Women stand up!

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Many women I know are livid that the NZ coalition government’s Pay Equity Amendment Bill was passed this week by Parliament.[i] This has brought back Fair Pay Agreement processes, as previously laid out in the Equal Pay Act, to a grinding halt. The outcome is the cancellation of 33 claims being currently negotiated, along with several tighter restrictions making it much harder to make such claims in future.

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War – what is it good for?

We cannot understand the waves and forms of Palestinian resistance unless we understand the inter-generational effects of the initial forced displacement of Palestinians and the obliteration of all vestiges of Palestinian occupation of the land followed by a rewriting of history through a Jewish supremacist and anti-Arab lens.

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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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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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