Tag: Title IX

FIST to host Zoom Forum March 25th on Strategies for Winning Back Abortion Rights

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Feminists In Struggle continues its series with a forum on abortion rights: “After Dobbs and the continuing threat to women’s reproductive rights, how do we develop a strategy to regain and secure the right to abortion nationally?”  Tickets on sale now!

FEMINIST FORUM: STRATEGIES FOR WINNING BACK WOMEN’S ABORTION RIGHTS Tickets, Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 1:00 PM | Eventbrite

Here is our exciting panel of speakers:

Andrea Gabay is a grassroots activist who first volunteered in 2020 while living in New York City. She was an active volunteer doing food drives and composting at GrowNYC environmental program to empower New Yorkers to secure a healthy environment. She also supported many marches throughout NYC, including many BLM movements and was involved with Women’s March in Manhattan. Andrea brought her activist work back with her to San Diego, where she organized a march/rally in January 2023 as part of the national Women’s March.

Wendy Murphy , J.D. is an impact litigator specializing in women’s and children’s civil and constitutional rights. She won landmark Title IX cases against Harvard, Harvard Law, and Princeton between 1992 and 2010 that led to the revolutionary 2011 Dear Colleague letter; and sued the Trump and Biden Administrations in federal court to advance women’s rights. She also won landmark cases to improve privacy rights for women crime victims and testimonial rights for disabled crime victims. She is adjunct professor of sexual violence law and law reform at New England Law Boston where she directs the Women’s and Children’s Advocacy Project under the Center for Law and Social Responsibility. She is well known for her legal advocacy in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.  See our ERA-FIST brochure, “Why We Need the ERA” on which Wendy collaborated, and her book, From Suffrage to Inequality.

Ann Menasche is a San Diego civil rights attorney, grassroots activist, lesbian, and long-time feminist who is a founding member and co-coordinator of the national radical feminist organization, Feminists in Struggle. She is also co-chair of the Green Alliance for Sex-Based RIghts. She has fought for access to safe legal abortion in the years before Roe and in the decades that followed. In the 1980’s she led a landmark case against an anti-abortion center or “fake clinic” for consumer fraud and won. She also helped organize Marches for Women’s Lives in San Francisco that drew tens of thousands of people. Ann was recently fired from her civil rights job for asserting that abortion bans harm women as a sex and has filed a wrongful termination law suit against her previous employer as a result.

JOIN US FOR THIS IMPORTANT DISCUSSION!

Forum on the New McCarthyism Targeting Feminists’ Jobs and Livelihoods, Saturday Dec. 10th

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THE NEW McCARTHYISM: THE ATTACK ON FEMINISTS' JOBS AND LIVELIHOODS

THE NEW McCARTHYISM: THE ATTACK ON FEMINISTS’ JOBS AND LIVELIHOODS is the title of our next Feminist Forum, which will be held on Saturday, December 10th at 1:00 p.m. Pacific Time, 4:00 Eastern on Zoom.

In the 1950’s it was “the Red Scare.” In the second decade of the 21st century, the methods are the same but the target is different: feminists and others who do not agree with gender identity orthodoxy that conflates sex and gender and denies the existence of biological sex.

JOIN US FOR THIS IMPORTANT DISCUSSION ON HOW WE CAN PUT AN END TO THIS WITCH HUNT SO THAT WOMEN CAN STATE OUR OPINIONS AND FIGHT FOR OUR SEX-BASED RIGHTS WITHOUT FEAR!

SPEAKERS:

Christy Hammer is a sociologist with a 35-year university teaching career, and currently an associate professor of education at the University of Southern Maine. After telling her graduate students that there were only two biological sexes (with variations), students walked out of her classroom, demanded she recant, and sought to get her fired all in the name of “restorative justice”. One trans-identified student who felt personally attacked, filed a Title IX sexual harassment/discrimination complaint against her, which was summarily dismissed by the University counsel. Christy has a long history working in LGBTQ youth advocacy, and in promoting anti-racism in schools. What happened to Christy was described by others as an example of the “woke attacking the woke.”

Ann Menasche is a radical feminist, Leftist, lesbian, and founding member of Feminists in Struggle (FIST).  She was fired without warning last May from her job of 20 years as a Civil Rights attorney at Disability Rights California for asserting that abortion bans harm women as a sex, and for her FIST activity outside of work. The executive director had issued a statement opposing the threatened overturning of Roe and asked for staff feedback. DRC’s statement had mentioned every group that could be harmed by illegal abortion except women. After stating an obvious truth, Ann faced an onslaught of name-calling and slurs, and was condemned in absentia as having opinions “inconsistent with the values of the agency”.  For more on this story, see Defend Feminists

Everyone, women and men, are welcome to attend this forum!

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FIST submits written testimony on Title IX

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Here is the letter FIST submitted on June 11, 2021 to the Department of Justice to support preservation of sex based rights of women and girls under Title IX:  Written Comment: Title IX Public Hearing (gender identity and rights of women and girls).


Feminists in Struggle (“FIST”) is a women’s liberation organization focused on protecting the rights and advancing the interests of women. We are concerned that Executive Order 13988 will be interpreted and applied in such a way as to disadvantage women and girls as a sex in academic environments. Although the rights of transgender-identifying males do not need to infringe on the rights of girls and women, when gender identity and sex are conflated and gender identity is allowed to override or supplant sex, the two are in conflict. Since the objective of Title IX is to advance the status of those oppressed on the basis of their sex (i.e. women), FIST advocates an application of the Executive Order that does not compromise this objective. Our recommendation for fulfilling the directives of the Executive Order is as follows:


Sex-separated sports must remain an option for all students. This means that all students have the option to compete against only members of their own biological sex. Membership in these sports groups should not be attained by identifying as transgender or non-binary. The OCR should also direct schools to create co-ed sports groups and opportunities that are opt-in for students. This application of the Executive Order has many advantages that the previous applications of similar directives (the Obama Administration’s Dear Colleague letter of 2016) lack.


First, such a policy would preserve fairness in women’s sports. The differences between the physical capabilities of males and females are multifarious. On average, women have smaller bodies, less maximum oxygen consumption, smaller and shorter bones, and a lower ratio of muscle mass to body weight. As a result of these physical differences, among many others, men are almost always faster and stronger than women within their peer group, while women have greater balance, flexibility, and endurance than their male peers. Under the Dear Colleague guidance of 2016, sports did not remain sex-separated, and transgender identifying male students were allowed to compete against female students. They exploited their natural biological advantages in strength, speed, and size to claim prizes that would have otherwise been won by female students. Female students missed out on qualifying spots for higher competitions, chances to compete in front of college recruiters, and scholarship opportunities. In contact sports such as soccer and wrestling, the safety of female students is compromised in addition to fairness, as women are lighter and weaker than their male counterparts and more prone to musculoskeletal injuries. Female-only teams are also important because women and girls still have less opportunity to participate in sports and develop their potential as compared to their male counterparts. By preserving sex-separated sports as an option for all students, this application of Executive Order 13988 will preserve fairness and safety for female students, which should be a guiding principle for Title IX.


The creation of opt-in co-ed sports groups will also have many benefits. For one, it will reduce the “othering” of trans-identifying students and create a positive social environment in which they can compete. Because all participation is voluntary and open, the value of fairness is not an expectation in these sports groups, so it is not compromised by the presence of individuals of either sex. When the presence of trans-identifying male athletes is no longer a threat to sporting values such as fairness and safety, they can more freely enjoy the social, emotional, and physical benefits of sports.

FIST also suggests that the Executive Order be applied in such a way that maintains female students’ right to sex-separated spaces such as restrooms and changing rooms where women and girls are in a state of undress and need their privacy and safety protected. Male children are more likely to engage in unprovoked physical aggression than are female children, and male people overall commit the majority of sex crimes, including rape. Victims of sex crimes are largely female. The data available regarding the crime rate for trans-identifying males is limited, but the data that does exist shows that such males commit these crimes at the same rate as other males (i.e. retain a pattern of male criminality). Because of these factors, sex-separated spaces play a key role in preventing sexual assault and harassment in schools, which is a primary objective of Title IX.

FIST recommends that girls continue to have access to female-only restrooms, and that all students including trans-identifying individuals, have access to a gender-neutral restroom. This application of Executive Order 13988 will reduce sexual harassment of trans-identifying students while also protecting the privacy and safety of female students.


In the event that the OCR chooses not to follow FIST’s recommendation on the application of Executive Order 13988, it is imperative that data be collected on the results of this change. FIST demands that the impact on female students be measured. Data such as female participation rates in sports, as well as the number of prizes collected by trans-identifying males competing in female sporting events, should be gathered. Incidents of sexual assault and harassment in schools should be collected and aggregated by place of assault, sex of victim and perpetrator, and gender identity (if any) of victim and perpetrator. Surveys should also be conducted to determine whether female students’ attitude towards the school or sporting environment have changed, particularly female students’ feelings about their own safety within school and fairness within their sports. This data is important public health information that can be used to guide policy in the future.


Respectfully submitted,
Feminists in Struggle
June 11, 2021

“On the Basis of Sex”: Why the ERA is still important for women and girls

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Why do women still need the ERA? Won’t the placing of the word “sex” in the U.S. Constitution and providing for legal equality between the sexes just be used against us and provide no real benefit? Some, like our sisters in WoLF, think so. We think they are dead wrong on this one.


First we need to understand our past. The eagerness and utter blindness in which so many progressives have betrayed their principles and sold out the interests of women and girls in favor of a sex-denying gender identity ideology is not unprecedented in history. After the Civil War, the Abolitionist movement, the male comrades of the early suffragists and First Wave feminists betrayed their sisters by insisting that women, both Black and White, wait for our rights, and that only Black males should have their rights recognized. They ended up putting the word “male” in the Constitution for the first time, in the Fourteenth Amendment. Women were now explicitly non-citizens.

This split the movement, weakened both the feminist and anti-racist struggles, and led to some feminists incorporating racist ideology into their campaigns and for the first time opposing universal suffrage. This betrayal also delayed the victory for women’s suffrage until 1920. But, guess what, the word “male” is still in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Amendment that provides due process and equal protection of the laws. The Equal Rights Amendment is in part about a long overdue correction, to treat sex discrimination with the same seriousness and status as race discrimination under the highest law of the land, the U.S. Constitution.

Race and national origin discrimination claims benefit from what is called “strict scrutiny”–it is far easier under the Fourteenth Amendment to challenge discriminatory laws and practices based on race than on sex–and to do so everywhere in the country. And women still suffer from a ton of such practices. One of the biggest aspect of female oppression is we are poor and grossly underpaid. Poverty means that women often are forced to stay with abusive male partners or are vulnerable to being prostituted in order for them and their children to survive. We still have a largely sex-segregated workplace, with “men’s” jobs having higher status and pay. Women who entered the trades in the late 1970’s, were forced out a few years later largely as a result of sexual harassment. White women who work full-time earn 78 cents to every dollar a man earns. For women of color it is far less. Women are over 62% of minimum wage workers.

And even in female-dominated professions, men make more than women do, with women nurses paid 10% less than the males, and women lawyers earning 83 cents on the dollar compared to their male colleagues. While we have laws against discrimination in employment and wage discrimination they have loopholes or may not be enforced. And these laws could be weakened or repealed at any time. A Constitutional Amendment has much more staying power.

Or take pregnant women workers. Despite the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, pregnant women, especially those in low paid physically demanding jobs, are routinely fired or forced off the job. They are treated far worse than employees covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act suffering from a variety of medical conditions. Putting sex in the U.S. Constitution would make it far easier for those women to make their case.

The Equal Rights Amendment would give women an additional hook to challenge male violence against women in the universities and in the military. And women being denied access to contraception could challenge the double standard that allows Hobby Lobby to refuse to cover contraception while covering Viagra. And can it not be argued that it is sex discrimination for vasectomies to be perfectly legal and funded while abortion is not funded and instead even treated as a crime as many states are trying to do?

But what of the downside, that women-only spaces and programs might be eliminated? First, this is already happening under Title IX and in other areas of civil rights law, and through regulation, without the ERA. Should we then repeal Title IX or Title VII because the sex discrimination provisions can be used to eliminate the separate spaces and programs that women need? No, we need to fight against the use of “gender identity” to remove sex-based rights and we need to do so with or without the ERA.


Strict scrutiny doesn’t mean no distinction is possible. There is extensive case law holding that distinctions meant to address past discrimination of a historically disadvantaged group are allowed, or where there is a compelling reason to treat the groups differently. Female-only spaces and programs, including women-only scholarships, colleges, shelters, clinics, and training programs have compelling reasons justifying them, based on privacy, male violence, addressing past discrimination and other grounds. Same goes for women’s sports programs. The fight to defend affirmative action, for example, has been going on for decades and this is an area where men of color and women’s interests as a sex coincide.


It is quite telling that President Biden is all-in for eroding sex-based rights through support for an un-amended Equality Act and issuing Executive Orders that would have gender identity override sex, but can’t manage to tell the Archivist to publish the ERA. Women must expect and demand more.


It has been nearly one hundred years since the first version of the ERA was introduced in Congress in 1923 as the Lucretia Mott Amendment.  A century is too long to wait for equal rights based on sex under the Constitution. EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT NOW!

Actions to Take In Response to Biden’s Executive Order and Imminent Introduction of the Equality Act

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Since the first day of the Biden administration, developments have come thick and fast regarding attacks on and attempts to protect single-sex programs and facilities for women and girls. FIST encourages everyone who cares about the legal rights of women and girls to contact Congress, the White House, and the federal agencies to demand the protection of our legal rights to single-sex sports teams, scholarships, prisons, shelters, and other facilities.

Reach out to the White House and social media, to your U.S. Representatives and Senators, and to the federal agencies. Letters, emails, phone calls,and demands for in-person meetings with your U.S. Representatives and Senators are all needed.

Regarding the Equality Act: Write and call your Senators and Representatives, urging them to support the Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act. Here is a sample letter.

The website The US Equality Act continues to grow and to be a valuable resource. The site includes much good explanation of how the Equality Act and Biden’s January 20 “Executive Order on Preventing & Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation” will harm women and girls and need to be amended, revised, or applied by federal agencies to preserve the Congressional intent behind Title IX.

 The US Equality Act site also has lots of guidance and sample material for sending letters to Congress and to the federal agencies tasked with applying the Executive Order. Most recently two new sample letters were added:

One for Speaker Nancy Pelosi

And one for the Bureau of Prisons

DON’T MOURN, ORGANIZE!

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With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, we’ve lost an outspoken advocate for women who broke multiple barriers in the long fight to end discrimination on the basis of sex. Though she was no radical or revolutionary, she was in many ways both a product of decades of struggle for women’s rights as well as one of our most passionate proponents. And we have suffered this loss at a time when we are facing two enemies at the gate – one who will take advantage of this loss to swing the Court even more to the Right, putting in direct jeopardy Roe vs. Wade, lesbian/gay rights and the effort to finally enshrine the Equal Rights Amendment, already ratified by 38 states, into the U.S. Constitution in addition to disappearing sex as a protected class in language and in law in favor of “gender identity.”


Laws are passing in a number of states that will result in the most vulnerable groups of women–those escaping male partner violence, experiencing homelessness in shelters, or those who are in prison, having to share intimate congregate spaces with males. These women are poor, disproportionately women of color, and many have been victims of sexual and physical violence by men. Yet, women’s needs for privacy and a safe refuge from male violence and the ability to establish boundaries are being run roughshod over by an ideology that re-defines “women” and “men” as a set of stereotypes that a person of either sex can claim. Girls in middle and high school going through puberty are coming of age in a violently misogynist porn-soaked culture, are being taught that they are sexual objects that have no intrinsic value, that they have no right even to say “No,” as males enter their locker rooms and private spaces and take away their prizes and sports scholarships set aside for women and girls. No wonder so many girls decide that being female is not for them and ingest hormones and seek double mastectomies to ‘become men” or “nonbinary.”


And then there is the Equality Act that has already passed the U.S. House and is pending in the Senate that while providing long overdue statutory rights for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, would take away sex-based protections by redefining sex as “gender identity.” Even without the Equality Act, the Courts have already moved in that direction. While the U.S. Supreme Court in Bostock ruled just this past June that employment discrimination based on an undefined “transgender status” was based in part of sex, the narrowness of the ruling did not prevent two lower courts from citing to Bostock to deny the existence of sex entirely. And though Title IX regulations explicitly allow separate bathroom and changing room facilities in schools based on sex, “sex” now has been redefined to mean “gender identity, ” with the Courts ruling that two girls who identified as boys that were denied access to the boys’ facilities were discriminated against based on “sex”.

In light of these developments, the approach taken by FIST’s Feminist Amendments to the Equality Act remain essential. In order to avoid confusion and end subsuming the category of sex by “gender identity,” we need a bill with clear definitions of all the terms being used, and separate provisions protecting each class of persons, rather than merging distinct protections under the broad umbrella of “sex.” Rather than the amorphous and subjective concept of “gender identity,” people who do not conform to gender role norms should be protected from discrimination based on” sex stereotyping” whether they identify as transgender or not. Most importantly, we need a federal bill to spell out the rights of women and girls to separate spaces and programs.


FIST and the newly formed LGB Alliance USA are in the process of creating a broad coalition to advance the Feminist Amendments. Please sign on as an endorser and join the campaign!


Feminists across the globe including in the United States are starting to organize once again, asserting the primacy of our own rights and needs as a sex by demanding full civil rights protections under the law. We cannot let the courts, Congress, and state legislatures erode our sex-based rights, whether by restricting or outlawing abortion, eroding lesbian/gay rights, denying us the Equal Rights Amendment, or prohibiting female-only spaces, programs, and short-lists. The purpose of securing our rights is not to perpetrate discrimination of any kind; rather, it is to advance our status in society against continued systemic oppression based on sex.


Let’s honor the memory of RBG by committing ourselves to continuing the struggle for the sex-based rights of women and girls. DON’T MOURN, ORGANIZE!

The Equality Act

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A committee of FIST lawyers has agreed to analyze H.R. 5, “The Equality Act”, and consider proposing feminist amendments.  In case you haven’t been following this, H. R. 5 calls each of the following a form of sex discrimination:  discrimination on the basis of the “sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition of an individual, as well as because of sex-based stereotypes.” The Act goes on to define ‘gender identity’ to mean “the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s designated sex at birth.”

We are supportive of extending anti-discrimination protections to lesbians and gays, and are heartened to see the intent to strengthen protections against pregnancy discrimination.  However, we are concerned that defining gender identity as a form of sex discrimination will have the effect of actually compromising some of women’s hard-won rights and harming some programs like Title IX of the Education Act which was intended to redress past discrimination.

The Congressional testimony of Julia Beck of WoLF and Doriane Lambelet Coleman, two feminists pointing out the dangers to the rights of women and girls inherent in elevating gender identity to a discriminated status can be heard beginning at about 24:00 minutes of WLRN podcast #36 “The Left, The Right, and Feminist Strategy  https://soundcloud.com/wlrn-media/edition-36-the-left-the-right-and-feminist-strategy