Letter to the Queensland Human Rights Commission
Letter sent 16/10/2021
Reading through the advice to Queensland schools on trans issues I came across the first error of many so I sent off this note to them. Forgive errors, It was a quick email that I didn’t have time to edit.
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I am reading your “Trans @ School - A guide for schools, educators, and families of trans and gender diverse children and young people” and notice you have incorrectly defined “gender”.
You claim that gender is “part of how a person understands themself. A person’s gender does not necessarily mean that they have particular sex characteristics.”
This definition incorrectly places “gender” in an individualist framework, which is more correctly what “gender identity” is.
Gender as it has been understood in sociological and cultural studies is the cultural meanings and stereotypes that cultures attach to the two sexes. Gender belongs to culture while “gender identity” belongs to the individual.
Your definition of “gender” as belonging to the individual reinforces cultural meanings, some of which are oppressive to women and girls. These meanings have been deliberately changed over the years by women as part of the women’s movement. When you enshrine these characteristics in an inherent, individual and protected framework you give them a concreteness that women have been fighting against for centuries.
Also by enshrining “femininity” in a legal and bureaucratic framework as a protected identity for boys and men, you lock it away from women and girls, and their sovereign right to talk about and change the gender meanings that have always shaped their lives sometimes in positive and sometimes in negative ways. Pretending that cultural meanings of femininity are not attached to the sex of female, further harms and gaslights women and girls and removes from them the consent over the spaces that have historically been used to protect their unique bodies and their specific vulnerabilities. This is done by placing ownership over these spaces in gender rather than sex.
Protective infrastructure of women as a sex has been designed to protect types of bodies not types of identities. By offering all boys and men the opportunity to adopt largely superficial stereotypes to access women’s and girl’s spaces, women and girls are given the message that their spaces belong to and identity not their body. School children are now being given the message that it is femininity and masculinity has the integrity and legal protection and not sex. Where does this leave girls who understand that it is their bodies that make them vulnerable?
This mess of a legislative ideological framework where the female gender (femininity) is only legally protected in boys and men, makes femininity powerful in boys and men and disempowering in girls and women. No wonder there is exponential growth in girls rejecting their body and embracing the protection of masculine gender identities. This is particularly true for masculine girls who become encouraged to alter their perfectly healthy bodies.
This misinterpretation of gender puts gender in an ethereal framework as “gender soul”. Dissent to this ethereal belief is framed as discrimination and hate. Thus your incorrect interpretation of gender leads directly to people with female bodies losing sovereignty and dignity over their spaces that are designed to protect their bodies and cultural and political disenfranchisement if they object to that loss. This willful undermining of the dignity of women is surprising because the first point of the preamble to the Queensland Human Rights Act 2019 is the recognition of “The inherent dignity and worth of all human beings.”
Combined with the reducing popularity of the “affirmation model” of transgender care, it is obvious that your incorrect definition and misunderstanding of gender, needs to see change. It does not help children with gender dysphoria and harms all children in schools. I have copied in my local member because there is a rumour that the state government intend to push through gender self ID legislation by the end of the year and this will further harm the rights of women and children. Women like myself will never stop fighting against your prioritising of gender over sex even if you continue to reinforce this legislation we will never abandon our rights and those of our daughters.
Although I understated that you exist in a ever-expanding bureaucracy that sometimes reinforces errors that it rests on, I ask you to start to correct this harmful range of errors around gender.
Best regards,