Bruce Pardy: A letter to my ‘TERF’ friends
By Bruce Pardy | Published by The Epoch Times
Dear Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists,
Last May, Olivia Pichardo threw out the first pitch at a Boston Red Sox game. She was being honoured as the first woman to play Division 1 NCAA baseball. There were no protests. Where were you? After all, you keep saying that men and women competing against each other is unfair, unsafe, and wrong.
You say that it’s unfair for men like Lia (William) Thomas to swim against women in the pool. It’s dangerous for men to play women’s rugby. It’s wrong to have men in women’s cycling races, which they keep winning. It doesn’t matter, you say, that these men identify as women. “They should not be competing at all,” said tennis great Martina Navratilova in an interview with Intelligencer magazine in November. “Whether they win or lose, doesn’t matter.”
NCAA swimming star Riley Gaines agrees. “A school that knowingly allows a male athlete to take a spot on a women’s team or allows a male athlete to take the field in a woman’s game,” she said in testimony before Congress in December 2023, “is denying a female student an athletic opportunity.”
But a woman playing with men is not what you mean. It’s wrong to allow men to elbow their way onto the pitch with women. But if a woman can make the men’s team, you have said, she has a right to play. Lots of women have played with men through the years. Some, like Pichardo, have been celebrated. Manon Rhéaume played goalie in NHL exhibition games in 1992 and ‘93. Mo’ne Davis pitched a shutout game in the Little League World Series in 2014. Brooke Leibsch played quarterback for her Kansas City high-school team in 2015.
“Girls can do anything a guy can do,” Leibsch said when interviewed by a local TV station. ”Girls can be just as strong as a guy.” You go girl, you might have told her.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, or from which wave of feminism it came. But a long time ago you made an argument that stuck. We are equal, you said, and we are special. We have the same rights and privileges as men. And we have special rights and privileges as women.
We have the right to be in men’s spaces, you declared. There can be no places where women are not welcome. There can be no men’s social clubs. There can be no men’s firms, professional associations, fitness centres, golf clubs, or sports leagues that do not admit us. We are equal, you said, and cannot be excluded.
But we are also special, you insisted. We are victims and need our own spaces where men are not allowed. We have been disadvantaged, so we must have professional associations dedicated to our success. We need our own networks to do for ourselves what men have always done. We must have our own fitness centres, law firms, and charities. We are physically weaker and vulnerable to men’s violence. Our sports and locker rooms are for women only.
The feminist double standard was born. Women could invade men’s spaces, but men could not do the reverse. Girls could play for the boys’ high-school soccer team if they were good enough, but boys could not play on the girls’. Two soccer teams of 16 players each could end up with 15 boys and 17 girls. No one cared much about the boy turfed from the team to make way for the girl. Boys’ teams, in effect, would be open teams, while girls’ remain segregated by sex.
Your double standard became embedded in human rights law. It weaponized the concept of discrimination. Affirmation action was born. Companies cannot refuse to hire women because they are women. That’s discrimination. But they can refuse to hire men because they are men. That’s not discrimination but equity, diversity, and inclusion. Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, women have the right to the same rules as men. But if they don’t do as well under those rules, they have a right to have the rules adjusted. Equal and special.
But what goes around comes around. Your double standard became the ethos of modern social justice. Leveraging that ethos, men have found a way to invade your spaces. These men, calling themselves women, are entering your clubs, sports, changerooms, and prisons. The Biden administration has proposed to prohibit schools from banning transgender students from sports teams that align with their gender identity. In the social justice hierarchy that you helped invent, transgender women are the bigger victims. Indeed, you are their oppressors. They are equal and more special than you. You seem surprised.
Are women equal or special? Do you agree, at long last, that the same rules and standards should apply to everyone? You can be separate from men, or together with men, but you can’t have it both ways. We can have separate soccer teams, one for boys and one for girls. Or we can have two open teams for the 30 best players. Men can have their own clubs, firms, sports, and professional associations, and women can have their own sports, changerooms, bathrooms, and prisons. Or we can have everything open to everyone. Either would be fine. Pick one, and we can work together to put the social justice genie back in the bottle.
If not, so be it. The woke dumpster fire can continue to burn. You can carry on complaining about the unfair turning of tables. And men can shrug when the next Lia Thomas gets in the pool. You go girl, they might say.
Best regards,
Bruce
To read the original version of this commentary, see the publisher’s website here
Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe and professor of law at Queen’s University.
