She told me that she released the powerful statement because she was inundated with stories of women, girls, and their allies being punished for expressing their views on sex, gender, and gender identity.
“These stories,” she said, “kept emerging on screen and multiplying.”
Moreover, said Alsalem, she couldn’t ignore “the level of noise, sabotage, threat of violence, or actual use of violence that kept becoming louder and louder.”
In March of this year, in Auckland, New Zealand, British activist Kellie-Jay Keen was attacked at the Let Women Speak Event.
“While I do not agree with some of the views and sentiments of Ms. Keen,” commented Alsalem, “we must acknowledge her right to speak without violence or intimidation.”
I asked Alsalem to define the word “woman.” She wasted no time in responding: “adult human female.” “At least that’s what it used to mean up until very recently,” she added.
“Female,” clearly relating to biological sex, has been considered an equivalent of “woman,” reflecting many other non-English languages where the distinction between female and woman doesn’t exist. For example, Alsalem explained, “in some Indo-European languages, female reproductive biology is even embedded in the word woman, which can be traced to the word ‘life’ (as in, giving life, giving birth). Think of the famous slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî—Women, Life, Freedom—where Jin (Woman) and Jiyan (Life) have the same root.”
This global, universal, and historical understanding of “woman” being equivalent to “female,” she told me, is what informed the recognition that women have faced discrimination due to their sex, which is at the heart of international human rights frameworks such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) convention.
In recent times, however, with categories of personal identification changing and expanding, and new terms constantly being introduced into the common lexicon, the word “woman,” like so many other words, has been corrupted.
All of this leaves us asking one rather important question: Can anything be done to bridge the divide between the trans community and the non-trans community?
“First of all,” responded Alsalem, “we have to remember that we are speaking of some radical trans activists that do not speak for nor represent the entire trans community.”
Many trans persons and their allies, she added, don’t support them or their questionable agendas. Alsalem believes that there are many things that “can and should be done” to bridge the aforementioned divide. These include opening up spaces that allow everyone to speak to the issues in a respectful, dignified manner, without anyone jumping to injure or cancel them.
“The issues at stake are too important, far reaching, and complex not to be discussed and debated by the whole of society,” said Alsalem.
Finally, she argues that “this process of discussion, reflection, and legislation shouldn’t be left only to parliaments or political parties and their political bartering but wider and more representative, consultative, and inclusive processes of consulting citizens in any given society.”
Perhaps these matters should be voted on in a referendum, since they have implications for broader society.
