November 2024
Maree Docherty, Lesbian Resistance - Speech at the Global Protest Against Sex Self-ID - New Zealand
My name is Maree Docherty from Lesbian Resistance.
My first encounter with men presenting as women was in the late 1960s. I was 18, newly moved to the big smoke to work and checking out the night life with my best friend.
We found a little bar/club called the Bo Peep. Two huge men in frocks and wigs were fighting in the women’s toilets. To say we were horrified would be an understatement. Though I was more annoyed that I couldn’t use the women’s toilet. Then, this seemed a harmless night out at an adult venue. Now, it’s turned into a nightmare, fighting for our hold on reality and truth.
My new job was serving five years in the NZ Navy. During that time, if I had confessed that I was a lesbian, I would have been given a dishonourable discharge. Today, men can declare themselves female, join the Navy, and invade women’s barracks, sleeping quarters, changing rooms, toilets. If these men outrank women, they will have additional powers.
In all my long years living as a lesbian, these present times would have to be the most homophobic.
The sex self-ID law in NZ and other western countries has given permission for men to force themselves into my private lesbian spaces. This is a rape of my culture. I am repulsed and disgusted by men who would call themselves lesbian. It’s homophobic and women hating.
Shame on politicians who pass laws like self-ID, allowing mentally ill men with fetishes to override, take away and steal the hard-fought for rights of lesbians and/or women and girls.
Lesbian Resistance stand regularly at a market square in a small rural town to talk to the public about issues like sex self-ID.
Since all these years ago I often wondered how heterosexual women felt about men pretending to be women. Now I know from our talks that women do not like it at all. In fact, overwhelmingly men and women dislike sex self-ID. The days of being kind and inclusive are over. Giving mentally ill men an inch, they take a mile.
Forcing something so unnatural on women and girls is insulting and dangerous.
Aren’t we lucky that here in NZ the left hasn’t yet been able to push through hate-speech laws. Laws designed mostly to prevent freedom of speech and stop women like me telling the truth.
The truth that you cannot change sex, there are only two sexes, male and female. Sex is not an identity. No child is born in the wrong body.
This is a bad law that needs to be repealed.
Lesbian Resistance New Zealand stand beside our German sisters.