Invisible Women - WITS

[thereplycamefromanchorage]

So WITS, who appear to be a Women in Stem organisation in Ireland are saying their choice of Invisible Women for their bookclub is 'problematic' because of its lack of inclusion of transwomen and non binary people.

twitter.com/WITSIreland/status/1285980180784336896?s=20

They describe the irony of a book called Invisible Women sidelining transwomen - whilst being completely unaware of the irony that the premise of the whole book is how biological women's needs and safety has been sidelined and ignored in favour of men.

Twitter replies are heartening though.

Where is the Irish media coverage on this?

Trans women are supposed to be a subset of women, no? But it appears they read the word “women” and utterly fail to associate that with trans women. Oops.

Hah, yes. Why would you think it didn't refer to transwomen too unless....you don't really think transwoman are women?

CCP does use the word gender in the intro to the book and although I disagree with it in relation to some of the stuff she discusses, I agree with the underlying principles totally so it's a genuinely semantic issue only for me.

@Antibles

Trans women are supposed to be a subset of women, no? But it appears they read the word “women” and utterly fail to associate that with trans women. Oops.

Hah, yes. Why would you think it didn't refer to transwomen too unless....you don't really think transwoman are women?

CCP does use the word gender in the intro to the book and although I disagree with it in relation to some of the stuff she discusses, I agree with the underlying principles totally so it's a genuinely semantic issue only for me.

And a book called invisible Women should not have anything about nonbinary gender. It's like asking your child who is proud of a poem about winter she has written why she didn't include the other three seasons of the year, too.

All this strikes me as astonishing, given that the people writing all this are, I suppose, very analytical and sharp. Yet the terms in that second letter are tossed about for effect, have no clear definition at all and so on.