Trans rights and feminism – it’s not a zero-sum game
By Helen Said, diversity and equity advocate, Melbourne Australia
I am a proud older generation activist who embraced 1970s feminism. As
a young woman, I did not fit the stereotypes – I excelled in the “unfeminine”
field of mathematics, I enjoyed political discussion, I did not want to become
financially dependent upon a man and I avoided uncomfortable, sexist fashions.
Feminism allowed me to be more fully myself.
It is disappointing to me that some older feminists would prefer not to
allow transgender and non-binary people to be more fully themselves. Some feminists
have been labelled Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) because they insist
on enforcing the male-female binary onto the entire population. Trans and
non-binary people disrupt their particular feminist doctrine. I think we have
to embrace an evolving concept of feminism that can make room for more
diversity.
Gender non-conforming women in sports
Trans women, intersex women and women who fail discredited
gender tests have been the subject of TERF hysteria in recent times. All
women, without exception, should be able to enjoy sports without this harassment.
It shouldn’t be up to individual athletes, like Imane Khelif, to sue TERFs and
other intolerant critics. We need anti-hate speech laws that genuinely protect
our most vulnerable. Life is already hard enough for gender non-conforming people.
Nevertheless, real questions have been raised about fairness within women’s
sports, and these need creative solutions.
Although I am hopeless at sport (a downside of my otherwise wonderful
Autism), as an activist, I would like to see all of these gender sports issues
addressed. I feel greater investment in women’s sports would create more
opportunities for all women. I would advocate for 4 medals in all women’s Olympic
sports – platinum (1st), gold (2nd), silver (3rd)
and bronze (4th). Even if some of these medals were won by trans
women, intersex women or women who fail discredited gender tests, if there were
4 women’s medal categories in each sport instead of 3, there would still be many
more medals for women overall. This might not be best solution; this simply demonstrates
that solutions exist.
Affirmative Action (AA) in politics
I belong to the Australian Labor Party which proudly embraces AA for
women. Under this rule, we need 50% of all positions within our party to go to
women. For example, I have been elected to my branch executive, partly because I
am a woman. I think this is fair because I spent many years bringing up kids
alone and not being able to attend night time meetings, so I am not as well-known
as some of the men. I have a lot to offer my branch and women are more likely
to get involved in political activity if they see other women being prominent
at meetings.
AA has seen parties of government, both federal and state, go from
being almost all male when I was growing up, to 50-50 male and female in recent
years. This is great news for women, for example, since Labor adopted AA (also
a Greens policy), women’s superannuation and childcare has seen a boost,
abortion has been de-criminalised, domestic violence is taken more seriously
and we have just concluded a world-first Women’s Pain Inquiry.
Nothing is perfect in politics and parties of government become
bureaucratic. We often change ideas and views about gender quite quickly, but
it takes agitation, and months or years of democratic processes for these
changes to be reflected within party structures.
For example, Victorian Labor has a Values Statement, to be read out at
the beginning of each meeting. The Values Statement was adopted about 4 years
ago, specifically naming racism, sexism and homophobia as being unwelcome in
our party. After two years of agitation by some members with disability, (including
myself as co-founder of Neurodivergent Labor), our message cut through. Opposition
to ableism was added to the Victorian Labor Values Statement by Conference in
2023. A further change, to add transphobia to the list, was finally adopted in
2024. I am hoping that ageism becomes a thing within the next couple of years
as well.
The process of calling for change, finding supporters, dealing with
other members’ doubts, lining up conference delegates’ support, getting the
matter put onto the agenda and having it passed at Conference, then having all
the websites updated and having the changes communicated to everyone who reads
out a values statement at every meeting – that has been a long haul. You might
ask, all this to add two words to our Values Statement? Let’s consider the
power of these two words – at every party meeting and speech night, in every
venue right around the state, every Victorian party member, from the polling
booth volunteer to the policy strategist, from the trade union rep to the Victorian
Premier, has to say, or hear the words, “Prejudice and discrimination —
including sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia — have no place
in our party.”
https://viclabor.com.au/members-updates/values-statement-update/
How do we make the leap from words to action? This is also a long
process in politics. The last two state conferences have considered extending
AA to members with disability, people from CALD backgrounds and Indigenous people,
but there are no simple formulas to determine who qualifies. We need to get
these things right for the good of our party and the people who depend on our
government. These matters have been referred to committees for more detailed
consideration. I am unsure whether AA for LGBTIQ+ people is also being
considered within the Victorian ALP. It is already part of the rules in the
Queensland ALP, where a minimum of 5% of pre-selected candidates must be
LGBTIQ+ people – see pages 34 and 35 of Queensland Labor Rules:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://queenslandlabor.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2023-Rules.pdf
Queensland, often thought to be a conservative state, shows us what is
possible. While the whole of the country benefits from having more diverse
candidates, again there is the potential for a trans or intersex person to be
questioned if they ask to be counted in the current AA female quota and to take
a place on the election ticket that is reserved for a woman (this dispute actually
happened within the Greens a number of years ago.) A separate LGBTIQ+ quota
could alleviate this situation, but I personally think it should still be
possible for a trans person, who has either lived as a woman for a substantial
amount of time, or who is currently living as a woman, to be considered for a
women’s AA position, given their direct lived experience of female gender issues
and broader gender discrimination. We should ask, how many such political
aspirants could there possibly be, in this situation, to seriously disrupt
women’s equality in politics if they are afforded the benefits of women’s AA?
Some people don’t support AA at all, and believe that political
candidates should simply be selected on merit, without regards to race, gender
or any other consideration. On the face of things, this sounds reasonable, but hundreds
of years of meritocracy is what caused us to have privileged, old, able-bodied white
men running the world in the first place. The privileged few who pre-select
candidates, in every party, are clearly biased and there is much conscious and unconscious
prejudice to overcome. Clear rules are needed to give us fairer representation.
Another consideration is, where are the women, LGBTIQ+, disabled, migrant
and Indigenous political aspirants going to come from, given the vast
disadvantages all these groups face in gaining skills and networks and coming
forward? This is where Diversity Action Plans come in. At our 2023 conference, Victorian
Labor was the first political party in Australia to adopt a Disability Action
Plan, and I have proudly been named as a contributor. We adopted a Cultural
Diversity Action Plan in 2024. It takes time, effort and will to carry out
these plans to transform our party, but the rules framework has been put in
place to make this possible.
https://thisislabor.org/disability-action-plan/
Similar reforms are clearly needed to assist LGBTIQ+ people gain a
similar level of accessibility and recognition within sections of our party. In
my own small corner of the world, at my local outer suburban working-class branch,
I successfully moved a resolution supporting bins in men’s public toilets, to enable
incontinent men and trans men who menstruate to fully access public life.
My resolution failed at a neighbouring branch, who complained about “the
wording of the resolution”, and its relevance to local council elections, and I
am pursuing their branch executive to reconsider the matter through a mutually
agreeable re-wording of the resolution. I have shared with them a number of
powerful documents regarding toilet accessibility, including the Bins4Blokes
website and the public toilet audit conducted by the nearby suburb of Banyule,
which specifically mentioned the necessity for all-gender toilet access. The
Banyule Public Toilet Plan proves that trans rights are legitimately a matter for
all local Labor Party branches and councils.
https://www.banyule.vic.gov.au/About-us/Policies-plans-strategies/Council-plans-and-strategies/Public-toilet-plan
I am currently arranging for a number of guest speakers, including
disabled party members and women of colour, to address our local branch
meetings. If re-elected to the branch executive, I will continue with the
diverse range of speakers and include neurodivergent and LGBTIQ+ speakers to
visit our branch in 2025. I am hoping that this will help make our party even
more diverse and can help pave the way for greater LGBTIQ+ inclusion and
advancement within our party.
Pronouns
Every effort should be made to honour and use the pronouns of a person’s
choice. People like myself might have spent many years believing that feminism
liberates us all, but we have to respect the fact other people have gender non-conforming
identities and feminism doesn’t address all their needs. Whether or not we
understand their reasons for adopting various identities or pronouns is not the
point. The point is to allow people to be themselves and to tell us who they
are and for us to respect their wishes.
That said, changes in pronouns are not always easy to remember,
especially for older people who grew up with a different pattern of speech. It’s
easy enough to remember to say “woman” instead of “lady”, and “gay” instead of “homosexual”,
language changes which have occurred during my time, because this involves the
substitution of only one word. When it comes to pronouns, this involves
inserting changes of grammar mid-sentence, in many sentences, during
conversations, and mistakes can easily creep in. Although a larger percentage
of Autistics are transgender, a larger percentage of Autistics are dependent upon
patterns for our learning and find unlearning these grammar rules a lot
tougher.
For me, as an Autistic who needs to listen very carefully to
conversations to get what people are talking about, when I hear someone talking
about “they”, I am wondering, does it mean one person, several people or the
impersonal “they”? I have to work this out as well as follow the conversation,
which is sometimes hard.
As someone who migrated here during the White Australia Policy era, I
have frequently heard the word “them” being used, in a sneering way, during the
othering of migrants. When someone, or a group of people, was called “them”, it
meant they were darker skinned people from “over there” and the dog whistle was
that people were supposed to dislike “them”. Having been one of “them” without
so choosing, and having repeatedly heard “them” used in this way, I do find “them”
and ‘they” quite impersonal, quite distant, but I am happy to make the effort
to say “they” and “them” if it is what others want. However, I do not want to
be called “they” or ‘them”.
It’s one thing to go back and delete the wrong pronouns in an email and
another to remember pronouns in a faster paced face-to-face conversation. In
asking people to make the effort to change their language, a similar effort
needs to be made to understand and gently correct any mistakes made. Mistakes
are different from deliberate disrespect. Communication is important and
jumping on people who make inadvertent mistakes in their use of pronouns cuts
off communication.
I once had an unfortunate conversation with a trans person (who had
grown up male), who didn’t like me pointing out that an organisation’s recruitment
photo only featured white men in the foreground. They had posted the photo and
hadn’t noticed anything wrong with it and had ignored my earlier request to
change the photo. After several complaints, and after I took my complaint
higher, they finally responded. They alleged that I was using the wrong
pronouns and genders about the people in the photo. I don’t seriously believe I
was using the wrong pronouns about the photo. I think they were just trying to shut
down my feminist perspective, by trying to portray me as some elderly,
conservative, frumpy TERF that was attacking trans people. Perhaps they were so
used to being attacked that they assumed any criticism was a form of prejudice,
who knows?
I then said, “I apologise if I have accidentally misgendered anyone in
the photo, but because everyone in the photo appears to be men, this will
discourage women from joining.” The photo was finally changed. I recognise that
this individual was not representative of trans people as a whole, but it feels
like this person was manipulating their trans status to try to shut down
feminists. This is sad as I believe in building alliances to dismantle all
elite, prejudiced hierarchies. This person seemed, to me, like a reverse JK
Rowling, stuck in a Trans VS Feminist zero-sum game, and that doesn’t help any
of us. I am happy to say that, after the photo was changed, our argument ceased
and we remained on good terms.
While I was growing up, the impersonal pronoun was always “he”, except
if it was a job ad for a kindergarten teacher for instance, then the ad would
say “she”. This was gradually replaced by he/she, which was an advance in its
day, as it was considered genderless. Of course, we now know that “he/she” implies
that everyone fits a gender binary, and we now know that this is non-inclusive
of many gender-diverse people. The advantages of “he/she” was that it was
unambiguously singular.
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