“That’s not acceptable,” Jamie Lee Hamilton told the Straight in a phone interview. “No city licence should be given out to any business that operates in the city of Vancouver if it chooses to discriminate.”
Hamilton added that she plans on filling her next hormone prescription at Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women, which opened on July 7 at 29 West Hastings Street.
The collective’s executive director, Caryn Duncan, told the Straight in a phone interview that her organization’s steering committee discussed whether or not to extend service to all “self-identified women”. In the end, members decided to serve “women born women”.
“We are an organization that has for almost 40 years supported women around their battle with breast cancer or unwanted pregnancy or delivering a baby with a midwife, [and] celebrating or dealing with menopause,” Duncan said. “It’s about bleeding—or wanting to bleed or not bleed. It’s about being a woman, and the physiology of being a woman.”
She claimed that the pharmacy doesn’t have the expertise or capacity to serve transgender women. “I think we’re being very reasonable,” Duncan said. “I believe the massive groundswell of support for our pharmacy and for our work is evidence that what we do is supported in the broader community.”
The B.C. Court of Appeal has upheld women-only organizations’ legal right to restrict membership to women and not admit transgender people. Hamilton, however, claimed that the court’s ruling dealt with organizations and not with a business that provides a health service.
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This links to the open letter I've written to VWHC: http://gudbuytjane.livejournal.com/11601.html
It is time Vancouver's women's groups move past their archaic and biased attitudes about trans women. This is a marginalized group of women who are routinely targeted for violence. I refuse to be part of a community of women that would discriminate against a group based solely on one's discomfort. This has been done in the past to women of colour, lesbians, and others, and it is time for it to stop being okay to do to trans women.
It's incredibly frustrating to see something as positive as a women's only pharmacy decide to discriminate against one group of women.
I think that any organization for women should be trans inclusive, but for heaven's sake, this is a pharmacy. They are filling prescriptions. The idea that they would have to go far out of their way to serve trans women's needs is, I believe, a weak cover story for their bigotry. Trans women ARE women, and need services provided for women. I sincerely hope that Lu's will reconsider this archaic and discriminatory policy.
And as a cisgender woman, I would hardly sum up my health concerns and "physiology of being a woman" as "it's about bleeding". Seriously? That's incredibly simplistic, and it's a pretty flimsy reason for discriminating against trans women.
Trans women = women. Women's spaces should be for all women.
Once again we see the code words "Women born women" supporting transmisogyny. Once again we see the same old tired, worn out and utterly discredited "biological imperative" argument ironically advocated by a group created to fight arguments based on biological imperatives; at least when they're being used against them.
Vancouver Women's Health Collective just wasted a perfect opportunity to be inclusive. I have two words for them: Exclusion disempowers. By falling back on the tactics of the oppressors, they become the moral equivalent of the oppressors.
Hypocritical much?
And as a ciswomen, I'm appalled at such treatment of marginalized women. I've yet to see any good reason to deny them the same level of safety, care and comfort.
This is one of many excuses used to exclude trans women from consideration - and one of the specific excuses used to exclude trans women from medical care.
The kind of expertise or capacity that any institution or business or clinic or pharmacy needs to serve trans women is the ability to acknowledge us as women and treat us as human beings, instead of othering us and our bodies and using that to exclude trans women from access to medical care.
Whatever Caryn Duncan may believe about what she said, she's reinforcing the cissexist norms that marginalize and exclude trans women from services so basic as health care.
* http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cissexual
Let’s pull back to look at the bigger picture: trans people aren’t protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Why would a women’s organization deliberately decide to discriminate against some of the most vulnerable people in our society? An example of this vulnerability: trans women are over-represented in sex work and in the DTES: if the pharmacy opened its doors to all women, it would be well positioned to do some good work.
A shame that the Vancouver Women's Health Collective is in the dinosaur age about this one.
And i didn't know that i was required to disclose my relationship with either of those things when simply having a prescription filled. i'd better tell the good folks over at my local pharmacy and see what they have to say about it. i'm sure they're super interested in what is/n't in my pants and what does and doesn't come out of my genitals (which im sure they're also real interested in hearing more about!).
One woman has already been denied access to this WOMEN's pharmacy because of what Lu's perceived/assumed to be emanating from her genitals. How many more before the "groundswell of support" starts to understand why this is so problematic, outrageous and ridiculous?
Please stop hijacking the word "feminist" to describe your oppressive actions.
Here's a better word for you: "bigotry."
You make a laughing stock of your own pledge to promote "Health for all women in an equitable society."
I expect just about all women self identify as women. Presumably the scare quotes are meant to imply self identified = transsexual women are not women?
doesn't the same thing apply to WOC/white? abled/disabled?
post menopausal women don't have periods - will they be excluded because they aren't bleeding? or are they included because they might want to bleed?
It's just vile bigotry.
Shirley Anne in the UK
So the discrimination isn't "about bleeding" at all. I might remind my cisgender sisters that in the early days of the feminist movement (back in the 1970s) the point was often emphasized that one of the reasons that women have been oppressed by patriarchal society is because women were equated with their reproductive biology, and that women are indeed much more than merely their ovaries, uteri and vaginas.
So this position is a crock, sisters.
Then about the stance of the Pharmacy; this is pure and blatant discrimination based on prejudice and as such simply bigotry!
ANY pharmacy where they know how to do their job, can give full service to ALL women, either cis or trans!
As well, using "whore" as a derogatory term is not terribly respectful of sex trade workers.
I don't know Jamie Lee, but I am glad she stood up and made her voice heard. Whatever personal issues one might have, this really doesn't seem like the time, unless the goal is to derail from the point at hand - the marginalization of trans women.
And I never see any mention in the trans discussion on woman-only space of the men that perpetrate the violence trans people and women both face. Trans activists need to be focussing on the violence done to them by MEN, not on tripping up women who are fighting for their freedom from male violence too.
Stop trying to derail the conversation by crying male violence and think a minute. Just why do you suppose transwomen want to get into womens' space in the first place? Could it possibly be to get away from those violent men? Why yes, it just might be! Who ever would have thought?
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