Dear Editor:
About 87% of the delegates at the recent Conservative Party convention voted to support a plan to demand single-sex spaces that are only open to women, with a definition of women as a “female person.”
The policy is intended to keep transgender and other gender-diverse people out of women’s prisons, shelters, locker rooms and washrooms. Forcing a transgender woman to use men’s spaces will likely trigger symptoms of gender dysphoria, causing them mental and emotional harm and could potentially lead to verbal harassment or injury from physical retaliation from others.
Perhaps the answer is to set policies that control environments instead of people. For example, creating locker rooms with individual showers and changing spaces that are enclosed so that no one is able to see or judge anyone else’s naked body. We also have to think about the consequences of creating a term like “female person” and then using it to exclude services to individuals either within the confines of this policy or by applying it to other governmental or public services. If we allow this we will be creating a void without services for individuals who do not easily fit within the Conservatives’ definitions of “female person” or “male person”.
If you think this does not really matter, because you don’t know any transgender or other gender diverse individuals, please remember that what you are willing to stand by and watch be done to someone else could also be done to you.
Joanne Mitchell,
Fergus