‘TERFS’ are the new anti-Semites
trans rights activists are indulging in a heresy hunt reminiscent of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks on anti-Zionists
I have hesitated long and hard before dipping my toe into the debate over trans rights and gender identity. It is fraught with traps and hidden mines waiting to go off. This piece is intended as a contribution to the debate rather laying down fixed ideological positions as I would take over something simple like for example Zionism!
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| Leah Levane made it clear, and Matt Wrack to a lesser extent, that they disagreed with the no platforming of Esther Giles |
The debate is not helped by a confusion over terms such as sex and gender and what we mean by them. The debate, as it has developed, bears all the hallmarks of the poisoned offspring of identity politics. However the no platforming of Esther Giles, the suspended secretary of Bristol North West CLP from speaking at a meeting called by Stand Up For Labour Party Democracy should be condemned by all those concerned to see democracy restored in the Labour Party. [See the statementby Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour Left Alliance and Labour in Exile Network below].
Not only was Esther deplatformed but Graham Bash of Labour Briefing and the LRC was vetoed as a speaker by the organisers of the meeting which was hosted by Don’t Leave Organise and the LRC. Given the LRC were providing the zoom facilities for the meeting then this is astounding.
On the pretext that there were 500 participants, which there weren’t, everything was transferred to streaming on Youtube, thus preventing any audience input. Just to make sure they turned the comments off so that the controversy would not find its way in through the backdoor. You can of course have both have a zoom meeting and stream it.
It seems that in its control freakery Momentum, whose Alan Gibbons chaired it, and the CLPD have little to learn from Starmer and Evans. Momentum Forward seems like a continuation of Lansman by other means.
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| Ben Selby |
Clearly Alan Gibbons, who has just been unsuspended, and the other Momentum power brokers who engineered Esther’s no platforming, including Ben Selby, a supporter of the Zionist AWL, don’t understand irony. Otherwise it might have dawned on them that it’s not the best advert for a meeting opposing Starmer’s attack on free speech to yourself no platform someone because you disagree with them. And to then take all possible steps to ensure that no one in the audience could raise the matter suggests that some people are running scared.
I am not an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech. I accept that there have to be some limits. As US Supreme Court Judge Wendell Holmes saidin the 1919 case of Schenk v United States, free speech does not include crying ‘fire’ in a crowded cinema (although the judges misapplied the concept to opposition to the draft). Likewise those who openly advocate harm to people on the basis of race/colour/sex/sexuality/gender reassignment are not exercising freedom of speech but using it to deny others that right.
That is why I have always supported no platform for fascists, using the old slogan of ‘No Pasaran.’ To extend no platform as a tactic to those you simply disagree with is wrong in principle. On that I agree with JVL.
Of course trans women have every right to define themselves as women. Indeed anyone has the right to define themselves in whatever way they want. However that does not mean that other people have to accept that definition. Personally I have no reason to doubt anyone who makes such a claim, whatever it may mean, but many women do challenge the assertion by trans women that they are women.
I find these arguments about ‘rights’ similar to the Zionist claim that Jews (not the ‘wrong sort’) have the ‘right to define anti-Semitism’ which is conveniently structured so as to defend Israel not Jews. People are what they are and semantic arguments about how you define something, including gender, does not actually change anything.
The right to self define is also a meaningless right since rights historically have been won in the struggle for freedom against those seeking to deny them. Free speech for example. Today ‘rights’ are increasingly seen as a badge of identity not an expression of what we have won and fought for collectively and what we have yet to win.
Those who are critical of gender ideology and gender fluidity and who disagree that trans women are women are not fascists and no platforming them is an abuse of that tactic. Those targeted are usually feminists. A number of women who I know, mainly older women, are critical of the argument that trans women are women.
They should not be treated as fascists and to do so suggests that those seeking to ban them have little confidence in their own arguments. Nor are they simply being bigoted. Many women feel that trans women are intruding on areas that are women only.
I accept that a number of people suffer from body dysphoria, the feeling of being born to the wrong gender or a gender different from one they identify with. I am opposed to any discrimination against trans women or men. That should go without saying. But just because someone identifies as a woman, when they have a penis and are biologically a man, should they be accepted as a woman without question?
In many situations such as toilets it makes little difference who uses them. But is it really being suggested that men claiming to be women but with male genitalia should be sent to women’s prisons, given that there have been a number of cases such as that of Karen White and Michelle Winter where female prisoners have been attacked and raped? I also accept that putting transwomen in men’s prisons can also be dangerous for the trans woman, which is why 3rd spaces are needed. The situation is not an easy one to resolve in the context of a repressive institution such as prison.
There are situations such as women’s refuges where it is right that if women who are already vulnerable are fearful of trans women being there that they should be listened to and not dismissed. To pretend that they are simply paranoid or prejudiced is to dismiss their fears for the sake of an ideology.
It is a fact that with few exceptions we are born either male or female. Gender is a social construct however and it can be changed. The fact that trans activists have displayed, on occasions, the aggression and violence associated with men, in their attacks against what they describe as ‘transphobes’ suggests that self-defining as a trans woman does not automatically mean that one is a woman or that one even identifies as a woman.
It is also noticeable that this problem doesn’t arise with women becoming trans men. Presumably men don’t feel a threat from women who change their gender identity. Why?
Since gender is neither fixed nor binary, I don’t understand the objection to separate transgender identities and spaces.
When someone has transition surgery it is clearly different. Noone would go through that if they didn’t identify with another sex. That’s not to say that surgery simply removes at a stroke years of male socialisation to say nothing of them retaining the male physique and strength. This clearly poses problems in terms of competitive sport.
Self identification however is different and there is no point in simply asserting, as if a catechism, that men claiming to be women are in fact women. This becomes especially problematic when looking at men claiming to be women who have raped or sexually assaulted women. I accept that this is rare, however that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen or exist. Likewise the overtly misogynist social media posts by trans activists, some of which I am posting here suggests that there is at least a section of trans women who are openly misogynist.
The attack on those who are gender critical, TERFs, is similar to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations. Women I know who don’t accept gender ideology and trans activism don’t hate trans people but they do question the assumptions on which this activism is based.
It certainly doesn’t surprise me that the Alliance for Workers Liberty, which has provided the ‘left anti-Semitism’ ideology which the Labour Right has utilised to attack anti-Zionists should be involved in a similar attempt to silence feminists.
Ben Selby of the Alliance for Workers Liberty was heavily involved in the removal of Esther Giles from speaking at the SUFLPD meeting on the grounds of ‘fighting for the rights of all communities that make up our movement’. This comes from a pro-imperialist outfit that refused to call for the withdrawal of imperialist troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and which supports the Apartheid State of Israel. Presumably Palestinians and Arabs aren’t included in these ‘communities’.
My own experience of these issues is limited to being attacked by a transwoman at the picket of Sodastream in Brighton some years ago. The particular individual, Chelsea was her name, carried a handbag but that was the limit to her feminine wiles.
There was the infamous attack on feminists in Hyde Park in September 2017 which resulted in a number of women suffering injuries after being attacked by trans activists. A Woman’s Place issued a statement after one of those activists was convicted of assault. It is difficult not to see this and similar acts of aggression as an example of misogyny and male violence rather than women on women violence.
There was also an extremely aggressive and violent picket of a meeting by A Woman’s Place in Brighton during the 2019 Labour Party conference. It’s not often I agree with Simon Fanshawe, a died in the wool Blairite, but he was right when he said that yelling scum at lesbians and feminists who have been fighting for women’s rights for decades is not solidarity or diversity but aggression.
I feel enormous sympathy with transwomen but I also understand the feelings of women who are branded ‘transphobes’ when they are nothing of the sort.
There is a very easy explanation for this conflict between feminists and trans women and that is the way that identity politics, diversity and the reduction of racism to ‘hate crimes’ have depoliticized the fight for sexual and social liberation. Diversity is all about co-opting people to accept oppression rather than changing society. Class has been replaced by identity and everyone has an identity. Even the ruling class!
Tony Greenstein
* this article has been amended to make it clear that Save Our Socialists did not organise the Stand Up for Labour Party meeting.
Against no-platforming at ‘Stop the Labour Lockout’, an event billed to campaign for free speech!
Posted on February 7, 2021 by admin
Joint statement by Labour In Exile Network, Labour Left Alliance and Labour Against the Witchhunt
We are very concerned to hear that Esther Giles of the successful campaign Save Our Socialists and Labour in Exile Network, has been de-invited from the February 7 ‘Stop the Labour Lockout’ event. She was billed to speak next to Alan Gibbons and Gaya Sriskanthan of Momentum, Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union, Leah Levane of Jewish Voice for Labour and Socialist Councillors and many more.
But the day before the event, she was contacted and it was explained to her that some speakers had threatened to withdraw from the rally if Esther was allowed to speak. The reason: three years ago, she supported a comrade who was pressurised to make a statement about trans women. Esther’s feeling was that – regardless of the issue of the debate – nobody should be bullied. We continue to campaign side by side with all those oppressed by this capitalist society, including (but not only) women and all our LGBT comrades. Esther’s letter to the organisers is available here.
We very much believe in free speech in our organisations and in wider society. The best way to fight prejudice, misperceptions and misunderstandings is through education and debate and not by no platforming comrades on the left. Over the last five years, the mere accusation of a Labour Party member being antisemitic has been enough to get them suspended, disciplined and vilified. It is therefore more than ironic that an event billed to fight for “free speech in the Labour Party” should decide to no-platform a speaker merely for standing by a comrade’s decision to exercise that right.
It is also highly debatable whether this event really presents a “major united left initiative”, as Jewish Voice for Labour puts it here. Neither the Labour in Exile Network, the Labour Left Alliance nor Labour Against the Witchhunt have been invited to participate in what is billed as an ongoing campaign. This is particularly troubling, as these three organisations have been among the most outspoken opponents of the purge of left-wingers and Corbyn supporters – in the case of LAW, this was the reason it was set up in the first place in 2017! All three organisations continue to fight against all unjust suspensions and expulsions that have occured in the last 5 years.
We call on the organisers and speakers of the event to:
- Renew the invite to Esther Giles;
- Oppose any new attempts to no-platform speakers; and
- Invite Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour Left Alliance and Labour in Exile Network to participate in the rally and the “ongoing campaign”.
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Transgender extremism, violence against feminist meeting at British Labour Party conference
by Nick Rogers
The debate around the meaning of sex and gender made an appearance at this year’s British Labour Party conference in Brighton. Women’s Place UK – an organisation that questions the demand that biological males who self-identify as woman should have access to women’s spaces, to all-women shortlists, and be able to stand for election as women’s officers in the labour movement – organised an unofficial fringe meeting for the Monday evening of the LP conference. Despite circulating details of the venue only an hour or so before the start time – a security precaution experience has taught them to adopt – those attending the meeting found themselves confronting a baying crowd.
I did not attend the meeting. However, a woman comrade from my Constituency LP who did provides a vivid account of what happened:
“On approaching Brighton on the train slightly late for the meeting I got a message that a younger woman and her teenage daughter were frightened to go through the mob outside the meeting. I wasn’t sure of how to find the meeting, but as soon as I left the rear entrance of the station, I heard the roar of men shouting from several streets away. I found the two women around the corner from the meeting. I encouraged them to walk with me and said that I’d ask the police there to help us through.
“As we approached, I saw a large crowd of mainly young white men, some with masks and hoods down, crowding the entrance of the venue and shouting abuse. I was just so angry at women including lesbians being threatened by a crowd of mainly young men that I put myself between the mob and the two younger women and marched them into the venue through a kind of side passage.
“In the building I met a leading feminist campaigner I know who had come out to look for the two women and hadn’t found them. She was shaking and soaking – a young man had just squirted liquid from a plastic bottle at her head and face. She realised by the time I saw her that it was water, but it could have been anything. Apparently, police saw the attack but did nothing. She has given them a photo of her assailant.
“Ironically, later on residents in the residential flats above the community rooms where the meeting took place, got fed up with the hours of noise and chucked water over the protestors. Predictably, it was later claimed by the protestors that the water was being thrown at them by meeting attendees, though we had no access to these upper storey flats.
“Inside the basement meeting hall, Onjali Rauf, a Muslim campaigner for trafficked women and award-winning children’s writer, had just begun calmly to speak, against a constant background of the windows being kicked, with the blinds shaking. Where the blinds didn’t totally cover the windows protestors were taking pictures of those of us in the hall. I saw several women from Haringey Labour in the meeting, some of whom had been shaken up by the experience of entering the venue; also Kevin Courtney, General Secretary of the National Education Union; and Simon Fanshawe, founder of Stonewall. They tweeted their disgust at the protest, and that they heard only respectful discussion and nothing in any way transphobic in the meeting. (The full transcripts of the talks are published on WPUK website so you can check for yourself.)
“The meeting was well-stewarded by the absolutely unflappable WPUK women and Brighton Resisters including some very long-standing Brighton lesbian campaigners. These women are absolutely the veterans of Gay and Lesbian Liberation, and feminist campaigns such as Greenham, Grunwicks, setting up Women’s Aid Refuges in squats in the 1970s and organising support for women in stopping National Front marches in Turnpike Lane and New Cross etc.
“We’re used to groups of young white men trying to shut us down and indeed physically attack us. However, for several of the younger women there, the experience was extremely upsetting and scary. Onjali had to leave early after speaking, in order to collect her car. She was accompanied by several stewards, so I hope she was not abused as she left. The rest of us left in groups, to be greeted by the choir of protestors singing ‘We’re better feminists than you’.
“The protest was organised by Brighton Queer AF – a group which has objected rightly to the commercialisation of Pride. I’m sure that if any of them had come into the meeting, they would have learnt a lot, and maybe found that they hold common views on lots of things with the feminists, lesbians and trans-people who are gender-critical and socialist. The involvement of anyone with either official roles in Labour or Momentum or The World Transformed in encouraging the mob is alarming and is hopefully being followed up.”
Later that evening, I met several women who were recovering from the experience of having “scum, scum, scum” screamed in their ears as they entered and left the meeting and of having endured the cacophony of banging and shouting from outside throughout the entire meeting. One of my women comrades had been spat at.
Although they were clearly shocked, I was impressed with my comrades’ determination. Some had been fairly non-committal when it came to gender self-ID and its implications for women. They had attended the meeting to find out more. From the level of intimidation they had just witnessed, they were now clear that the left and the labour movement has a problem with rationally debating the issues raised. What is more, they felt the actions of the demonstrators were an expression of blatant misogyny.
The following morning, I was personally drawn into the debate when a young member of my delegation, without consulting with the rest of us, went to the rostrum on a spurious point of order to condemn the WPUK meeting as a transphobic hate group and to denounce any delegates who had attended, calling “shame” down on them. The rest of the delegation urged me, as delegation lead, to set the record straight. Making a (possibly equally spurious) point of order, I responded from the rostrum to explain that the young man did not speak for our CLP. I went on to say that differences within our party and the broader movement could only be bridged if debate was conducted in a fraternal and comradely spirit and that everyone’s freedom of speech was protected. The previous night’s demonstrators had sought to silence debate. Their behaviour was semi-fascistic.
These two short contributions have subsequently trended in a minor way on social media and within strictly limited political circles, but widely enough to reach the eyes of one of the editors of Redline, who asked if I would contribute an article.
It was only at the end of 2017 that I became aware of the intolerant reaction of some transgender activists to anyone who challenges their newly-minted ideology, and particularly anyone who will not accept the mantra that “trans-women are women”. A well-regarded local activist, Helen Steel, was mobbed and barracked for a prolonged period at the Anarchist Bookfair when she tried to intercede to defend some women activists who were handing out leaflets. Until then, I had always taken at face value the progressive nature of the demands of transgender activists – admittedly, the debate around these issues was peripheral to the political discussions I was mostly involved in. I had previously not heard the term of abuse, TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), which was yelled at Helen for an hour or two.
It was the 2017 incident at the Anarchist Bookfair that prompted a group of us in the local Labour Party to investigate. It was not long before we realised that something was far wrong, not only with the way the debate was being conducted, but also with the thinking, or ideology, that the most extreme transgender activists had developed. If a trans-woman is any biological male who “feels” like a woman (and that is what the advocates of self-ID tell us) and “trans-women are women” then being a woman (or alternatively a man) is simply a feeling in your head.
Now, those of us who were quickly becoming gender-critical instinctively applaud anyone who challenges gender norms of behaviour, including in what they wear and in how they interact with other people and wider society. It is our understanding that gender is a social construct. In many ways it is oppressive, particularly to women, although it also places unhealthy psychological expectations and constraints on what it is to be a man in our society. We should all be rebels against gender. In a sense, the objective of socialists should be to abolish gender.
We also are aware that some people are so uncomfortable with the gender that society imposes on them that they wish to live their lives in the opposite gender. Others are unhappy with the biological sex into which they are born and may pursue medical intervention. There is an important discussion to be had about what we need to do as a society to help transgender people lead “liveable lives”.
However, we believe that there is a material, biological basis to the oppression that women have both endured and fought against for thousands of years – as a Marxist, this is axiomatic to me. The role of women in the reproduction of species – through nine months of pregnancy, then birth and taking the major role in caring for young people – is the economic foundation of all hierarchical, patriarchal societies. It is the biologically-imposed “work” that women do and from which men benefit.
According to Engels, the “world historic defeat of the female sex” represented by the spread of the neolithic revolution (the emergence of agriculture, animal husbandry, land ownership, social elites and so on) made of women the first exploited class.
Today, it remains the case that women’s role in reproduction, and differences in the biology of women and men, such as average size and strength, must be taken into account in the social arrangements we build, if we are to move towards true equality. Yet the ideology of the transgender extremists refuses to acknowledge biological sex as the basis of the division of our species into men and women.
It is already having a heavy impact on the language used by public bodies. And, remember, this is before any change is made to Britain’s Gender Recognition Act. Increasingly, the word “woman”, and other words associated with women, such as “mother”, are being disappeared from public discourse in relation to those issues that have the most direct impact on women’s lives. Public information publications and online sites are more and more often speaking of “pregnant people”, “menstruators”, “people with cervixes”, “chest feeders”, and other bizarre terms that eradicate actual women. This is justified as being trans-inclusive – since trans-men can give birth, menstruate, suffer from cervical cancer and trans-women cannot.
Meanwhile, the ability of women to discuss the nature of their lives as a collective group, and to fight against unfair and unequal treatment is being taken away from them.
So how is it that references to women are being progressively erased from the language? And how is it that delegates at Labour Party conference can cheer news of an assault on a meeting of women activists? It seems to me that two strands of political and social development have come together.
First, there is the long night of neoliberalism under which we have weathered successive attacks on socialist ideas and the very concept of people coming together on a collective basis to fight for their rights. This political environment has nurtured the kind of post-modernist nonsense that passes for cutting-edge thinking in many of the social science and humanities departments of our academic institutions. The glorification of self has replaced grand narratives.
It has encouraged a relativist, individualistic approach to thinking about social issues. Thus we see activists emerging from these institutions insisting that what goes on in people’s heads is more important than material reality.
These developments are obviously profoundly un-Marxist (and deliberately so). They are also entirely unscientific – science being concerned with probing beneath the veil of immediate experience in order to uncover more profound truths.
To a large extent, adopting a scientific approach involves abstracting from the noise of a huge quantity of data in order to build testable models that can usefully explain what is happening. In biology, one of the most basic of models is the division of sexually-reproducing species into male and female, based on their role in reproduction. Transgender ideology furiously rejects this model – at least as far as our species is concerned. It insists people’s subjective experience (or assertions about that experience) is primary and even goes as far as arguing that sex is as much a spectrum as gender (it being obvious that gender, as a lived experience, is infinitely variable and malleable).
Second, we should recognise that all social change produces a backlash and that, under the guise of protecting the rights of transgender people, the advances that women made over the course of the twentieth century are being endangered.
Conservative and deeply sexist ideas such as the “female brain” and “feminine essence” are making a come-back. How else to explain being a woman or a man as a “feeling”? And the howling rage of the transgender extremists against women who dare to say that, as a biological and social category, they exist, displays clear evidence of misogyny. If something looks and sounds like a campaign against women, perhaps, by design or otherwise, it is.
There is no inherent clash between the interests of transgender people and women. Both suffer the consequences of a sexist society that demands certain behaviours based on your perceived biological sex. Both transgender people and women would benefit from working together to challenge gender stereotypes. In fact, gender and the concepts of femininity and masculinity are their common enemy.
Keir Hardie, the founder of the British Labour Party, included votes for women in the 1888 platform of the first election he fought (as an independent). He remained a supporter of the women’s movement throughout his political life and worked closely with the most radical of the Pankhursts, Sylvia. What is truly “shameful” is that, despite this inheritance, 101 years after the campaign for women’s suffrage achieved its first breakthrough in Britain, women within the Labour Party are facing the fight of their lives to assert their right to organise, campaign and speak out.
What’s wrong with gender ideology
by Daphna Whitmore
Update: On 25 February 2019, Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin announced that the Government would put on hold a Bill to allow sex self ID pending better consultation and investigation by the Crown Law Office into legal issues that had been raised. This article has had photos and screenshots added on 31 August that show just how misogynistic many trans activists are. The photos also show that most trans activists are not transgender, but are males with a deep hatred of women.
Science is under attack as universities, workplaces and governments are drawing up policies and laws to codify a fiction that makes creationism look sensible. We are supposed to believe that trans women are women, lesbians can have penises, and biological sex is a social construct. The idea that a man can literally be transformed into a woman, and a woman can be a man, has gained ground over the past decade.
Parliament is considering a law that would enable anyone to change their sex on their birth certificate by simply filling out a form. A similar bill, the Gender Recognition Act, is being promoted in the UK by the Conservative government.
This self ID process is supposed to ease the suffering of people with severe body dysphoria. This is a rare condition in which a person is tormented by the belief that he or she was born in the wrong body. However, the majority of trans women activists do not have body dysphoria and do not want any medical or surgical procedures. The majority are hanging on to their penises and are aggressively demanding rights that impact on women. People who have opposed self ID have faced a storm of abuse from trans activists. Nearly all of the abuse is aimed at women, particularly gender critical women who they call TERFS (Trans exclusionary radical feminists). (See here for thousands of examples).
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Trans activists at the Melbourne International Women’s Day demonstration 2019 use the slogan “TERF graves are gender neutral bathrooms!” as a play on “I’ll piss on your graves” |
Self ID would mean a male could simply say he is a woman and demand to share women and girls’ changing rooms. Biological males are now competing in women’s sports and the women are expected to applaud their victories. Women are being told they must open women’s groups to include males who identify as women and to do so with graciousness or be called transphobes, bigots or worse. Lesbians are being told they should embrace these new penis-bearing-women. Women in prisons have been harmed and face danger as males claiming transgender status are moved to women’s prisons. In Canada and Australia beauticians who provide women-only services have been taken to court for refusing to wax the hairy scrotums of trans women.
It is important to differentiate between biological sex and gender as a key plank of the trans ideology involves conflating the two. Sex is biological, whereas gender describes social and cultural behaviours. Biological sex is observable at birth while gender is something that is socialised and happens over time. So babies with male genitalia have XY chromosomes, and those with female genitalia have XX chromosomes. Biological sex is determined by birth genitalia and this corresponds 99.6% of the time to chromosome sex. That level of scientific validity is extremely high. Contrast that with the trans ideology that ‘sex is assigned at birth’, as if it is some random act of a blind midwife. Unfortunately the Ministry of Health and other government departments have taken up the ‘sex is assigned at birth’ linguistic hooey.
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This trans activist at Melbourne International Women’s Day demonstration 2019 with a special message of hate for women who think the sex industry exploits
Here are more images from trans activists at the Melbourne International Women’s Day demonstration 2019:
The trans ideologues claim sex is a spectrum because some people are intersex. This, they say, proves that there are all sorts of sexes or genders. Intersex conditions are rare; they are usually still female or male, and most often are infertile. Just as other developmental anomalies occur such as limb deformities involving extra digits, there are deformities in sex, but this does not mean that sex is a spectrum. Furthermore, intersex people have complained about being used by the trans activists as intersex are not transgender. Their objections have been completely ignored.
Sexual reproduction was a path evolution took 1.2 billion years ago and it has remained dimorphic in that it has two distinct gametes. Sexual reproduction – in plant and animal species – entails two sexes, not a spectrum of sexes. Small gametes are male (sperm in humans) and large gametes are female (ova in humans). Sexual reproduction is simply the fusion of the nuclei of male and female gametes. If sex was a spectrum there would be a number of intermediate gametes. There are no intermediates. The development of sex characteristics are complex, but the end of the process is male or female in over 99 percent of people. *
Self ID is a gift to predatory males. Fill out a form and you are a woman. Why should females be forced to share intimate spaces against their will with males? If females want to get changed or shower without males, or sleep in rooms without males, that will no longer be enforceable. Should it become law women-only spaces would be made free access for any male who declares himself a woman. Violent offenders could be transferred to women’s prisons. It would further encourage biological males competing in women’s sports. In healthcare where it is vital to know the biological sex of the patient there will be wrong diagnoses, wrong treatments, and likely deaths. If this sounds far fetched consider blood transfusions where male and female blood is treated separately. Blood donations from females are used for products such as immune globulin, instead of being transfused directly to patients because of potential for antibodies from pregnancies, (including miscarriages – which are sometimes unknown). These antibodies can cause severe reactions, an acute lung injury, and sometimes death. Transgender people who conceal their biological sex in the healthcare setting are endangering themselves and others.
Transgender people have the right to live free from discrimination but the trans activists are undermining this. By demanding women give up women-only spaces and sex-based protections the trans activists’ campaign is far from progressive. The mess we now face, with a law change pending, is not just the fault of trans activists. They have been enabled by a chorus of woke-folk who have been schooled in post-modernist subjectivism.
The UK parliament has had 100,000 submissions on the Gender Recognition bill, many as a result of a mobilisation campaign by progressive women’s organisations. Supporters of women’s rights in New Zealand should sit up and take note.
Speak Up For Women is a campaigning group set up to defend the rights of women and girls, in opposition to the Government’s proposal that a person’s sex should be a question of choice, or self-identification, on birth certificates.
For more on the consequences of self ID read Renee Gerlich’s article published on the Canadian website Feminist Current.
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*The trans ideologues like to bring up XY females who give birth as proof that a spectrum exists. These females may appear to be XY on karyotyping done with blood or saliva samples, however more sensitive tests show they usually have a patchwork of XY and XO cells and tissues. Their Y chromosome doesn’t have a functioning SRY gene (which triggers male sex development), and XO functionally directs the reproductive development, leading to female sex and anatomy. Similarly, some males are born with XX and develop as males due to the translocation of a tiny section of the sex determining region of the Y chromosome.See also
There is a major split in the LGBTQ community between the letter L and the letter T