You must be a woman (some restrictions apply)
Scottish Women’s Aid is recruiting:
Do you want to get involved in making Scotland a happier, safer place for young women? Are you interested in learning more about feminist research? Would you like to a shape an exciting national digital campaign? If yes, this advisory panel opportunity is for you!
We want to understand where young women and girls look for support and advice when they are faced with abuse from someone they are in an intimate relationship with, and how Women’s Aid can help them in that situation.
And by “abuse from someone they are in an intimate relationship with” they mostly mean someone male. Lesbians can be abusive too, of course, but the power dynamics are different, plus there are more straight young women and girls than there are lesbians. Mostly the abuser is going to be male.
So, next paragraph –
Who can apply: You must be a woman (cisgender, transwoman, gender non-binary or gender non-fluid person) between the ages of 16 and 25. We would particularly love to hear from young BAME women, young LGBTQI women, disabled young women, young women living in rural areas, and young women from other minoritised groups.
You must be a woman (a woman, a man, perhaps a man or perhaps a man). In other words when we say you must be a woman we’re only joking, because you can be a man who identifies as a woman or you can be “non-binary” or “gender fluid.” Your options are many. If you’re a man abusing a woman you’re in a relationship with, just say you’re a trans woman and apply to be on our advisory panel and maybe you will get to shape our policy on violence against women and girls.
And why do I suspect if a trans/NB/whatever the hell else should apply, hiring an actual woman will not be considered. To hire a woman when there is a TiM on the list of applicants would be to mark yourself as bigoted. Whoever wrote this ad does not want to be called bigoted.
The title of this post confuses me. I would have put it “You must be a woman (some exemptions apply), since they are exempting some applicants from the requirement to be a woman.
That was the point. Some restrictions apply but not the one that you’d expect. One of my usual sarcastic jokes.
“Some restrictions apply” is a phrase seen often on high-pressure sales offers and advertising for sweepstakes and other contests; that’s what I took it to refer to. Seems apt.
Yes that too – a jokey invocation of ad-speak.
Am listening to a talk on pubic radio from a genetic ethicist just now, and he’s talking about not wanting to edit our genes in a way that reduces human diversity. By way of an example, he mentions not wanting to genetically edit away gays and trans people. Hmm. I am not aware of there being a “trans gene” that could be edited. I would hope he’s not thinking of so-called intersex persons, as those persons are actually affected by developmental sex disorders, or DSDs. Seems to me that DSDs are something that you would want to genetically edit if you could, seeing as they’re disorders.
It just goes to show how much a very dubious metaphysical claim about identifying as someone of the opposite sex had gained a hold in the popular imagination.
If he’s really interested in preventing the reduction in human genetic diversity, he should be most concerned about retaining the genes of those people who identify as other species.
Genes really don’t work that way… Editing out the “gay gene,” would probably edit out resistance to certain kinds of cancer or black hair.
What the hell is a “gender non-fluid person”? Does that mean someone that isn’t gender-fluid?
Yeah, I wish more people understood at least basic genetics. They don’t have to dive in and learn about hox genes, hedgehog genes, mutated fruit flies, but I wish they would understand that there isn’t a “gene” for this and a “gene” for that. It is complicated and messy, and things tend to be inherited together, or sometimes to be controlled by multiple genes.
Thank you for the explanation, Ophelia. Over here, the phrase is ‘terms and conditions apply’, so I didn’t realise the cultural significance.
It’s something one used to hear at the very end of some tv adverts – a rushed voice hastily concluding “somerestrictionsapply”. It always sounded very shifty, very “you can’t sue us because we just gabbled those three words at you.”
You must be a person between the ages 18 and 25. And yet they are looking with particular interest for applications from minority women… what’s the bet that if a woman and a trans woman both apply with equal qualifications, the trans women will win as a result.
#9
Must have been a typo. Surely they wouldn’t want to exclude the ‘gender fluid?’ Perhaps they lack the vicious certainty of self declaration, since they MIGHT make conflicting declarations the next minute?
I think that whoever composed that list of who qualifies as a woman intended to include both gender non-conforming and gender-fluid, but had a brain-fart and ended up dropping a bollock, as it were.
Or are non-pourable trans a thing now, too? Gender-solid, perhaps?