Our Campaigns: Promoting Sex-Based Analysis
Thank you to all who attended Feminists Speak Out - March 2024
Kathleen Piovesan is a founding member of the Vancouver Lesbian Collective.
Read Kathleen’s full talk on the harms of gender identity to women in BC.
Kathleen Stock is the author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. She is a UK-based columnist for UnHerd, co-director of The Lesbian Project, and a witness for Amy Hamm, the BC nurse threatened with disciplinary action for her gender critical views.
Cherry Smiley is the author of Not Sacred Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined. She is an outspoken BC-based (radical) feminist and artist from the Nlaka’pamux and Diné Nations who holds a PhD in Communications.
Sex-based rights under attack
Our female biology and society’s treatment of women based on how our biology is perceived impacts the condition of women in Canada. Even though sex is a protected ground in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, increasingly our institutions pretend they don't know this fact.
Instead, institutions treat gender identity as more important than sex and the term “woman” has been redefined in policy and practice to include males who claim to be women. This is an attack on our ability to make a better world for women.
Sex matters to lesbians
Lesbians are exclusively same-sex attracted women. Sex-based bias in society impacts the condition of lesbians in Canada. We still fight sexual harassment, pornification, and sexual assault from males who feel entitled to cross our boundaries. As women and as lesbians, we have the right to assert sex-based boundaries on our sexuality and our organizations, and to have these boundaries respected in society.
Statement on Employment Equity Act, May 2022
As members of the Vancouver Lesbian Collective we have a vested interest in the review of the Employment Equity Act for federally regulated industries, particularly as it considers adding LGBTQ2S+ workers as a distinct category and considers if changes should be made to the EEA to reflect current understandings of gender equality.
Still Talking - Vancouver Public Library - July 2019
A number of our members attended a Vancouver Public Library Board meeting to speak in defense of the library’s room rental policy and decision to host Meghan Murphy’s first #GIDYVR Still Talking event, focused on Gender Identity and Women’s Rights. Our group’s position is that women’s right to gather publicly to discuss issues affecting us is lawful under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that libraries are places for open debate and critical thought, not institutions of censorship.
In 2020 under similar circumstances we appreciated the tenacity of library workers through this controversy, by giving roses and chocolates.
