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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Do "sex based rights create division"?

14 replies

MondayYogurt · 20/02/2021 11:51

?

Do "sex based rights create division"?
OP posts:
Socrates11 · 20/02/2021 11:58

The amount of people who don't or won't understand basic safeguarding is disheartening. Schools are also segregated from society because children & young people are not safe from predatory adults. Cherry picking does not make a strong argument.

And "no evidence"?! oh do fuck off. Men are a danger to women and girls. Stop lying.

Xpectations · 20/02/2021 11:59

So are they now arguing that rights are like pie?

Try that sentence with another protected characteristic: it always comes down to disability-based rights and accessible toilet provision. There is no evidence...toilets should be accessible to everyone.

MichelleofzeResistance · 20/02/2021 12:05

Sex based rights only creates division between those who believe women having sex based rights wrongly excludes others from things they want. Which has missed the entire point of sex based rights.

If you don't want division, the obvious answer is additional spaces and respecting that some women need sex based rights. If on the other hand you just want women to lose sex based rights, then division is a useful word to try and suggest that women having rights causes problems. Gynephobia basically.

MichelleofzeResistance · 20/02/2021 12:07

Speed limits cause division. Speedphobia is so disheartening, after all it's not like it's really proven that it's the speed that causes the issue and it smears all those careful, responsible speeders. We shouldn't let a bad driver prejudice us against speeding.

MoltenLasagne · 20/02/2021 12:14

Obviously sex based rights cause division, they divide female facilities from male facilities. Let's not play dumb and pretend this is an overreaction when we've got the whole of history to see why it is necessary.

MondayYogurt · 20/02/2021 12:22

I won't link to the thread but it's easily searchable.
Erasing women's sex based rights is the goal.
To see it so clearly laid out (and liked) is great because there's been a lot of gaslighting, 'No we would never want to remove rights! How dare you imply that.'

Removing rights is the goal.

OP posts:
Justhadathought · 20/02/2021 12:23

Of course there are differences which result in certain types of 'division' between people and between groups of people. As human beings we are not one big amorphous blob of undifferentiated gloop.
It is natural and healthy for 'a body' to protect its own boundaries. Boundaries are indicative of a functioning and healthy defence system.

This " we should all work together" stuff is simply naive idealism. And it is designed, albeit unconsciously by many, to make people or others feel bad about their own boundaries.

HermitsLife · 20/02/2021 12:27

Well said JustHadaThought

Dalyesque · 20/02/2021 12:47

No, they create clarity and safety .

Barracker · 20/02/2021 13:22

"Women having rights upsets men."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

nauticant · 20/02/2021 14:09

Here's the context:

twitter.com/WhatTheTrans/status/1363055992372617216

The tweet is a response to an "investigation" by a "journalist".

DonkeySkin · 20/02/2021 15:23

I think the author of the tweet is correct in one sense - that sex-based rights do create division, because they assert that women (and men?) are entitled to certain privileges on the basis of sex. That's an anathema to the concept of sexual equality in the West, which asserts that men and women should be regarded equivalent social actors.

GC feminists argue that women and men should be treated differently in certain circumstances, that women have rights that are exclusive to them on the basis of their female biology. I'm not saying they are wrong (I agree with them), but I think we have to acknowledge the tension here with traditional liberal feminist narratives about women and men being 'equal' and therefore basically interchangeable.

The truth is, men's strength, and thus their potential for violence, is much greater than women's. Only one sex can kill the other with their bare hands, so in this important respect the sexes can't ever be equivalent social actors. Because this is a biological fact, I can't see this changing, although we can mitigate it through laws and social norms.

So women do need certain spaces and services to ourselves for reasons of safety and privacy, and obviously we need our own sporting competitions. But modern notions of equality make this difficult for many women to admit out loud, and I'm not sure that 'sex-based rights' is the right meme with which to advance this argument, because so many people think the progressive thing is to ignore the salience of sex altogether.

The phrase itself, 'sex-based rights', is potentially an alienating one for young women who see their claim to equal personhood as being rooted in people not noticing their femaleness. And perhaps not only young women, as this goes all the way back to the Second Wave.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's feminist legal career was about challenging exclusion and discrimination 'on the basis of sex'. The point of this argument was that sex doesn't matter - the fact that women have different bodies to men should be irrelevant to how we treat them in society. Catharine MacKinnon extends this logic to prisons, arguing that female-only prisons constitute a form of sex discrimination against men (google MacKinnon's interview with the Transadvocate for this - I won't link to it as the site owner collects info on GC women).

In MacKinnon's reasoning, 'sex-based rights' shouldn't exist, not even in prisons, as they are by definition a form of sex discrimination. And they are, of course - but the counter argument would be that because of our bodies, women shouldn't be treated as equivalent to men in all circumstances - there are some instances in which the differences between male and female biology need to be taken into account; thus, certain services and spaces which are exclusive to females.

To return to Ginsburg, she is the person credited with introducing the word 'gender' as a replacement for 'sex'. She did this on the suggestion of a female colleague, who thought that it would make her feminist legal arguments more acceptable. Using 'sex', she reasoned, might put the judges in a lascivious frame of mind, whereas 'gender' is anodyne, with no messy associations with the body:

“I owe it all to my secretary at Columbia Law School, who said, ‘I’m typing all these briefs and articles for you and the word sex, sex, sex is on every page,’ ” Ginsburg said.

“Don’t you know that those nine men (on the Supreme Court)--they hear that word, and their first association is not the way you want them to be thinking? Why don’t you use the word gender? It is a grammatical term and it will ward off distracting associations.’ ”

It's ominous that in order to win legal equality for US women, lawyers like Ginsberg felt it was necessary to linguistically decouple women from any 'distracting associations' with the body. This elision of the significance of the sexed body is now well established in feminist thought and disseminated throughout the mainstream - it makes consciousness raising around 'sex-based rights' an uphill task.

Barracker · 20/02/2021 16:21

Great post DonkeySkin

Plutoh · 20/02/2021 16:26

The irony of someone tweeting how do you deal with people trying to erase your identity. Ahhh the irony is too much.

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