Feminist message hijacked

The issue of transgender rights versus women’s rights has pitted woman against woman and divided the feminist community. This week Massey University bowed to pressure and cancelled an event where, among others, controversial Canadian feminist Meghan Murph

I’m part of a large social group for lesbians in New Zealand. This week we learned that Massey University in Wellington withdrew as a venue for Feminism 2020. If you’d listened to the press put out by Speak Up for Women NZ, who were organising the event, you might expect that we, as a group of lesbian feminists, would be pretty upset about this cancellation. You’d be wrong.

Speak Up for Women claim to speak on behalf of women, feminists, and frequently, lesbians.

They haven’t asked us what we think about the things they say on our account. They’ve even blocked several of us from talking to them at all, showing an astonishingly low tolerance for women who don’t immediately fall in line with their ideology and who dare to demonstrate independent thought.

While claiming to be a feminist group, Speak Up for Women oddly haven’t mentioned anything about the major issues affecting Kiwi women today; in particular, our high rates of domestic violence and sexual assaults, low wages and the high cost of housing.

Feminist groups are currently out there doing the mahi to help support people living with these issues, but to Speak Up for Women, the growing number of Kiwi women dealing with the choice of living in a violent home or out on the streets, isn’t the real issue.

Apparently, the real issue is trans women for existing and calling themselves women, according to these ‘‘feminists’’, and it’s almost the only thing they talk about.

The recent Counting Ourselves survey, which asked about the experience of transgender and nonbinary people in New Zealand, tells us that 32 per cent reported someone had sex with them against their will and 47 per cent had experienced someone attempting to have sex with them against their will.

Two-thirds had experienced discrimination, 71 per cent experienced high or very high psychological distress and more than half had thought about suicide. This is clearly a vulnerable group who need our support; yet Speak Up for Women would have us believe they’re practically running the world.

Speak Up for Women, their supporters, and the speakers they’ve invited to present at their Feminism 2020 event can all spin a good conspiracy theory and many will happily tell you about the well-funded trans lobby (somehow linked with Big Pharma and George Soros), which has plans to steal everyone’s womanhood before Christmas.

They’ll tell you that trans men are an attack on lesbians and somehow homophobic, and that we don’t want trans women in lesbian spaces. They’ll repeat this despite the vast majority of lesbians being completely mystified by these assertions, as we happily support

our trans brothers and sisters to be who they are.

As a group of women, feminists, and lesbians we’d say it’s time to stop listening to Speak Up for Women, and start listening to the real feminists who are out there doing the hard yards to

support women and their families and maybe flick them a few dollars this Christmas season.

They’re working at places like Women’s Refuge, Rape Crisis, Sexual Abuse HELP, foodbanks, and Birthright. Maybe flick a few dollars to places like

Naming NZ and Gender Minorities Aotearoa too, let’s see if we can start bringing some of those negative statistics down.

Rachel Green, on behalf of NZ Lesbians Social Group, which represents about 1500 members