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Students have launched the first women’s society at the University of Cambridge to be restricted to those defined as “female at birth,” a move that has been criticised by other groups as “an assault on the trans community”.
The move immediately provoked backlash from across the University. The Cambridge University Labour Club (CULC) called it “the latest assault on the trans community at Cambridge,” accusing the society of promoting “transphobic rhetoric under the guise of ‘free speech’,” while several societies issued a joint statement in support of the trans community.
Maeve Halligan, a 22-year-old MPhil student at Lucy Cavendish College, told GenderBlog.net that she founded CUSW after being unable to find any single-sex societies at the University’s Freshers’ Fair earlier this term.
She saw the society’s creation as a way of preserving women’s rights to single-sex spaces. “If you’re a male person who seeks to enter into female spaces, that directly erodes the right of women to have a single-sex space in the first place. And that’s just bad,” she said. “Our USP, the fact that it’s women only – isn’t it funny that that’s controversial?”
Source: Students launch women’s society excluding trans women | Varsity