WHY IT IS NEITHER PATRIARCHAL NOR MISOGYNISTIC TO ALLOW TRANSWOMEN INTO WOMEN’S SPACES.

A despicable right-wing Australian politician talked of one South Australian Member of the Legislative Council who is in her party and is descended from European Jewish immigrants and said that she supported immigration that would assimilate into Australia. She expressed admiration for a former, now deceased Australian Labor politician who, when Australia accepted its first non-British immigrants since Federation, spoke of them as being “just like Australians”. That is an attitude akin to Southern Gentlemen selecting slaves, like how Philip Adams described being selected for school sporting teams. The fact of the matter is, selecting immigrants who will assimilate, if that is the goal, is not done on the basis of source countries, but attitudes of individual immigrants. I advocate for multiculturalism and integration, for various reasons.

This same Australian politician demonstrated that the only place her motions should be passed is not in the senate chamber but on the toilet! She erroneously claims that parents of transgender children are forcing them to transition because they wanted a child of the opposite sex. Another reason why such right-wingers deplore puberty blockers is that it can be harder to clock a trans person if they have not undergone the puberty of the sex they were assigned at birth.

Gender transitioning is in a sense, a second puberty, and without a tracheal shave, a transwoman will still have a deep voice. It is important, however, to distinguish between a transwoman and a drag queen. Drag queens may be gay men, straight men or any other, but they are men who dress as women to play a character but live as men when out of character. A transwoman is a person who was assigned male at birth but does not blend with being masculine.

I have seen people say that if transwomen thought like women they’d understand the need for separation, to which I say, put yourself in the shoes of a transwoman, and no, I don’t mean Adam Graham/Isla Bryson. Imagine being the teenage AMAB who isn’t good at sport, and who, when they go into the change room to change into their sports uniform, has someone yell out, “Quick, out of here!” followed by a homophobic remark. Rather than being forced into a boys sporting group because he chose a subject where there’s a few boys and mostly girls, they should have been allowed to do a mixed sport instead, such as dancing. And despite not being homosexual, that student is also no threat to a female. Imagine being the AMAB who likes sparkly things, and in art, wants to draw a landscape, but has rude intolerant boys who like graffiti scribble on their work and laugh.

Many women have gay male friends, and many men have lesbian friends, and one reason why those women have gay friends, as well as shared interests, is that they find them non-threatening. And a number of those gay men have been rejected by bigoted straight men. And let’s not forget that of them, many of those gay men were considered to be a top bloke or guy amongst others, until the workplace Christmas party that was opened to spouses and they found that rather than Jane or Julie, their partner’s name was Fred, George or Harry.

Maybe it is time for non-TERFs or TERFs who can still be rationally reasoned with to start treating transwomen like they would their gay male friends and see them for the non-threatening people that they are, and to see that yes, there may be some violent sex offenders, but the vast majority of transwomen are law abiding members of the community who just want the hand of friendship to be extended to them and to be accepted as people. And acknowledge that the reason why many transwomen want to be admitted to women’s spaces is because they are women.