Carol Bartle

The position of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner should not come as a surprise and in fact is the only position that she can take in order to try be consistent and coherent to herself and others given her overarching views and opinions. We must understand that the position she expressed is the only position one can organically arrive at, if one - as she does- a) conflates sex and gender identity b) disregards the material reality of women in favor of women being a feeling or an identity. c) disregards that certain reproductive processes are tied to being of a certain sex. I have genuinely tried to understand this position and to debate it with her to no avail. There is one point where we fundamentally differ and that I think underpins her positions on this: Commissioner Cody believes that if we were to recognize that women and girls have historically been discriminated against based on their sex (intersecting with other grounds), that would mean that we accept that that this discrimination is biologically determined and that this discrimination is acceptable or justified. This reasoning is flawed. We would not follow the same logic with any other form of discrimination, say for example racial discrimination. Naming that black people are often and have been often discriminated against because they are black does not suggest that such discrimination is justified, nor a tacit acceptance of it, nor does it suggest that they should be forever locked in a condition of being racially discriminated against. The answer to a serious problem cannot be to stop naming the cause, in the hope that this cause would magically go away or that its impact on the lives of people would soften or vanish.