As in many Western countries, New Zealand radical feminists have to put up with journalists conveying their views on trans issues, usually in a negative light. Efforts to directly state what feminists think rarely get published and so it was with this letter Sandra Coney wrote to the weekly magazine New Zealand Listener. It took to task journalist Danyl McLauchlan’s description of feminists’ views in an article he wrote criticising New Zealand First, part of the current coalition Government, having as a policy to restrict female toilets to biological women.

Dear Editor

Danyl McLauchlan made some incorrect remarks about the thinking of radical feminists who are concerned at the impact on women’s dignity and wellbeing of some actions by trans-activists. 

It may seem odd that women put such store on having changing rooms and toilets that are for the use of biological women alone. Toilets have been a site of struggle for women since the 1950s when women campaigned to get toilets in town and city centres, the absence of which prevented women from entering public spaces with the freedom enjoyed by men. Men could use pubs, but women couldn’t as women were prohibited from entering public bars. Public toilets that women feel safe using were and are critical to women’s civic and economic participation. 

The answer is of course providing unisex toilets as well as those segregated by sex. 

Radical feminists paid a great deal of notice to gender stereotypes (what we called sex role stereotyping) during the 1970s. We challenged traditional practices around dress, play, children’s literature, occupations and so on. Instead of the rigidity and restrictions of stereotypes, we argued that girls could be tough, adventurous and risk-taking, while boys could give expression to nurturing and behaviours usually seen as feminine. We argued that these behaviours were not innate or sex-based, but learned and culturally imposed by society which used them to confine women in a domestic role and keep power in men’s hands. That’s why some of us old radical feminists are astounded and dismayed, that learned social constructs are being seen as evidence of being “born in the wrong body”, and that the “’right” sex can be achieved with medical and surgical treatments. Feminists would have said if a boy liked dolls that he should be encouraged to play with them, and it didn’t make him any less a boy, or that a girl that liked trucks should play at scooping up the mud, and that she was still a girl. This was seen as a path to a much broader range of identities and futures for all humans.

We did not, as McLauchlan states, believe that sex was a social constructed, only gender. Sex is biological, innate and in your DNA, and does not alter across cultures.

The fact that some trans-women adopt the most extreme stereotypes of women to try and present themselves as women is distressing. It tips a feminist analysis on its head. If women desired other women as sexual partners, we said they were lesbians, and no less women. Now girls in schools attracted to other girls think they must really be a man.

Now, the old gender stereotypes are being imposed on women in a way even more dogmatic and rigid than anything that went on in the 1950s or the 1970s. Every female must have long hair. Sportswomen paste on false eyelashes to play contact sport. Girls wear tuille and tiaras. The words “woman” and “mother” are being abolished in favour of “they” and “birthing parent”, “breast-feeding” is “top-feeding”.  Women can’t even claim what was traditionally their sphere. A whole generation of females is being proscribed by ideology which has no evidential basis. Instead of claiming women’s rights, why don’t trans-activists seek their own? And please note that it doesn’t work the other way. Trans-men are not fighting to get into men’s space, which does make you wonder if this isn’t a last gasp of men seeking to control women.

Sandra Coney QSO

Author, The Menopause Industry