November 2024
Jenny Ruth - Speech at the Global Protest Against Sex Self-ID - New Zealand
Trans rights are human rights.
I do mean that. I know what it's like to be denied basic rights. I don't wish that experience on anybody.
But no trans-identified man can ever be a woman, no matter how many laws are written trying to force us to pretend to accept that they can be.
It is basic biology that, in humans, sex is binary and it's immutable.
We all know this.
There is actually no difference between the word sex and the word gender. The trans ideologists would have you believe there is a difference, but they are interchangeable words that mean the same thing.
Sex is not just what's between our legs. It's in every cell of our bodies. Scientists can tell which sex we are from a simple mouth swab.
Archeologists can tell female bones from male bones.
Nobody is “assigned” sex at birth; our sex is determined at conception and, these days, is usually discovered long before birth.
Again, we all know this is part of the human condition.
No man can become a woman; the best he can achieve is to ape the appearance of a woman. We all know this.
By the way, I regard the term “cis” as in cisgender and ciswoman, as hate speech.
It is an attempt to categorise women as a subcategory of women. Real women stand in no need of such a qualifier and we are the only kind of women. Trans “women” are actually men.
Self-ID laws, like the law in Germany that has just come into force, and like our's, which came into force in 2023, do not even require somebody wishing to change their legal gender to make even an attempt to look like members of that gender.
A man can simply declare he is a woman, sign the form, and the law will deem him to indeed be a woman.
This is what our Department of Internal Affairs says on its website:
“A self-identification process for amending the sex on a birth certificate is a simple administrative process that requires a statutory declaration. It is based on how a person identifies, rather than eligibility criteria such as medical treatment.”
The politicians and lawmakers writing these laws, and the judges enforcing them, have forgotten, or pretend to have forgotten, why women
and girls need sex-based rights in the first place.
It's a question of basic safety.
My generation of feminists achieved quite a lot in terms of women's demands for equality.
And these days, in most situations, it mostly doesn't matter what sex you are. But when it does matter, it matters a great deal.
Why is safety a particular concern of women and girls?
The statistics tell the story: men are overwhelmingly responsible for most violence; men are responsible for almost all rapes.
Predators are overwhelmingly men.
Almost every woman and girl in the world has experienced sexual harassment – I do suspect the ones who say they haven't are telling fibs.
I'm not claiming all men are violent, or that all men are rapists.
The trouble is that we cannot tell whether they are or not just by looking at them.
Every woman understands the fear of a man following them on a dark street at night.
We fear them because they're men and we have no way of knowing whether they're one of the dangerous men or not.
Women-only spaces matter in changing rooms at gyms and swimming baths; it matters to lesbians wanting to hold women-only gatherings; it matters in women's prisons.
It matters in women's refuges – I was a member of the group of women in Auckland in the '70s who opened New Zealand's first feminist refuge for battered women.
It matters in rape crisis centres.
It matters in women's sports.
Germany's self-ID law, and New Zealand's self-ID law, and such laws around the world, are putting the safety of women and girls at risk.
Imagine, if you can, you're a convicted rapist and you know you're going to prison.
It's obvious there's a huge incentive to declare that you're a woman so you can be sent to a women's prison.
Some people deny this will happen; it is already happening.
It is precisely such men who will take advantage of self-ID laws.
It was a rapist in Scotland who changed his name to Isla Bryson and demanded to be housed in a women's prison that helped to bring Nicola Sturgeon's reign as first minister to an end.
How many rapists in women's prisons will society tolerate? I say just one is one too many.
It's time to call BS on such laws. It's time to say no.
The safety of women and girls matters and our rights must be paramount.
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