The Harms of Gender Identity to BC Women
Talk given by Kathleen Piovesan of the Vancouver Lesbian Collective (VLC) at Feminists Speak Out, a public event held and hosted by VLC on March 21, 2024
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a public event on the topic of gender identity in Vancouver. By my count, it’s been just over 4 years.
Since then there is more talk about gender identity in Canada. And that’s positive. Yet, governments, public bodies, and private enterprise have already incorporated the idea of gender identity into laws, policies or programs ahead of resolving or even having public debate about its impacts. And to be clear when I say gender identity, I am not referring to the individuals who understand themselves as having a gender identity, but about a belief system that says that an internal identity supersedes the material fact of biological sex. Now feminists are forced to defend ourselves against criticism that we have not properly considered the interests and needs of men who identify as women in our organizations and campaigns. Our criticism of the concept of gender identity, its impacts on our advocacy and on women, have mostly been ignored, sidelined, or maligned. Yet, we have a big stake in whether men can be counted as women and therefore we don’t accept no debate.
Feminists will not trivialize the importance of the female body to the social condition of women
Many if not most issues in the feminism of the second wave, which is still very much relevant in our contemporary world, relate in some way to the female body and its place in society. Reproductive justice, women’s health, women’s sexuality, and of course, male violence against women are all fundamentally issues of our female bodies and their place in society. In taking up these causes, feminists demonstrated not only that social forces interfere with the autonomy and integrity of our physical bodies, our reproductive capacities, and our sexuality, but that this treatment also means our social roles and our work are less valued, our poverty greater, and our public lives more constricted. Feminists, especially women of colour and working class women, also showed that pervasive race and class inequality shape and compound the social meanings of sex. The intersection of race, class and sex inequality increases the likelihood that a woman will be subject to assault by men, that she will live in poverty, that she will be imprisoned often for non-violent crime, and that her labour and her body will be highly exploited.
In the ascendancy we experience now of more right-wing politics coupled with a failure of left movements to recognize and address the material basis of women’s inequality, women of colour and Indigenous women experience greater threats and deeper constraints. While our feminist advocacy has made mistakes in this regard, we know that the strongest version of feminism starts from all these material conditions, those of race, class, and sex.
We defend our feminist victories and our sex-based rights
And, so, we’re here tonight. Rejecting the pressure to treat our own material reality as trivial, extraneous, or irrelevant in the new sex-gender politics. In so doing, we are honouring our own feminist accomplishments and those of other women.
Among those accomplishments are feminist anti-violence organizing, through which we now know that male violence against women is pervasive and its threat acts as a force to control all women. We have feminist anti-violence organizations that act as a restraint on this violence and an escape route. We know, too, how the rest of our society can best respond. As a result of feminist protest, we now have a law on prostitution that recognizes that the prostitution exchange is fundamentally unequal in terms of sex, race, and class. It criminalizes the buyers and pimps who are overwhelmingly men and not the prostituted people who are almost all women. This is only a start, but a very important one, to addressing the entitlement of men to purchase women for sex. As a result of campaigns of Indigenous feminists, sexism in the Indian Act has been challenged, with Indigenous women with status now more able to pass that status to their children regardless of whom they marry. While this redresses only a small portion of the sexism of colonialism, it ensures women and their children retain important rights, protection, and dignity. Because of feminist strategizing, we successfully fought back against a legal challenge to women-only organizing, and secured that right for all of us. While we still have to secure the social acceptance of this right, it is an important reinforcement to feminism. And, as a result of feminist advocacy, sex is and remains a protected equality ground in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is a tool we can draw on to advance women’s equality in Canada.
Feminists, from every cross-section of women in this country, fought for these gains against all odds, including backlash, belittlement, defunding, and misogyny in all its many forms. While women in Canada have a lot still to fight for, our victories remain our victories. And we will defend them and advance on them.
We are still proud lesbians
Of course, there are losses too. Several are particular to lesbians. So-called pro-LGBT organizations now dare pretend that the material reality of sex is unimportant to lesbians. They have decided to drop our concerns in favour of men who identify as lesbians and who insist on a right to be included in lesbian spaces and gatherings. Lesbians don’t want to include these men in our lesbian social groups or in our sex lives. And stories are coming out about harassment and assault in these spaces though these are mostly still shared only among sympathetic lesbians or anonymously online.
Lesbians were also among the first women to transition. When I came out in the early 2000s, to transition or not was a live conversation among the lesbians I came to know. Misogynist attitudes were present then and now, like beliefs that lesbian sexuality, like all women’s sexuality, is fundamentally for men or that it is nothing more than a porn category or, conversely, that we are ugly, sexless, irrelevant women. The long need to hide our realities has meant our histories are buried and can now be more easily retold to fit new gender narratives. Lesbians today are confronted with myths that there were no lesbians in the past or if there were we aren’t much like them, that our struggles are entirely new, that other women have not rejected feminine comportment, interests or appearance or struggled against their constraints, and that there are no lesbians or other women in whom we can be proud or from whose lives we can take inspiration. In this culture, it can be so tempting to see oneself as not like the other members of our sex, as not like lesbians. In response, Vancouver Lesbian Collective created public expressions of lesbian pride. And consequently, faced backlash from so-called LGBT organizations.
BC institutions have illegitimately redefined the category woman in favour of gender identity
The current challenge in BC is to fight back against the redefinition of the category woman accomplished by privileging gender identity over and above biological sex. And there is a lot to do.
As of January 2022, the province of BC has a self-ID policy, meaning that the government legislated that anyone can fill out a form with Vital Statistics and name their gender identity as their sex. A man can call himself a woman or a woman call herself a man and have this new designation recorded on all BC legal identification documents and in the vital statistics of the province. There is no question that people who are trans-identified need a way to operate in the world and that might include some kind of change to ID. But, the move to include gender identities within the category biological sex, and therefore alter the meaning of the category in favour of gender identity, was brought in without consultation with women, women’s groups, and without any obvious plans to monitor its impacts.
There are many other examples of institutional changes to privilege gender identity over biological sex. Many of you have probably heard about men being transferred to women’s prisons. This is happening in BC and women are reporting harassment and assault. The BC Centre for Disease Control has produced a language guide promoting the use of sex-neutral language in health care settings, which many feminists point out confuses health messaging and leads to less attention to women’s rights and needs. In many city-run public facilities, bathrooms and change rooms are no longer sex-specific. Women, like one just this month in Burnaby, BC report voyeuristic and sexually harassing behaviour in mixed-sex bathrooms and changing facilities, even including sexual assault. Private corporations are implementing diversity, equity and inclusion programs instead of genuine equality in hiring and pay, with women and men of colour reporting their concerns about sex and race equality in the workplace are sidelined.
And lest we think these changes are all new, as far back as the mid-1990s, the BC Human Rights Tribunal found against Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and later the Vancouver Lesbian Connection when they each refused to admit a male to female transsexual into their organizations. The Vancouver Lesbian Connection folded. Vancouver Rape Relief persisted and fought back, eventually winning the right to women-only membership, which they maintain to this day. Nevertheless, the willingness of the Tribunal to hear the cases, despite established exceptions allowing women-only groups, and then finding against each organization, has gone down in history as a victory of human rights over feminism as if feminists, in asserting women’s rights, were somehow working against the human rights of trans-identified people. This rhetoric, as Lee Lakeman has pointed out, is a total misrepresentation. What these decisions really did was to start to enshrine a new concept called trans rights over and above those of women.
The affirmation model is a step backward on women’s rights
It's possible that accommodating the human rights of people who claim a gender identity may require changes to facilities, protocols, or anti-discrimination policies. However, right now the idea of what constitutes non-discrimination for such people is quite mixed up with the idea of affirmation. Affirmation not only in the sense of affirming the gender identity claim itself, but also affirming that gender identity is a characteristic of a person in general and that that characteristic is akin to or more relevant than biological sex. We think this affirmation model is a cop out. It’s a way institutions are actually avoiding the question of what is discrimination against people claiming a gender identity and therefore what constitutes non-discrimination. They can pretend to champion human rights, such as by creating sex-neutral facilities and language guides with very little effort or cost to them because all of these have been offloaded to women who are left to deal with the impacts and conflicts that result. Imposing new demands on or removing accommodations from women, or any other equity-seeking group, is not an advance of human rights. It is a step backward on women’s rights. And, we believe, will not ultimately improve the situation for trans-identified people.
Illegitimate institutional changes have emboldened individuals to discriminate against women
Institutional changes have helped embolden a broad range of state and non-state actors in BC who feel entitled to punish individual women and women’s groups who dare to challenge gender identity politics.
University administrators have hounded or been complicit in hounding women out of work and study at universities.
Other employers have been complicit in the sexual harassment of female employees by trans-identified males.
Non-profit housing and service organizations have pushed out or silenced workers, volunteers, and even service users, including in cases of sexual harassment by trans-identified males.
Individuals have harassed women and some men on the street for supporting women-only feminist advocacy
LGBT events and societies have harassed and banned lesbians
Labour-left organizations, the former mayor of the City of Vancouver, and activists have labeled individual feminists and women’s groups as bigots
Government bodies have denied or rescinded funding to women’s groups who advocate for women-only space.
Women-only space is necessary to women’s political agency
So, who benefits when women are pushed out, silenced, defunded, deplatformed, belittled and intimidated? Obviously, some men gain opportunities they would not have had otherwise. But, also there is less space for feminism, for the only movement that pushes back against undue male power. It is not any and every woman who is pushed out. It is, in the main, women who advocate feminist positions on sex and gender.
When we fight to retain the category sex, in its original meaning, we do so to preserve the rights we have already won and sustain our capacity to fight for the freedom and wellbeing of women. When we fight for single sex spaces, yes, it is in part for our safety, but also for our political agency. Feminists have chosen women-only political organizing in BC and around the world over decades because it is in women-only formations that we put our concerns first. Women-only organizing has produced the most effective grassroots feminist advocacy around the world. And, lest you think I am saying that men have no role in feminism, I am not. Men are very welcome allies. But, not at the centre of our organizations.
We mobilize our feminist anger and stand with other women who resist
Campaigns against feminists are instilling a mix of fear and anger. We heard stories of women afraid to come here tonight because they thought even coming to a public event discussing feminist resistance to the harms of gender identity might jeopardize their livelihoods, their social groups, or their physical safety.
At the same time, many of the women and some men who have been pressured as I just described have not been cowed by the attacks they have experienced. In fact, many are sitting here tonight. There are women and men in this audience who have been defending women’s single sex spaces and feminist organizing in BC for decades.
Further, many more of you came here tonight even though you might not have known what to expect or might have been afraid. That kind of action and more is urgently needed and is already a start to changing this situation.
One of the most prominent examples of a campaign in BC to instill fear amongst those who advocate a feminist position on sex and gender just wrapped up two final days of testimony. The BC College of Nurses and Midwives used public funds to first investigate and then prosecute over more than 20 days of hearings, a BC Nurse, Amy Hamm for gender critical views. As they stated at the start of proceedings, they have never had a hearing like this, namely one in which they had received no complaints about her nursing practice. Instead, the College accepted to use their institutional power to demonstrate what can happen when a woman speaks up, as Amy did, persistently, publicly, and unapologetically in support of another woman (JK Rowling), about the realities of biological sex, the harms of gender identity, and for the protection of women’s sex-based rights.
This case has brought a chill among nurses. Several have told us their direct experiences and observations in their workplaces. These include workplaces where gender identity is the main patient record while biological sex is pages deep in the file or where colleagues police language around gender and sex regularly. Nurses are by and large women, many of whom are working class, women of colour, Indigenous, and/or immigrant. They have a stake in the debates about sex and gender and yet are warned clearly to not take part.
At the Vancouver Lesbian Collective, we could have allowed ourselves to accept this lesson also. To stay silent and not open ourselves to similar kinds of attack. But even seeing the costs Amy and other women have paid for their public persistence, we thought the cost of silence was too great because silence, while necessary for some, also means we cannot resist the harms of privileging gender identity over biological sex, harms that fall disproportionately on women and that challenge feminist possibilities.
So, we mobilized our feminist anger and planned this event tonight at which we are featuring two courageous and generous women who, like many before and many after, have also refused to be silenced and instead persistently, publicly, and unapologetically offered their leadership defending the interests of women and of feminists.
We hope you will take our collective example, and in your own ways, in your own names, be brave, be public, tell the truth, stand up for women, stand up for lesbians, and stand up for feminism.
Thank you