Notwithstanding Democratic Party leadership’s embrace of “gender identity,” leftist feminists globally are rejecting it in favor of laws, policies, and practices that protect the sex-based rights of women and girls. The Arizona Women’s Bill of Rights (SB 1628) would enact that protection in Arizona, and I urge the House to pass it and Governor Hobbs to sign it.
I serve as the president of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) – the leading global organization that works to advance women’s sex-based rights all over the world. It does so by promoting the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, which challenges the discrimination and oppression we experience from the replacement of the category of sex with that of so-called “gender identity.” WDI USA supports the Women’s Bill of Rights, in Arizona and elsewhere.
In the 1960s and 1970s, second-wave feminists, who leaned Left, fought for women’s rights. They opened rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters for women fleeing male violence. They won many property rights for women, allowing women to leave oppressive marriages. And they fought for abortion rights.
There’s a good reason why second-wave feminists had to fight for women’s rights—because women didn’t have rights before because they were women (i.e., adult human females). Today, those victories are being thrown out, including by Democratic women leaders, because of the nonsensical, pseudoscientific concept of “gender identity”—the idea that somehow sex isn’t real, that a person can be the opposite sex, or that there is some mysterious third sex class (there isn’t). There is nothing progressive about pretending sex isn’t real.
Democratic leaders, including women, have been participating in this charade for years, and it’s time to stop. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the Women’s Bill of Rights in her state (the legislature overrode the veto). New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham failed to support the bill in her state. At the federal level, every Democrat in the House of Representatives (including the women) voted no on the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act—a straightforward bill that would protect women’s sports under Title IX nationally—last year. In March 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris sent Dylan Mulvaney a letter on White House stationery congratulating him for achieving “365 days of girlhood.”
WDI USA is a nonpartisan organization that works with women’s groups across the political spectrum to advance women’s sex-based rights. Speaking for myself, I have always been a Democrat (except for a brief stint as a Green) and I am appalled at the female leaders within my own party who, in service to “gender identity,” are throwing women and girls under the bus (though a handful of Democrats at the state level have taken a firm stand supporting women’s sex-based rights and I applaud them).
In 2021, I published a book called The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls, where I outlined the Leftist feminist critique of “gender identity.” I always put “transgender” in quotation marks because the word does not describe a coherent category of people. One hundred percent of human beings—all 8 billion of us—are either female or male, even if some claim otherwise.
In 2023, I published another book, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. The last section is an Afterword with a policy prescription for Democrats. It says:
Democratic Party leadership: You must change course, and you must do so immediately. You should do this because it is the right thing to do, but you should also do it for the health of the party. You only need to look at some of our allies across the pond and down under to understand why. Women all over the world are rejecting their left-of-center parties for refusing to represent our interests and for sacrificing women and children at the altar of “gender identity.”
Arizona Democrats should vote yes on the Women’s Bill of Rights and Governor Hobbs should sign it when it reaches her desk. Women and girls — the sex class — depend on it.
Kara Dansky is the President of Women’s Declaration International USA and the author of The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls.