Two feminists have charged that Liberal transgender “rights” bill will jeopardize women’s rights if it allows biological men into spaces that are for “female-born” women only.
Hilla Kerner, who spoke on behalf of a Vancouver rape crisis centre, and Meghan Murphy told the senate committee studying Bill C-16 that men who choose to be women are not the same as women.
Bill C-16 adds “gender identity” and “gender expression” to the Human Rights Code as prohibited grounds of discrimination, and to the hate crime section in the Criminal Code.
The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is “worried that well-intentioned legislation will be used to undermine the rights of women and the crucial work of women’s groups to serve and organize with female-born women,” Kerner said.
She told the committee that the shelter, run by a feminist collective that is pro-abortion and pro-lesbianism, has been subject to a “witch hunt” because it doesn’t take in men who identify as women.
It won the right to do so after a 12-year legal battle with Kimberly Nixon, a man who identifies as a woman and has had sex reassignment surgery. Nixon brought a human rights complaint against Vancouver Rape Relief after it refused to let him volunteer as a crisis counsellor.
The B.C. appeals court threw the case out in 2005, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it two years later. But even though the court “agreed that we are allowed to work only with female-born women, we are deemed to be transphobic,” Kerner told the senate committee.
The BC Federation of Labour has directed its affiliates to boycott the shelter, which is “the oldest rape crisis centre in Canada,” she said.
“And that’s the danger of the legislation: it is not explicitly expressing the rights of women to organize.”
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“Dissolving the categories of man and woman to allow for fluidity may sound progressive but is no more progressive under the current circumstances than saying race doesn’t exist and that white people don’t hold privilege in this world if they don’t feel white, or if they take on racist stereotypes attached to people of colour,” she told the senate committee.
“If a white person did this, we would rightly call it co-optation and denounce the behaviour. Why do we accept that if a man takes on sexist stereotypes traditionally associated with women, he can magically change sex and shed his status as male in this world?”
Kerner said there’s no “consensus in society” as to what the terms mean.
“From our understanding, gender expression describes the behaviours that oppress and control women. That includes men’s violence against women,” she said. “In this context, rape is a gender expression.”
Moreover, “female-born women and people who were born male and self-identify as women have different life experience,” she said.
“We know the embarrassment of having our clothes stained with blood from our period, the anxiety of facing an unwanted pregnancy and the fear of being raped. We know the horror of being raped and we know the comfort of grouping with other women.”
Nor do men who choose to be women have the experience of dealing with patriarchy all their lives.
“What we are saying is: If you were born a female, you are doomed. You are doomed in our society to be second-class. You do not have the privilege of growing as a male and have a choice to choose to be a woman,” she told the committee. “Surely, you cannot say these are the same thing.”
The Vancouver Rape Relief centre has been facing backlash since the CBC ran the story, with a Twitter war erupting between Murphy and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, in which the latter called on the shelter to close its doors.
