I AM A DUCK

The headline, and the angle she was approaching this from, is that there was a case where trans women were in the crosshairs regarding a law protecting women from hiring discrimination based on pregnancy. The point of contention being that - as trans women - they could not get pregnant, ergo making this whole process of protecting them from pregnancy-related discrimination a Farce.

This was a point of view hammered in by a politician named Mikaela Hall, and it's that angle that a lot of Facebook click-farmers and general hatemongers generally clung onto. That's where my mum was at.

So she pulled up a news article and she began to read it out, and the situation made itself super clear.

The ACTUAL crux of the issue is that if an employer asks a trans woman if she plans to start a family, and she answers "yes", there is a chance that management will discriminate against her based on that because she might claim maternity leave. And an essential part of this case is that this is legislation that has existed for decades, covering cisgender women, and this court case is simply a reiteration that employers are not legally allowed to discriminate during their hiring process based on if they think the applicant is going to take leave to raise their kids.

Politicians like Mikaela Hall dove in to be like "BUT TRANS WOMEN CAN'T GET PREGNANT, THIS DOESN'T APPLY TO THEM", but the issue is with that misogynistic viewpoint of women starting a family and taking time off to raise their kids. It's a broad issue of misogyny within the hiring process, and if a trans woman passes in cisheteronormative spaces - or if she doesn't, but employers feel that they can level the same disadvantaging rhetoric against her anyway - it's an issue of misogyny which affects her too.

The issue of politicians turning this into a culture war spectacle is bunk when it's literally an issue of misogyny within hiring practices which affects cis women just as much as trans women - but it BECAME this culture war talking point because of ghouls like Mikaela Hall making it as such.

And the thing about this conversation with my mother is that despite her swallowing the BS hook, line and sinker, she actually caught herself when she read the article. I immediately caught the issue, but as she went further through the article, she realized what the argument actually was and she corrected herself. She realized she was wrong. She realized this was a reiteration of the same bigoted hiring practices that have affected cis women for decades, just - for lack of a better term - trans-washed to make your average culture warriors foam at the mouth about trans women being counted alongside cis women.

And that's where I think a lot of transphobic rhetoric is at. Cis women are discriminated against along gender lines for so many things - and when something occurs that affects cis women, but the focus of the article is how it affects TRANS women? Rabble rabble rabble, trans women aren't affected by this, they're centring themselves and impacting women's rights, where do they get off, rabble rabble rabble.

But the focus of this story is simple misogyny. An employer cannot discriminate against a woman based on whether she may one day want to raise a family. "Are you planning to raise a family at any point in the future" is an illegal interview question for that reason - if a woman says "yes", that's immediate grounds for a company to boot them out of the hiring process. It's levelled against men less because the societal expectation is that the wife will raise the kids and the bloke will keep working, but when it comes to trans women, the same disadvantaged question is levelled against them and they're held to the same standard that cis women are. And this hearing was simply to say that this discrimination - against either cis or trans women - isn't legal or right.

But it BECAME this big culture war talking point because of willful, deliberate, malicious ignorance from the mouths of transphobes who were buttmad that trans women were being counted in the same categories as cis women.

For the most part, my mum is a very put-together, cluey lady. But she bought this shit hook, line and sinker, and it's only in bringing it up to debate the broader point of transphobia that she saw the full context of the argument and realized she'd been misled. And I think a lot of transphobia works along the same lines - rabble-rouse along divisive political lines and only give the audience half the story.