Bronwyn Williams writes for the Tasmanian Times:
Yesterday’s joint statement by Tasmanian women’s groups, Women’s Legal Service Tasmania, Engender Equality, Hobart Women’s Shelter and Women’s Health Tasmania, continues the litany of oversimplified assurances about the benign nature of the radical birth registration and anti-discrimination law reforms proposed by Labor and the Greens.
These organisations say Women Speak Tasmania doesn’t represent the large number of women associated with them, but how many women, exactly, do THEY represent?
We generously estimate their Boards and staff to number around 120 people in total. But what about their clients?
Has Hobart Women’s Shelter, for example, asked all its traumatised family violence clients how they would feel about sharing sleeping quarters with an intact male who identifies as a woman?
Women Speak Tasmania has had personal contact with many women in Tasmania, and we have formed close links with an expanding number of women’s groups, both interstate and overseas, in a short period of time.
Rather than presuming to speak for Women’s Legal Service Tasmania, Engender Equality, Hobart Women’s Shelter and Women’s Health Tasmania, Women Speak Tasmania openly acknowledges the fundamental ideological difference between us.
They say ‘transgender women are women’. Our position is that they are not. They are biological males, and in the centuries long history of female oppression, biology matters.
Women Speak Tasmania has put forward an alternative legislative framework that protects the rights of female persons and transgender people – see our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/womenspeaktas/.
Finally, we reject the assertion by Women’s Legal Service Tasmania, Engender Equality, Hobart Women’s Shelter and Women’s Health Tasmania that putting forward a women’s rights argument leads to ‘greater danger, including physical assaults to transgender women, non-binary individuals, and women who do not conform to stereotypes of femininity’.
All available data suggests violence against these groups is overwhelmingly perpetrated by MEN, not by women standing up for their basic human rights.