We are encouraged by those who spoke on the day in favour of our work and the political principles guiding us. As well, by the hundreds who expressed similar sentiments in their letters to council members. We are also grateful to the many who have donated to us, ensuring that we can carry on and even expand our public education efforts.
In a woman-only space, with other women, who have the shared experience of being born without a choice to the oppressed class of women we come together to organize and strategize our resistance and our fight for women’s liberation.
We have no doubt that people whose behaviour is not consistent with the tyrannical, socially imposed definition of manhood or womanhood, including transgender people, suffer condemnation, discrimination and violence. Women have been punished since the dawn of patriarchy for disobeying the suffocating constrictions of girlhood and womanhood.
While studying at Oxford University, I woke up to find myself being sexually assaulted. That’s why I want an honest and open debate about women’s services, without being accused of rhetorical “violence”.
But more often the worry was that someone who had grown up being treated as a male to adulthood simply did not share the references women make in our telling each other about assaults, the objective or subjective experiences of being raised from girlhood to womanhood.
Women must be able to formulate and express their own ideas as individual women and as a constituency that is affected by patriarchal laws and practices in uniquely gendered ways—an experience which no man is open to and cannot experience for as long as patriarchy defines gendered relationships to power and privilege in their present form.
