, so my defining it would only be ‘a deep spiritual sense of feeling like me’. Which I don’t even really have that. I am me, I suppose I feel like me, but perhaps some days I feel like a battering ram, some days I feel like a punching bag, and other days maybe I feel like a chocolate pudding. That doesn’t make me any of those things. I am still a woman, whatever that feels like, and I am willing to be that feeling like a woman means something different for iknklast than it does for steamshovelmama or Ophelia Benson or Paris Hilton or Hillary Clinton.
As usual, men have stepped forward to take care of that lack. Feeling like a woman means…feeling like a woman, goddamit, and if you don’t accept that a man who was born a man, raised a man, lived as a man, and still looks like a man feels like a woman, well, what kind of monster are you anyway?
Barriers can be good. That’s why we have walls on our houses, to keep out people who are not our family when we need privacy. So what if my neighbor were to decide he feels like he is one of my family instead of one of his? Does that mean I need to allow him in my house, give him a room, cook him dinner and set him a place at the table? Does he get to bring his dog? Does that make his wife part of the family, too, and mean that I need to do all this extra for her, as well? No. No one thinks like that. We have walls so my neighbor stays in his house and I stay in mine until we choose to be neighborly and visit; then he goes home to his house, or I go home to mine, and the barrier goes up. If someone chooses to violate that barrier without my permission, I can have said someone arrested. If that someone comes into my house and claims all my stuff as his, I can have him arrested. Because barriers exist for a reason, and some of them are good. Some of them are necessary.
Is anything similar being done for women who feel manly?
Surely there must be.
SPOILER ALERT: sarcasm.
Well that’s exactly why you need men to explain it to you.
I’ve heard on good authority that the hardest part of being a woman is figuring out what to wear.