Woman born Woman…

A recent article in the Vancouver Courier talks about a pharmacy opening up that caters specifically to Woman born Woman.  It is constructive to note that a number of years earlier the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter did not breach the Human Rights Code when it refused to allow Kimberly Nixon, a person who did not have the life experience of being treated as a woman, to train as a volunteer peer counselor.

It is interesting that around the same time as the BC Supreme Court decision, I and my partner were working with the Ct Coalition Against Domestic Violence to open up the Ct Women’s DV Shelters to transwomen, independent of their operative status but based solely on their identity. What precipitated our work was several months earlier a transwoman was a victim of severe domestic violence and could not even find shelter within Connecticut’s Domestic Violence (DV) Shelters.  If memory serves me right she actually ended up in one of the local homeless shelters where she was victimized yet again.  Sadly such situations of trans women being attacked and raped in local homeless shelters still exists today.  However back to point, we did a number of intense full day trainings with DV staff and advocates and after extensive and open discussions the participants started to challenge their own socially engineered concepts of sex simply based upon genital or a birth certificate.  In fact not long after those initial trainings we placed a young transwoman into one of the Connecticut DV shelters; and surprise, surprise, the world did not come to an end.

I could go on about the impacts and the challenges that Woman born Woman constructs have on the day to day lives of trans folks simply trying to survive; but suffice it to say that in the end society forces us into one of two boxes “M” or “F” without our consent, stamps this on our birth certificates and the rest of our lives become significantly determined by those markers.  Yet when one does not fit such a box are they then forced to be excluded from critical societal interactions and support structures when they challenge that sex assignment made at birth? I long for the day we rid ourselves of those horrific boxes and M/F labels; though sadly in today’s society many struggling trans folks don’t have that luxury and simply want to live in the identity that conforms most closely to their desires and needs.  Who among you shall cast that first stone against them?