International Women's Day: a vehicle to redefine us
Women should boycott this event that serves only to assert male dominance.
How do you celebrate International Women’s Day if you can’t define ‘woman’? The answer is: by including men. This annual calendar event, with its roots tracing back a hundred years to the suffrage movement, is fast becoming notorious as a date when, rather than centering women, organisations and companies fall over themselves to platform biological males. This year, with its theme of ‘Inspire Inclusion’, it would be optimistic to hope that this pattern will not be repeated.
Unfortunately, when it comes to women’s events, ‘inclusion’ has come to mean that they’re not just for women anymore. Last year, Hershey’s Canada used International Women’s Day to launch a limited edition chocolate bar with the likenesses of ‘five Canadian women working to build a better future’: one of the five was trans woman Fae Johnstone, born male. On the same day, Joe Biden honoured ’11 extraordinary women from around the world’, with an International Women of Courage award: one of the 11 was trans woman Alba Rueda, born male. Whilst all this was happening, organisations like Oxfam and the Women’s March, and politicians such as Justin Trudeau, were taking the opportunity IWD provided to tweet that ‘trans women are women’. And as IWD2024 approaches, there are already signs of the same: a women’s collective in Northern Ireland called Reclaim the Agenda has announced a trans identifying male speaker at their IWD event in Belfast: by Friday we can surely expect there to be more such examples.
Writing about this sometimes creates a bad feeling in me. Not only have I been socialised as a woman to ‘be kind’, a sort of codified way of telling women to think of others before themselves at all times, but I also do genuinely want a world in which all people, no matter how they identify or present, feel respected and included. Of course trans people should get advertising contracts, and win awards, and be celebrated. But should we be doing this on International Women’s Day, the one day of the year when the focus is supposed to be on elevating a category of human with a long history of oppression – females? The problem is that by changing the definition of women to include men, we begin to erode the ability not just to celebrate women, but to protect their rights, and as a feminist, I have to put women first. I want to ‘be kind’ to my own kind.
As a writer on women’s health, I have found myself front and centre of attempts to change the definition of ‘woman’. It first came to my attention around 2019 that there was a drive to change terminology and either use replacement terms such as, ‘birthing people’, ‘cervix owners’, ‘menstruators’, and, ‘bleeders’; or to remove ‘women’ from the language by using woollier phrases such as ‘expectant parents’ and ‘breastfeeding families’. When I politely questioned these changes, I was brutally attacked on social media, called a transphobic bigot, and deplatformed from speaking events. In spite of having written two bestselling books about childbirth and led a global ‘Positive Birth Movement’ for nearly a decade, I became persona non grata, and people were instructed to throw my books in the bin.