Speak out: A necessary Exclusion
by Chris Linneman, Special to The Peak, March 11 2002, Original source from e.Peak
After reading Stephen Hui's grossly biased "news" article of February 25, entitled "Transgendered woman challenges definitions of gender," I felt I had to respond.
Choosing to frame this issue as one concerning discrimination obscures the true nature of the problem. The case of Kimberly Nixon is one of whether or not an organization should have the right to decide its membership.
As Suzanne Jay explained in Hui's article, Rape Relief is an organisation that operates as a transition house and crisis line for women who have the shared life experience and socialization of being born female and growing up viewed as such by society. To force Rape Relief to accept the tribunal's ruling undermines its right to decide its own mandate, and leaves the shelter vulnerable to further invasion of women-only space.
As a male, I am also prohibited from joining the collective at Rape Relief. Since the Tribunal decision was based on the fact that Nixon was excluded due to an attribute of herself beyond her control (i.e., that she was born male), the decision could reasonably be applied to me as well. Most people would agree that such a decision would be an erosion of vital women-only space that our patriarchal society necessitates.
Why is the case of Kimberly Nixon any different? The members of Rape Relief made a collective decision to exclude an individual from their organisation for the benefit of the whole that, despite Hui's poor choice of quotation in his article, required a lot of discussion and consideration.
Yet Rape Relief's decision would not have prevented Nixon from contributing to the struggle to end male violence. She was invited to join Rape Relief's fundraising committee, a body open to everyone.
More importantly, according to Nixon herself, "there are no other services for transgendered women." This is of course unacceptable, but it seems to me the best solution would be to start an organisation dedicated to this cause rather than to penalize Rape Relief financially for choosing not to incorporate this function at the risk of alienating current users of the service.
What irritates me most about Nixon is that she seems more interested in making this issue a public moral victory than in helping the cause she claims to support. By taking $7,500 from an organisation desperate for funding in this time of political crisis, not to mention the cost of legal fees, Nixon is directly harming the women who use Rape Relief's services in a suspiciously vengeful way.
In her justifiable campaign to end discrimination against transgendered people, Nixon has unjustifiably dragged a highly effective organisation into a scandal with such ridiculous statements as "Because of violence against women, some extremists use transphobia as a tool to exclude transgendered women based on the perception that they were once men." Transgendered women were once men; if not psychologically, then socially and biologically. That is the reason they are not simply called "women".
I am appalled at Nixon's attempt to use her status as a member of a marginalized group to explain her rejection from an anti-oppression group such as Rape Relief. There are countless heterosexual white men that are similarly excluded from Rape Relief; clearly, the collective does not exclude people on the basis of their membership in a marginalised group. On the contrary, Rape Relief specifically operates on the principles of giving such individuals more space to make up for that denied them in mainstream society.
Nixon's accusation that Rape Relief excluded her due to transphobia is inaccurate and opportunistic, serving only to discredit legitimate claims of discrimination. Stated more accurately, Nixon's comment would have read: "Because of violence against women, it is necessary to exclude transgendered women from women-only spaces on the basis that they do not share the life experience of sexist oppression from birth that women share."
I fear too many people look at this case as simply another example of discrimination without examining the details of the situation. I fear that in the minds of many people, Nixon's marginalised status qualifies her to be exempt from the limitations to entrance that legitimately exist in women's organisations. Articles such as Hui's serve only to perpetuate this knee-jerk reaction to the issue.