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How much of a joke is Sex-Based Rights in Feminism?
It turns out, quite a lot actually
Ahead of my point here, the International Human Rights Law scholar (who specialises in sex and gender within IHRL, and especially gender recognition) Sandra Duffy has thrown her expertise into the ring with an absolutely blistering takedown from a legal perspective.
It is important to note from the outset that ‘sex-based rights’ are a fiction with the pretense of legality and do not in fact exist in the manner that the term is used…
Firstly, there are no such thing in IHRL as ‘sex-based rights.’ As explained repeatedly in this post, there are no rights which inhere in a person based on their physical characteristics. There is such a thing as protection from discrimination based on sex,..
Secondly, and rather obviously, lesbians are not a sex class and therefore could not have ‘sex-based’ rights, even if such a thing were possible…
Thirdly, CEDAW itself recognises that the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ which the Declaration believes to correlate to immutable physical sex, are in fact socially constructed.
I don’t have much respect for “Sex-Based Rights”, I’ll admit it. The concept is absolutely meaningless and should be ridiculed by every feminist worth listening to. I’ve laid out my argument for why a number of times on Twitter and I figured I ought to adapt it for this platform.
My first and foremost problem with it is that sex-based rights invert the reality of almost all anti-discrimination logic that exists in the real world, including the feminist project for women’s liberation generally. Marital Rape was a product of differentiated sex-based rights, male primogeniture is a sex-based right. It’s hard to think of a single instance where different rights applying by sex has ever worked out well for women because the nature of patriarchal discrimination is to make sure that these rights work against women’s interests.
Feminists have known this for decades. In 1974, in the book “Sex Discrimination and the Law”, feminist legal…
