In six decades of life as a woman, I’ve seen countless expressions of patriarchy. From the family favouritism shown to my brothers, to the societal and workplace inequities of single parenthood, and now the creeping social oblivion of female middle age.
I’ve studied and worked in the male dominated professions of accounting and law, and held my own.
I have espoused feminist values since my teenage years, and spent the later part of my working life advocating for, counselling and supporting women, particularly women suffering family violence.
I have always been acutely aware of the prejudices and social injustices facing women, and spoken up accordingly. And until now, I have been fortunate enough to escape any direct attack on my womanhood or my feminist ideas.
This year, I enrolled in a masters program at UTas and joined the UTas Women’s Collective, with the innocent, but apparently naïve, aim of meeting and engaging with other female students of a feminist bent. And, for the first time, I have been subjected to overt ageist and sexist discrimination and abuse and denunciation of my feminist ideals, at the hands of other ‘women identifying persons’.
After a rather unpleasant exchange on the group’s Facebook page, it became evident the collective is not as inclusive as it claims. It began when I noticed some disagreement between members about the group’s priorities, and made the mistake of asking why the interests of transgender and queer collective members needed to be given preference.
The response was courteous enough to begin with, but I was soon being exhorted to ‘educate myself’ about the unreality of biological sex, or risk removal from the group. I was lectured about the abhorrence that is ‘white female privilege’ and introduced to the jargon of the trans/queer movement.
Whilst conversing with me on the group’s closed Facebook page, two group members were at the same time laughing at me and insulting me on one of their personal pages. The sort of thing ‘cool’ 12 year old cyber bullies do to the odd girl out in their peer group. Only this time it was a couple of privileged, white, young women taking pot shots at an older woman – accusing her of being a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist – I had to look it up) and joking about being ‘nice’ to her, even though she ‘just (didn’t) get it’ and her ideas were totally repugnant to them.
After being told by yet another member that biological sex wasn’t real, and I was living in the past, I gave up on the conversation.
Since then, I note that one of the members who engaged in the Facebook insults was elected unopposed as the UTas South Women’s Officer.
The Collective’s Facebook page posts the occasional useful feminist article, but the overall transgender/queer bias is patently obvious. Only those who agree with a ‘feminism’ that prioritises trans/queer interests are welcome.
I fully appreciate the emotional and social consequences gender identity issues must have for transgender and queer individuals, but I’m not prepared to cede my experience of femaleness to the overtly political agenda of some in those groups. I am a woman, not a cis-woman.
And, seriously, when a Collective member has a bitch about their ‘queerness’ not being taken seriously enough because they’re ‘low femme’ and they have ‘a long-term cis man partner’ we know we’re truly in the realm of privileged, white, first world problems.
Thousands of women are out there right now – being underpaid, and exploited, and trafficked into sexual slavery, and raped and beaten and killed. Most of them have XX chromosomes and bigger things to worry about than their gender identity. If feminism has to be a game of priorities, I prefer to prioritise their struggles.
No doubt this article, if published, will see me banned from the Collective for breaching their ‘secret society’ rules. And that might raise some interesting discrimination issues.
*This article previously posted in Togatus is not available online anymore
Source: Tasmanian Times
https://tasmaniantimes.com/2015/10/utas-womens-collective-a-new-meaning-for-inclusive