Peak stupid
Via the Sydney Morning Herald:
A lesbian community organisation will be forced to keep its events open to men, straight women and transgender women after the Australian Human Rights Commission refused to grant it an exemption from anti-discrimination laws.
The AHRC’s decision prohibits the group from staging a planned “Lesbians Born Female” event to commemorate International Lesbian Day. It also challenges traditional notions of sex as a biological concept as the commission concluded that sex is non-binary and changeable.
Ok Australian Human Rights Commission, let’s see all of you change your sexes. Go on, show us how it’s done.
“The commissioner submits that the word ‘sex’ is not a biological concept referring to whether a person at birth had male or female physical traits,” the AHRC said in its decision. “Nor is it a binary concept, limited to the ‘male’ or ‘female’ sex.”
But…it is. That is what it refers to.
It’s like on a farm. A cow (female sex) gives birth to a calf. The calf is either female or male. Same with horses, sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, ducks – every farm animal you can think of. Same with animals you don’t see on farms – tigers, giraffes, elephants, kangaroos.
“‘Sex’ can refer to a person being male, female or another non-binary state. It is also broad enough to encompass the idea that a person’s ‘sex’ can be changed.”
No it isn’t. What are they smoking?
The verdict was welcomed by Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown, who said if the application had been successful, already marginalised and vulnerable trans people would have been further excluded.
Well hey guess what, they could set up their own god damn community organization. They could set it up and exclude lesbians because it’s for trans people. They could have their own commorg and lesbians could have theirs.
I wonder if gay men in Australia are being told they can’t exclude trans men.
Carole Ann, a spokeswoman for the Lesbian Action Group, which submitted the application, said the AHRC’s stance “obliterated” biological reality. “It wasn’t unexpected, but it is still disgraceful,” she said. “It basically puts us back in the closet if we want to have any events for lesbians who were born female.”
Ann is due to speak in state parliament on Tuesday alongside former Liberal MP Moira Deeming, University of Melbourne academic Holly Lawford-Smith, and other prominent women campaigning for sex-based rights.
The AHRC’s ruling is based on changes made to the Sex Discrimination Act 10 years ago. Under the changes, sexual orientation and gender identity were included as protected attributes, the definitions of a man and a woman were repealed from the legislation, and references to the “opposite sex” were replaced with “different sex”.
Sure that’s how all this works – you just repeal the definitions of a man and a woman, and then no one is either any more. Change the words and you change the thing. Magic!
The commission said the changes to the act made it clear that for the purposes of state and federal law, sex was no longer fixed or binary.
And therefore women just can’t have any rights. Boom; done.
Brown said the intention of the new law was clear. “The Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 2013 to protect LGBTIQ+ people and explicitly protects trans women and non-binary people from unfair treatment,” she said.
But the “treatment” is not “unfair.” It’s not unfair to know that men are not women. It’s not unfair for women to avoid men in some circumstances.
The AHRC, which received 236 submissions for and against the application, said it was swayed by a submission that argued it was not appropriate or necessary to exclude trans, bisexual or queer women to allow lesbians to celebrate their culture.
The commission warned that granting an exemption could lead to further exclusion of, and discrimination against, trans women who are lesbians.
No trans women are lesbians, because trans women are men.
Baby talk. We’re stuck in baby talk, apparently forever.
The concepts of female and male are so ingrained in our language, based on sex, that we have “male” plugs and “female” inserts on tools and fasteners. Where people get the idea that this is a limited concept that must be discarded is, frankly, beyond me. It’s not likely to happen, but I am curious as to how they would rule should some lesbians demand to be included in a trans only event?
They’d rule for the exclusively trans event. Trans are the most marginalized of the marginalized. It’s foundational. They are to be celebrated and centered.
Note “former liberal”. People here might remember that Moira Deeming was the MP kicked from her own party for attending the Melbourne Let Women Speak event, claiming she marched with Nazis thanks to several of those fools turning up. And when it was pointed out that said fools were separate from the LWS, that they were simply glomming on to it opportunistically, they still kicked her but changed the reason to something else that I forget. Given the change of excuse to justify her booting, it is clear that she was kicked for attending a pro-woman event.
Amazingly, this action came from Australia’s Liberal party – the more conservative of the two major parties, roughly equivalent to the Tories or Republicans (though with considerably less insanity).
Paging Silent Bob
I think you’re being optimistic. I think they’ve yet to reach the nadir; I’m not even sure there is one. Unfortunately, there always seems to be depths for something nadirier.
While Holms is correct in the way the Liberal Party treated Moira Deeming, it was the Labor Party (the other party of the duopoly) under our first and to date only female Prime Minister that these horrendous changes to the Sex Discrimination Act were made.
Julia Gillard, who made one of her best and most impassioned speeches calling out misogyny also gave a free pass to misogynists with the amended law.
It is SO frustrating.
What bothers me most as an Australian woman is that this ruling is the rejection of an intersectional claim; the lesbians had two grounds under the Sex Discrimination Act to ask for the exemption, being sex and sexual orientation.
The ruling dispenses with both. This means that no other intersectional claim should be assumed to possibly succeed, and women like myself who have no other claims, just sex, cannot ever expect our needs to be met by this government, this body, nor by any body that is supposed to be for us and operates under the auspices of the Sex Discrimination Act.
It’s appalling.
They don’t have that problem. The transmen are all too busy hooking up with straight men on Grindr.
Francis Boyle keeping busy
Cf “The Boxer Ceiling”.
I used to follow a now-defunct Facebook group that documented verbal and written abuse directed at gay men for being uninterested in relations with TiFs. The term “boxer ceiling” is a weak analogy to the term “cotton ceiling”, which referenced lesbians, and this defunct group used the term as the group name. I searched for remnants of the group or reasonable links to discussion of the problem to share here, and they are scarce, but it is clear that this is a real thing, if not quite as prominent as the “cotton ceiling”. I saw a reply to some discussion on Twitter that noted that potential transitioners need to understand that their pool of potential sexual partners greatly diminishes when they transition, and that most of angry transactivism is people ranting about the lack of available sex partners. Maybe true, but interesting perspective nonetheless.