An opinion piece in The Courier-Mail, Queensland, Australia newspaper.
It’s behind a paywall, so have copied.
Raises many issues discussed here….
Abigail Boyd wrong to omit the word women for pregnant person in Zoe’s law | The Courier Mail
Vikki Campion
In the final sitting week of the year, the Greens sought to cancel the word “woman” from new laws, to appease 0.06 per cent of the birthing population who identify as men.
Seeking to “omit the word woman” and insert “pregnant person” 23 times, Greens MP Abigail Boyd also sought to “resist the creep towards foetal personhood”.
Revealing their legislative skillset ends at the copy-paste shortcut on a keyboard, the Greens even sought to cancel women from a bill that by its very nature requires the XX chromosome to be relevant - Zoe’s law - which means offenders whose criminal acts cause the loss of an unborn child face longer sentences.
After at least four attempts at similar reforms in the past, the law creates two offences, each adding up to three years to sentences for crimes that result in the loss of a foetus, recognising the loss of an unborn child as a unique injury to a pregnant woman.
So how do the Greens pretend to care about women when they want to wipe womanhood from legislation?
There are plenty of other issues where Ms Boyd recognises the reality of chromosomes, anatomy and assigned sex, including on the number of incarcerated Indigenous women, underreported sexual assaults on women and the pay inequality between women’s and men’s professional sports.
It’s just pregnancy where women must be omitted.
Who would have thought out of all political parties, it would be the Greens purporting possibly one of the grossest acts of misogyny ever seen in public life?
A gender-non-conforming party wouldn’t use slurs like “close your legs”, but that’s exactly what Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe said to Senator Hollie Hughes last week.
A gender-non-conforming party wouldn’t use violence against women, such as the anti-coal protesters in Queensland abusing and chasing down female workers on remote land, calling one “a f**king dumb slut”.
Of the 35,000 people who gave birth in 2019, only 22 identified as male. How misogynistic does a party need to be to wipe the childbirth and delivery efforts of 34,978 women, for the sake of 22 people who only got pregnant thanks to a uterus and ovary?
With Greens leader Adam Bandt publicly seeking a “power-sharing” arrangement with Labor, there’s a very real threat that these fringe ideologies could be mandated under Australian law.
It’s not hard to see how damaging it would be for women if non-gendered terms replace biological sex data that governments need to fund things unique to women - like physiotherapy for pelvic floor damage in pregnancy and childbirth, or ovarian cancer, which kills three Australian women every day.
The party that claims to champion women and calls for gender targets wipes women from the same framework that gave them the right to be in Parliament in the first place.
Women are four times more likely to experience sexual violence and we pay more in private health premiums than men.
From the provision of natal-care spaces, to services for menopause - female data is vital for government services.
Either the Greens want more women in power - or they want to cancel them from the political process by removing them from legislation intended to provide justice to pregnant women and their unborn children.
Equality for women relies on legislation that recognises biological sexual differences. That’s how we got the right to vote and own property.
When Dame Enid Lyons first entered the House of Representatives in 1943, men feared women in Government. They thought “we were better with a broom”.
Dame Lyons was the first to speak up for female welfare where during the war, “roughly, a man receives twice as much as a woman.”
“Is it really proposed to bribe women into matrimony, or to starve them into submission, so to speak?”
Politicians should know the difference between discriminating against gender identity and discriminating against sex.
Sex is assigned at birth. It’s either male or female. Gender is society’s set of expectations about how they should act.
A person who identifies as a man or is gender non-conforming still has ovaries and uterus of their assigned sex of a female, which allows them to get pregnant and give birth.
Gender is a construct, and all power to anyone who rejects gender norms.
But how do we swing that to argue that gender identity is so important that we should rewrite the law to say that men are birth-givers?
The human anatomy that allows that to happen is that of a woman.
Once we were women, and now we are dehumanised in order to be more humane to those who identify as men.
Now we are chest-feeders, bleeders, uterus-bearers, cervix owners and “bodies with vaginas” reduced to mere misogynistic symbols, as if the feminine experience is a perfumed, glossy-lipped, worshipped wonder and not a bloody, messy water-breaking, breast-leaking, pelvic-floor weakening, life-giving glory.
The reason language matters is because words are too important to mince.
The sexual abuse of a minor is the sexual abuse of a child.
Non-consensual sex is rape.
And a pregnant person is a woman.
Originally published as The Greens have dehumanised women to align with their political agenda, writes Vikki Campion