Debate Over “Female Born” Lesbians in Australia
You just can’t make this stuff up. A controversy broke out in Australia earlier this month over the desire by organizers of the upcoming LesFest 2004 to exclude transsexuals from attending or working at the national lesbian festival.
LesFest 2004 organizers had applied for and received an exemption from sex discrimination laws from the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
But the exemption was challenged by the transsexual lobby group the Australian WOMAN Network. The transsexual group argued that the LesFest’s advertisement for “female-born” lesbians was offensive and urged the exemption revoked. The tribunal agreed and overturned the exemption on the grounds that LesFest organizers failed to inform the tribunal about a complaint filed against them.
In a press release WOMAN noted that under Australian common law,
- sex is not immutable;
- a transsexual person?s sex, following hormones and surgery, is their affirmed sex;
- the law should be consistent in this regard; and
- the meaning of ?woman? is its ordinary, contemporary meaning
According to WOMAN,
Such a term [female born] is offensive to the law that protects us all from discrimination on the basis of ?sex?. Inclusion of ?female born? in the text of a legal decision purports to create a legal distinction between people who are all legally women; those who were born women and those who were not. Such a distinction is not countenanced under either the common law or the Equal Opportunity Act 1995.
?Female born?, and its more common presentation, ?born womyn? are remnants of a gender political culture spawned more than three decades ago by radical separatist feminists like Germaine Greer and Janice Raymond. They did much that was good for the advancement of women, but their vitriolic pronouncements on people born with a variation in their sexual formation are abhorrent to anyone who support the rights of all individuals to dignity, privacy and self-expression.
I.e., people even nuttier than the radical feminists.
Sources:
Claws out over lesbian festival. Australian Age, October 1, 2003.
LesFest - On Again, Off Again. October 28, 2003.
VCAT joins attack on LesFest’s ‘Lesbians Born Female’ Policy. September 30, 2003.
The Debate Over “Female Born” Lesbians in Australia by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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