The Right to “Gender Identity” : A Clash with the Rights of Women – submission to the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill – Professor Sheila Jeffreys
January 12, 2013
The protected attribute of ‘sex’, under which women are protected from discrimination, is still in the list, but adding the new category of ‘gender identity’, could potentially create a clash of rights between male-bodied transgenders on the one hand, and those disadvantaged on the grounds of sex, women. In other jurisdictions, such legislation has seen the emergence of successful legal challenges in which male-bodied transgenders have sought access to spaces previously reserved for women, including women’s services such as sheltered housing, women’s toilets and women’s prisons.
The demands of transgender activists to have ‘gender identity’ included in human rights legislation were first articulated in detail in the US in the 1995 International Bill of Transgender Rights (Frye, 2000). It demanded the right to express the ‘gender identity’ of choice in whatever way the exponent desired, particularly in any spaces previously reserved for women. An important right in the Bill is that of entering spaces set aside by or for women, ‘The Right of Access to Gendered Space and Participation in Gendered Activity’ (Frye, 2000: 213). Since then, equality and human rights legislation has been updated and created in states across the western world that incorporates the ‘right’ to express ‘gender identity’. Women’s and feminist groups are not invited to contribute to consultation on such changes as if they would have nothing relevant to say, despite the fact that men may, under such legislation, gain the right to be recognised in law as ‘women’. Women are the ‘absent referent’, not officially referred to, despite the fact that it is ‘women’ that the majority of those persons who wish to express their ‘gender rights’ seek to emulate....Feminist critics argue that the concept of ‘gender identity’ is founded upon stereotypes of gender, and, in international law, gender stereotypes are recognised as being in contradiction to the interests of women. The idea of ‘gender identity’ is retrogressive. It depends upon the notion that there can be an ‘essence’ of gender in a person of one sex, that more clearly approximates to the ‘gender’ that is expected of the other sex. Feminists and researchers for many years now have challenged the idea that there is an essential behaviour of ‘femininity’ for example, that is appropriate for women.
https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/the-right-to-gender-ident...