Dig

Banning transgender women from lesbian group could ‘undermine their dignity’, court hears

How fascinating. Now let’s think about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group.

Think think thinky think

Done that?

Here’s what I come up with: what about the dignity of the women in the lesbian group? Eh? What about them? Eh? Why is the “dignity” of men who want to force themselves on lesbian groups more important than the dignity of the women who don’t want them to?

Why is the purported dignity of men who pretend to be women so vastly more important than the dignity of actual women? Why do men get to hog the camera while women are pushed out into the shadows somewhere?

Transgender women could have their dignity “undermined” and be made to feel “inferior” if a lesbian group is allowed to ban them from events, a court has heard.

How does that work? You could say the same about, say, musicians. The dignity of someone with zero musical training could be undermined if professional musicians banned people who are not any kind of musicians from events. So what? Things are what they are. We’ve always done it that way, for compelling reasons.

Self-declaration is just that. We can all announce that we’re surgeons, engineers, opera singers, pilots, architects, but if we don’t have the relevant education and experience, then it’s a mistake to accept our claim. We can all announce that we’re rabbits, stones, daffodils, but since we all have background knowledge that none of those entities can announce such a thing, such announcements fall flat.

Unless it’s men announcing that they’re women.

The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) has been in the Federal Court this week, appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission (HRC) that ruled the group could not legally exclude transgender women from its public events.

The LAG does not believe people can change sex and wants to hold political and social events exclusively for “lesbian born females”. This means no males or transgender women could attend.

To do this, it must get an exemption to the Sex Discrimination Act, which ordinarily protects against discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

Which is insane. Protecting _____ on the basis of a fictional idenniny is a contradiction in terms. You can’t protect women from sex discrimination if you refuse to let women organize and argue and protest as women, without any men. If you force women to let men join in then there is no protection against discrimination.

The HRC opposes the appeal and today told the court banning trans women from such events would go against the purpose of the Sex Discrimination Act and come at “too great a cost”.

“Trans lesbians see themselves and seek to manifest themselves to the world as women and lesbians. The exclusion here seeks to perpetuate the view that actually they are neither of those things,” senior counsel for the commission, Celia Winnett, said.

Because they are neither of those things. Men are not women. Men are not lesbians. That’s not a “view”; it’s a tautology. Men are men. Men being men, they cannot be women. Not being women, they cannot be lesbians. It does not matter what they “seek to manifest themselves to the world” as. They can seek to manifest themselves as various things as a hobby or a game or a kink, if they like, but they can’t force it on other people, much less alter our understanding of women and men because of it. Play your games, but don’t try to force everyone else to play along.

Ms Winnett gave examples of exemptions, such as those issued to Australian lead mining companies in the 1990s which allowed them to only employ men because lead exposure could put women’s fertility or unborn babies at risk.

She said this was different to the current application, which had the purpose of excluding trans women just because they were transgender.

Wrong. Because they are men. Get cute all you want, but that’s the reason.