The exclusion of men who identify as “women”
And if the judge’s request for pronouns isn’t enough horror for one day, there’s a ruling from the Australian Human Rights Commission a few days ago:
Australia’s Human Rights Commission has released a preliminary decision prohibiting lesbians from holding events for females due to the exclusion of men who identify as “women.” The Commission’s decision comes after a lesbian rights group applied for an exemption under the [Sex] Discrimination Act 1984.
Lesbians may not hold events for women, because men want to intrude.
The application to the Commission was submitted by long-time Australian women’s rights activist Jean Taylor on behalf of herself and the members of the Lesbian Action Group, a collective established to address discrimination experienced by lesbians. The application provided an overview of lesbian organizing and gatherings in Victoria since the early 1970s, arguing that, “many thousands of lesbians benefited from the sense of pride, recognition and wellbeing that a large, well [publicized], public lesbian specific gathering encourages in the participants.”
However, this started to change in 2003 when trans activists challenged the organizers of the 2004 Lesbian Festival, accusing female-only spaces as being discriminatory under the law. This caused the festival organizers to seek and be awarded an exemption that allowed them to invite and only allow access to “lesbians born female.”
The exemption was revoked on a technicality, resulting in lesbian gatherings in Australia being driven underground for almost two decades in an effort to avoid more challenges from the transgender community.
I am so sick of this relentless bullying.
While the Commission recognized that “lesbians in Australia have faced structural and entrenched discrimination” and that “it may be important and beneficial for lesbians to gather together as a community,” it nevertheless was not persuaded that it is appropriate or reasonable to “make distinctions between women based on their cisgender or transgender experience.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. MEN ARE NOT WOMEN. The Lesbian Action Group are not “making distinctions between women” they’re making the distinction between women AND MEN.
The ruling continued:
“The Commission notes that the grant of this exemption may lead to the further exclusion of and discrimination against same-xes attracted transgender women. Transgender women are a group who have and continue to experience discrimination, harassment and social exclusion.”
Shut up shut up shut up!
So
very
sick of it.
The Australian HRC is a bunch of overpaid fuckwits. (Please excuse my language.)
Interesting phrase. Genderists regularly try to make the point that transwomen are simply one variation of woman by comparing them to black women, tall women, blond women, etc. Those analogies are all physical. They’ll also say trans and cis women is similar to a divide between lesbians and straight women, which is sexual orientation. But I’ve never seen them use examples of women divided by experience. We don’t hear “being a trans woman is similar to being a woman raised on a farm, a woman who’s well traveled, or a woman who went to a small boarding school — just a kind of woman!” At least, I haven’t.
For one thing, experiences aren’t innate and they want to treat it as innate. They also want to be able to charge people making the distinction with being equivalent to racists or homophobes. I don’t know, maybe they used the phrase “cisgender or transgender experience” to set up the claim they both suffer from patriarchal misogyny.
So men attracted to men? This ruling is down the deliberate blurring of the line between sex and gender that is essential to the TRAs ongoing mission to validate their claims. What I don’t understand is how so many presumably intelligent people don’t (or can’t) see it as nothing more than wordplay, dishonest redefining of words to distort reality. Just the other day on that thread at PZ’s it was stated that yes, ‘male’ is a word describing a sex but ‘boy’ is a gender identity rather than the word for an immature male.
It’s all smoke and mirrors.
@3 I’ve seen expressions like ‘a woman with a transgender background’ or ‘transgender history’. Never mind all that, that was in the past, she’s a 100% woman now obviously.
They’re formulas. To be recited as religious incantations. So many intelligent people refuse to believe it’s nothing more than wordplay because they see words as an acceptable form of magic* and they desperately want to believe in the magic (some magic, any magic).
*See postmodernism – just about all of it.
So now would it be exclusionary for rape victims to exclude rapists from their gatherings? For firefighters to exclude arsonists? What about chickens excluding foxes?
And what about all those treehouses/clubhouses that were a staple of 1950s TV with enormous signs saying “NO GIRLS!” Will those now be ruled discriminatory? Or are they okay as long as they don’t exclude transgirls?
Clearly they aren’t worried about coherence or consistency; they’ll reach for whatever idea, phrase, or concept that will shut their current opponent up now. It’s just like the shifting, fluid definition of “god” used by theists in debate that Sastra has pointed to, wherein the definition being chosen is the one most likely to refute or confound the current approach being used by their critics. Genderists have many versions of their “truths” from which to draw, picking freely from either side of any number of attempts at definition and characterization. Innate/acquired; fixed/fluid; present from birth/adult onset; always know/slowly dawning; same as sex/different from sex; just like “cis” women/distinct from “cis” women; just want to live their lives quietly/taking over anything and everything women have, need, or want. Coming down firmly, unequivocally, and permanently on either side of any of these dichotomies and binaries risks pissing off some part of the alphabet soup, or losing them altogether and reducing the number of potential, force-teamed allies you can call upon, lean on, suck up to, or bully into joining or staying within your coalition.
@AoS #3, by “same sex attracted trans women” the AHRC has drank all the Kool Aid, believing trans women to be legally (and ethically) female, for all purposes concerning anti discrimination laws.