By Edie Wyatt
The Queensland government, ever keen to distract from its own corruption, has decided to erase women’s rights to privacy, dignity and safety in public spaces and facilities by deleting the connection between sex and bodies.
It is reported that the Queensland Parliament are considering allowing people to change their birth certificate to “better recognise trans and gender diverse people”. In effect, the proposed change to the Births, Deaths and Marriage Registration Act 2003 will allow people to change their legal sex for all purposes with a simple declaration.
When I say “considering”, remember Queensland has no upper house, and the Palaszczuk government has indicated that this legislation will go through without consultation with women. The justification for this proposed legislation, is that transgender identified males should not need surgery to have their “gender identity” validated on documentation.
The ability to change your sex with a declaration is referred to colloquially as “Self ID” and this is law in several other Australian states. The language in the reporting around this issue is filled with nonsense and propaganda, deliberately conflating sex, gender, gender identity and gender expression. Filling out a form at the department of Births, Deaths and Marriages will not change a person’s “gender identity” – it changes their legal sex to be the opposite of their actual sex and that has implications for other members of society.
The proposed legislation does not allow an alignment of gender identity with documents, it allows any man, for any reason, to change his legal sex to female and vice versa. There is no way to prove a man does not have a female gender identity, because the concept of gender identity itself is defined entirely by the state in consultation with state funded lobby groups who’s funding is dependent on them developing policy that is useful to the state.
The grass is greener where it is watered, and the brands of feminism and LGBTQ identity ideology that have been watered by state and capital is unsurprisingly not the fulfilment of women’s and gay rights, but the legal extinguishing of women and gays. Without sex, there is no recognition of the bodily rights of women; without sex, there is no sexuality and there can be no same sex attraction.
“Gender identity” is the checkmate to the resistance movements and lobbying of any material sex-based need or protections. Gender identity ideology, that puts a special category of men at the top of an inverted oppression hierarchy, has been grown exclusively in academic books, universities and government departments and been proliferated by committed activists almost exclusively funded by government and now corporations. Gender identity activism is literally the social justice movement to end all social justice movements.
Self ID legislation flips reality and makes sex an ethereal concept and gender identity a concrete characteristic that is protected by the state that invented it. Under self ID, “woman” is a gender category that can only legally be protected in men. Once a man legally becomes a female, he is protected with gender identity legislation and the woman can claim no sex protections against him because sex becomes a legal fiction underneath gender identity. You essentially have a class of men that have authority over, not just women’s spaces, but the language we use to talk about ourselves.
In Washington State this week, an 80-year-old woman was banned from a public pool when she asked a man to leave the dressing rooms where little girls were using open stalls to go to the toilet and where she was in a state of undress. The man refused and the YMCA employee said if the old lady didn’t leave, they would have to call the police. They then permanently banned the 80-year-old swimmer from the swimming facility. Self ID switches the power balance in places where women and girls are undressing to a situation where women have to submit to the demands of males with a female gender identity or face the police that are commissioned to protect them.
I wrote a few weeks ago about Queensland woman Sall Grover, who was facing a discrimination hearing for her business model that excluded biological males from a social networking app. Many of us suspected that the consequent withdrawal of the case by the complainant was a temporary measure, in anticipation of this long-rumoured legislation.
Under this proposed change to Queensland legislation, Sall will have no right under Queensland law to make a single-sex digital space, because women will no longer exist in Queensland as a sex. Women will have no legal right to draw a boundary around their spaces with their sex.
For the material life of women, Self ID not only affects toilets and change rooms, but dating spaces, crisis accommodation, domestic violence and rape shelters, girl guides, prisons, and hospital wards. There has been a wholesale loss of dignity for women who require single-sex facilities to attend to menstruation, incontinence and personal issues, or who just need social or safety retreat from males.
In Scotland, a transgender identified male who heads up a rape crisis centre has said that raped women who are uncomfortable in the presence of males are “bigots” in the same way as a racists are bigots. Self ID legislation turns victims into perpetrators, as women are shamed to override their instincts and allow males into areas where they and their children are vulnerable or else face the police.
The WiSpa incident in California saw a male sex offender, parade around semi erect, in a facility where women and girls were naked. When reporting on this issue The Guardian called feminists protesting the indignity of this for women and girls, “anti-trans”. They claimed reports of the man being a sex offender were erroneous, when the man was subsequently verified as a registered sex offender. Because the man was legally female it became clear that Self ID laws may in fact de-criminalise what used to be called “indecent exposure” and criminalise what used to be called “safeguarding”.
In Canada, where the erasure of sex has been taken to its insane logical conclusion, plans have been revealed on Vancouver Island for a genderless high school, complete with “genderless washrooms”. Here is a world where insecure teenage girls have no physical retreat from boys who are jacked up on the massive amount of testosterone that is required to turn a boy into a man.
You won’t hear of too many problems with Self ID around Australia because the cartel of progressive media has a blackout on stories to do with the issues of trans identified males in women’s spaces. This is why in Melbourne, where Self ID is law, Holly Lawford Smith has set up a website called “No conflict they said” for women to document their lives under a regime that has erased sex.
The gaslighting and grooming involved in telling women to sit down on this issue is sometimes bizarre and sometimes violent. While at a protest against self ID laws recently, a man screamed in my face that he couldn’t wait till we were all dead and trans people could be free. Another yelled that “no wonder everyone hates women because they won’t shut the f**k up”.
Women embracing the new government approved feminism ignore that the emergence of single-sex public spaces is a vital part of the history of the women’s revolution. Women only gained their own first single-sex public facilities in the late 19th and early 20th century as part of the inclusion of women in public life.
Women’s bodies have needs for care, protection and dignity in society. Not only do we give birth, menstruate, and suffer birth injuries that can lead to a lifetime of incontinence, we have a right to our own culture of solidarity, protection, and care for one another, separate from the life of males. Without our own sex category, the political and social meetings of women have gone underground in many countries.
I will not acknowledge any male person as female in any circumstances. I do not believe any person can “feel” like a woman because no person with a male body can have any idea what it is like to have a female body. I understand that with hate crime legislation, which is the next step, I could go to prison for this stance, and that that prison could include male people who hate me, but we must take a stand.
The good news is that activism sometimes works. In the UK the “gender neutral” trend of public toilets is reversing, with the building codes now changing back to compelling construction companies to provide women with their own facilities. It is significant to mention that Britain has managed to stave of Self ID laws with persistent activism from feminists and LGB groups and is one of the few remaining places where women have an absolute right to sex protections (even if these have at times been compromised by gender identity ideology).
If the Queensland government believes feminine males are vulnerable, it should find another way to protect them, women’s rights and protective infrastructure was not built as a safe space for vulnerable males and certainly not as a validation mechanism for them.
Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism from Brisbane. She tweets at @MsEdieWyatt and blogs on Substack. This piece was originally posted on Edie’s substack and has been re-posted with permission.
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