Yesterday on Twitter, I wrote an angry tweet. It went like this:
“I just really need to know how Judith Butler’s definition of women applies to Afghan women who are being beaten on the streets by the Taliban. Have you ever considered that your academics really don’t fit the lives of women in the global South?”
In Afghanistan (extreme example) but also in Pakistan, where I live, in India, in Nepal, Bangladesh, Middle Eastern countries, North Africa, women (or people with female bodies) are being abused, harassed, assaulted and killed not just because they have female bodies, but because they refuse to hand those bodies over to men to do with as they please.
Because this possession and ownership of female bodies is absolutely tied to female biology and the production of children and sexual comfort for those men, separating sex from gender completely negates this form of oppression which is hugely insulting to all of us who are still fighting to end sex-based discrimination in our countries and regions.
Imagine a Muslim woman in the UK who escapes a violent marriage and threats of honor killing. She goes to a shelter where she feels safe because it is a female-only space. Not just because she is away from the realm of immediate male violence, but because as a Muslim woman she does not feel comfortable sharing intimate quarters with a person with a male body. This allows her to reconcile her awful situation as well as her need to feel she is acting in congruence with her identity and principles of modesty as a Muslim woman.
But if a trans woman with a penis is in the same space, then the Muslim woman will be in a terrible conflict about her actions in leaving her home. Suddenly, she is not able to remove her hijab or undress because she cannot do those things in front of a person with a male body who is not a family member. This not a hypothetical, there are Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu women who are now excluded from single sex-only spaces because the definition of woman has changed to include women with penises. To call that Muslim woman a TERF because she expresses discomfort is yet another abuse for her.
I’m afraid the trans rights activists are acting like Western colonisers and imperialists all over again, imposing their ideas of gender and sexuality on us the same way their Empire was imposed on us for a good part of the 20th century. I don’t really want gender colonialism in the 21st century. Do you?
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The author refers to “gender identity theory as it is being adopted in Western countries”. It is not being ‘adopted’; it is being foisted upon western countries – by stealth, and by the complicit aiding and abetting of corrupted politicians who never so much as asked their constituent population (because they know damned well fine we would say ‘no’).
It is not only Muslim women who can no longer use once safe single sex spaces, but virtually all women – and especially all women who have been abused by men (which is more than one third of the population). As an abused woman, I would choose suicide over being incarcerated in a prison cell with a man; I would choose to self medicate over being forced to share a hospital ward with a man; I would choose sleeping under a bridge over being forced to share a women’s refuge or homeless shelter with a man, and; I would NEVER use a sexual assault referral centre if there was any risk of my coming into contact with a man. They are NOT trans women; they are MEN masquerading as women. Women are denied any chance to differentiate between predators and supposedly harmless men – and why would anybody so much as suggest we trust when Trans Rights Activism is so monstrously aggressive?
Yes, the Taliban uses guns, beatings and beheadings to enforce subservience through fear; but the Traliban doesn’t need to literally kill with actual lethal weapons; it uses words to instil compliance by fear. The Traliban has control of the unregulated internet, which it utilises to alienate critics and to stir up hysteria and mob violence in order to cancel anybody who dares to question their demands. Cancelled people – with no family or friends or means of support – are socially outcast and as good a dead.