Entries by Aphra

On peeing, pronouns and politics

A recent debate on The Standard about trans rights touched on a range of  issues – dead naming, the use of preferred pronouns, the actual incidence of sex self-ID related harm to women since the passing of legislation, access to toilets, and so on. If this was a 1960s British comedy, it would be titled Carry On Up The Cul-de-sac.
The issue of female-only facilities such as public lavatories1 changing rooms, domestic violence and rape crisis centres, hospital wards and prisons has to be placed in both an historical and a contemporary context.

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Fact or Fantasy?

In an interview in March this year, in response to a question from Ash Sakar about whether the housing of trans prisoners in the female estate puts women prisoners at risk of assault, Professor Judith Butler said that until people identify how much at risk female prisoners are from guards and from other women prisoners, we should not even be asking the question.

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AN IDEOLOGICAL DRAG RACE: Part Three

The embryonic coalition between the religious right and the secular ultra-right, and women angry about being silenced over what they perceive to be a range of threats to sex-based rights and to children’s safety, has focussed on the phenomenon of drag queen story hour.

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AN IDEOLOGICAL DRAG RACE: Part Two

Gender identity as an issue and a movement was created and marketed in the first world. In that context, a leader of women opposed to gender identity, who “channels her inner Monroe” while surfing a wave of anger on social media, is unsurprising.

I don’t know if Kelly-Jae Keen believes in her brand, but I do know that many of the women who support her are well-intentioned and genuine in their beliefs and concerns.

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AN IDEOLOGICAL DRAG RACE: Part One

This is Part one of a three part post which expresses the writer’s personal opinion. It may not be that of all members of WLA.

Part One: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

If we all dressed in sex neutral clothes, wore our hair etc in sex-neutral styles, would we have such a thing as gender identity?

Do the existential crises and social conflicts flowing from the claims that an individual gender identity outweighs biological sex, have their roots in the soil of the capitalist era’s heavily sex-defined personal appearance standards?

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Hyperbole Waives The Rules

Towards the end of March, Kellie-Jae Keen, aka Posie Parker, will be visiting NZ with her Let Women Speak roadshow. On cue, some members of the Green Party have called on the government to ban her, either from entry to NZ, or from speaking in public. They claim what she has to say is “hate speech”, and she’s depicted as a fascist, a white supremacist, and a transphobe.

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When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

Kate Weatherly, a New Zealand transgender athlete in women’s downhill mountain biking, has spoken out against FINA’s (Fédération Internationale De Natation) new rules for trans inclusion in women’s events.

In a sense, Weatherly is right, there are bigger issues in women’s sport than the participation of a few transgender athletes.

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A Lefteous Rant

In the New Zealand parliament last week there was a unanimous vote on a law change arising from a gender identity ideology which runs counter to, and cuts deeply into established knowledge that is foundational to all human societies across time – the knowledge that there are two sexes.

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Media Watch or Media Botch?

Colin Peacock – usually one of the most reliably discerning voices in New Zealand media – set sail last week on the stormy waters of the gender identity debate. After some curious navigational choices, the good ship Media Watch almost foundered on the dangerous reefs lying between the Scylla of confirmation bias, and the Charybdis of ideological forelock tugging.

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