It’s Pride Month, a month we owe to a black trans woman named Marsha P Johnson. and yet it’s a month full of racism and transphobia.
Protecting women as an excuse for racism and denying rights to trans women has a long, problematic and bloody history. Lynching of black men was “justified” because black men were painted as rapists. Now we have Conservative, homophobic and high profile women calling for public support to roll back trans rights and crush GRA bill reform in Scotland. Yet again protection of women is the reason frequently cited. You may remember that white supremacist Dylann Roof wrote a manifesto to justify his racially motivated murders of black men as a form of protecting white women.
Women are raped, it’s an undeniable fact, but white women are statistically far more likely to be raped by white men. And the use of bathrooms by trans women (which has been happening for decades) has not resulted in an increase of the number of sexual assaults in women’s bathrooms. The idea that improving the rights and protections for trans people makes cis women more vulnerable is a false flag.
“These initiatives utilize and perpetuate the myth that protecting transgender people’s access to restrooms and locker rooms endangers the safety or privacy of others,” the letter states. “As rape crisis centers, shelters, and other service providers who work each and every day to meet the needs of all survivors and reduce sexual assault and domestic violence throughout society, we speak from experience and expertise when we state that these claims are false.”
There are women who find the label cis offensive, so desperate are they to claim that trans women can never qualify as women. Let’s not beat about the proverbial bush here, defining womanhood in the narrowest terms in order to exclude trans women, is bigotry and has nothing to do with protection or empowerment of women.
Fewer than one in ten trans people have legal recognition, meaning they cannot change the sex on their birth certificate or on their tax records.
The proposed changes to the 2004 GRA bill are designed to make it easier for trans people to be legally recognised as their correct gender, and this is the bill that people like JK Rowling are fuelling resistance against. This is a summary of the proposed bill and a link to how women (cis women) will continue to be protected under the law can be accessed from the menu of the left side - https://www.gov.scot/publications/gender-recognition-reform-scotland-bill-consultation-scottish-government/pages/6/
So if you want to discriminate against trans women, trans men and/or non binary people by pretending you are protecting cis women like me, I’ll say the same thing I did to Dylann Roof -
“Not in My Name!”
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