Open Letter to the President, Parliament and Citizens of the Hellenic Republic

The Greek government has prepared and submitted to the Parliament a draft of a law concerning “change of gender identity.” As this terminology is not yet fully translated or fully incorporated in the Greek language, we wish to explain to the Greek women and men what the notion of gender means when utilized to replace sex as a legal classification and the consequences for women, children, freedom of speech, and the society at large.

We are women, men and transsexuals from countries where such misogynistic and homophobic laws are already a humiliating and threatening reality and consider it our duty to warn our Greek friends and the Greek authorities about the culture-wide changes a Gender Identity Law will bring. Most important of these changes is the destruction of all legislation that offers protection and equality to women through the medical, legal and criminal erasure of the biological reality of sex. Gender identity laws also constrain freedom of speech and scientific research on behalf of a tiny minority of people suffering from the mental conditions of gender dysphoria or autogynephilia. Those persons already enjoy all human rights, except the right to “self-identification”- but “self-identification” is not a human right and could never be considered as such when its legal recognition erases the rights and protections of women and children and endangers the basic human freedom of speech. Greek society, especially Greek women and children, are already suffering under the austerity measures and we are rightfully concerned about further impacts if Gender Identity becomes law.

*CHILDREN RIGHTS AFFECTED BY “GENDER IDENTITY LEGISLATION”

In our countries (The United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom…) children as young as three years old are “social transitioned” by misguided and terrified parents, teachers who don’t dare object to the transgender propaganda now being presented in schools by transgender lobbying organizations and irresponsible “therapists” who are members of transgender organizations. There are no degree programs anywhere in the world that certify a therapist as a “gender identity specialist.” Anyone who chooses to work in this field may claim the specialty. As a result, children as young as 10 years old are administered puberty blockers (gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist, marketed under the brand name Lupron). These drugs, which cause documented, serious side effects in adult patients suffering from prostatitis or endometriosis, block the normal puberty of “transgender children,” delay the development of both secondary sexual characteristics and the normal growth of children’s genitals, cause permanent sterilization as well as problems to the bones, heart, liver, and to the brain. There are no long-term studies regarding this off-label usage on children.

The private lobbying organization “World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH),” which is financed by some of the largest multinational pharmaceutical corporations including Bristol-Meyers-Squibb, Glaxo-Smithkline, and Johnson& Johnson, has recently published guidelines to lower the recommended age of children who can take Lupron to the age of nine. A great percentage of affected children are also diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, a condition that is well known in the scientific and medical community to create insecurity about identity and absolutist thinking. This research has not seemed to give transgender advocates pause. Instead of prudent and comprehensive treatment, and in flagrant violation of the United Nations Declaration of Children Rights, these children are prescribed puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries by private gender clinics and doctors (one of which has recently been suspended in Britain for diagnosing and prescribing to children over the Internet). This is truly uncharted waters and children are the subjects of this experiment.

We are aware that the draft of the Greek law doesn’t allow the “transition” of children under the age of 18. But we also know that in Greece, children are already sterilized through the administration of Lupron and are subject to medical mutilation of healthy external and internal genitalia or breasts. Every country that has passed such laws has seen the number of “trans kids” multiply by alarming percentages while NGOs run by transgender activists, like British advocacy group The Mermaids, are promoting in primary and high schools the “transition” of children. The Province of Ontario in Canada has recently passed a bill under which parents who do not agree that this medicalization of their child is in their child’s best interest could lose custody of their child. Greek transgender activists, with the help of international transgender organizations, are lobbying the Greek government and political parties to legalize the “transition” of children.

Greek women, protect the children. Don’t sterilize, don’t castrate and don’t remove healthy body parts from your children. The most eminent pediatricians and psychiatrists in the West know and have published research demonstrating that the majority of children suffering from gender dysphoria desist with age. Hormones and surgery are not the answer.

*WOMEN RIGHTS AFFECTED BY “GENDER IDENTITY LEGISLATION”

In countries where “sex” as a legal category is supplanted by the artificial notion of “gender” and where the so called “self-identification” replaces the objective reality of biological characteristics and social consensus about the sexes, i.e. where any man can declare himself a woman and be accepted by the state as such, women lose as an immediate consequence the rights and social protections we fought for with extreme sacrifices for the last two centuries.

• Women lose the right to the legal and social protection of maternity under the false pretense that “men [i.e. women who change gender identity and therefore are considered as “men”] can gestate and lactate.” This outrageous claim, which defies any biological, scientific, historical and social reality, is easily adopted by institutions, corporations and organizations who then contest in the courts their obligations towards their female employees and by courts who must comply with the new legislation, as is already happening in seventeen states in the US.
• Women and girls lose scholarships intended for female students, as well as university and work quotas, because men who self-identify as women are legally accepted as candidates.
• Women and girls are obliged to share the private spaces of segregated bathrooms, change rooms etc. with men who self-identify as women. Bodily intimacy is violated and the very real danger of rape, indecent exposure, and assault is not allowed to be considered by the law and the authorities. According to the United Nations, women and girls represent 95% of rape victims. According to the same universally accepted source, 98% of the perpetrators of these crimes are men.
• In countries were the “gender identity” laws are women’s new oppressive reality, crimes such as peeping, photographing of unclothed women and girls has risen and women have no legal recourse until the crime has been committed.
• Women and girls are forced to abandon gyms and swimming pools, as they already do in US and Canada. Female sport teams have been forced to abandon their locker rooms as young women and girls are simply unwilling to expose their bodies to those they know to be male or be exposed to male bodies legally re-defined as female. In cases involving adult women in public bathrooms and locker rooms, there are legally re-defined males already convicted for sexual assaults again women accessing women in private spaces in the US and no way to prevent this. This universal right to privacy and modesty is being removed in prisons as well, as we see in UK.
• We also have seen in The United States and the United Kingdom, men who have made no move toward any social or medical transition being offered beds in shelters for homeless females and those women escaping domestic violence. We have seen the results of putting transgender-identified males in to women’s prisons. Several of the more infamous cases, such as the Soham murderer, Ian Huntley, involve males who have been convicted of the rape and murder of women and girls. Under Gender Identity laws, these men are given full access to women who are confined in jails and prisons.
• Professor Helen Boyd of Lawrence University in the United States, and others, have written about the legal and emotional effects on women and children when the husband in decides to ‘transition” later in life. We have not yet seen long-term studies regarding the lives of children whose parents transition.
• As the language of Gender Identity Laws vary from state to state and between nations, legal and criminal justice organizations such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, UK’s MI5 (Security Service) and INTERPOL, to name a few, are undecided in how to label convicted men and women. This is leading to a gross distortion in the available criminal statistics used to understand and curtail criminal activity as well as a non-realistic portrayal of women as guilty of committing sexual offences that where in fact committed by males.

*GAY AND LESBIANS RIGHTS AFFECTED BY “GENDER IDENTITY LEGISLATION”

Please, remember that countries in which homosexuality is a capital crime, such as Iran, legalized decades ago surgical gender reassignment: Transition is in practice homophobia and gay eugenics. Transgenderism is a profoundly homophobic movement. Gay and lesbian organizations fight against transgenderism and work for the removal of T from the LGB movement and acronym. Transitioning young children and teens who do not conform to gender expectations is profoundly homophobic.

Our lesbian sisters are especially threatened by trans activists: under trans pressure, social media site, Facebook, has closed lesbian accounts and silenced lesbian groups; transgender activists organize “seminars” in order to teach queer people and “trans women with penises” how to break the lesbian resistance to intimacy with male-bodied people; the sexual orientation of our lesbian sisters is ridiculed and their sexual and human freedom is under attack from those “trans” men who wish to be perceived as “women and lesbians”. Transgender activists have already campaigned against and forced the closure of the famous Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, have used threats of physical violence to exclude lesbians from the Dyke March of Chicago, have addressed odious threats to and publicly stalked lesbian leaders like Cathy Brennan...

Greek lesbians and gays, don’t let our lesbian sisters and homosexual brothers lose the rights we fought for so hard for decades.

*FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AFFECTED FROM “GENDER IDENTITY LEGISLATION”

We want to remind Greek women and men, that universities around the world have been forced by donors to change the names of “Women Studies Departments” to “Gender Studies Departments.” Over the last decade, we have seen in our countries the creation of academic disciplines dedicated to “transgender studies and transition health programs” funded by well-known trans multimillionaires, like “Jennifer” Pritzker. At the same time, the freedom of scientific research is under attack. The Canadian Bill C-16 has opened the door for suits against Universities that teach Darwinism and Evolutionary Biology. Eminent scientists have tried to explain this real danger at the Canadian Senate, in vain. Only this week, the University of Bath in the UK rejected a research project about females who had previously identified as trans and who after undergoing ‘treatments” including mastectomies, hysterectomies and testosterone therapy, reverted to living again as women, under the pretext that “engaging in a potentially ‘politically incorrect’ piece of research carries a risk to the university […] Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university.”

Psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, pediatricians, endocrinologists, biologists are under attack. When they dare to publish research that doesn’t please the transgender activists, attacks, threats and an orchestrated “social indignation” in the media ridicules and stigmatizes these eminent scientists as “transphobic,” “alt-right,” or “conservative.” Transgender activism does not spare the social sciences and philosophy: last May, the philosophical academic review HYPATIA was forced through orchestrated indignation, to remove a paper that compared transgenderism with the new fashion of “transracialism.” But what is our society, how do we maintain a culture of reason without these voices?

Any discussion about the validity of the concept of “gender” or the consequences of “Gender Identity” laws is violently censored by trans activists. Two weeks ago, in Hyde Park, London, trans activists attacked a group of women gathered to attend a meeting on the subject, and repeatedly punched a 60-year-old woman. The attackers were three young males.

But as important as the science censorship, is the erasure of the words, the language policing that transgender activists want to impose. Already in Canadian provinces, certain states in the US, in the UK and elsewhere, under what are colloquially known as “misgendering laws,” freedom of speech has been converted to coerced speech. A citizen of these areas may not use the proper pronoun for the sex classification of a person who “identifies” as the opposite sex. Women and women’s reproductive rights organizations are now omitting the word “women” from promotional and instructional materials. Organizations such as Planned Parenthood, created and funded over the decades by and for woman, now use the term “non-male” to refer to the patients who use their services. Women training to become childbirth assistants, were asked to leave an educational seminar in early 2017 for refusing to not refer to a laboring woman as “non-male.”

Transgenderism and its legalization (with the consequent erasure of sex as a legal and constitutional category) demands a seismic change in the meaning of words and newly invented words while utilizing the power of the state to enforce acceptance of this new language. Language that only a tiny minority of the population wants to impose. New articles or pronouns that should be accepted and used according the “self-identification” of each person, new meanings for words essential to the construction of the self and the psychological realities of every human as well as to the construction of our collective self as a society. This imposition by the force of the law, the police and the courts, demands that all people lie about the reality in which they live. It demands from us that we lie about what a woman is, about what a man is, about how human reproduction works. It demands from all of us a lie about how human societies have been constructed. It demands from all of us a lie about any material and cognitive reality that make us humans. Those imposed unfamiliar words pervert our human reality, our collective memory, our cultures and our human history. In the American city of New York, the law now protects over 30 “gender identities” most of which are not defined by or codified in the law, yet carry a fine of $250,000.

Women, particularly, lose the language and the words that can tell our oppression. Because women’s oppression, since the beginning of human history, was and is based on our role in human reproduction and in the perception of our bodily functions. Women have been reduced, by patriarchy, to their bodily functions: our intellectual abilities, our psychological characteristics, our moral integrity, our mental equilibrium, were imagined to be influenced in the most categorical way by our bodily functions. We were good when submissive to the maternal destiny and to male sexuality to reproduce heirs for our husbands – we were bad when those same bodily functions were not adequately controlled, leading us to be labeled with hysteria and madness, as a danger to ourselves, our families and the social order.

According to the United Nations statistics, 98% of rapists are male and 95% of rape victims are female. According to European Union statistics, 32,000 women were killed between 2009 and 2016 by their husbands or partners. According to those same official statistics, 1 woman in 3 will be the victim of assault in her life. How are we going to speak about the violence we suffer, if the word woman doesn’t mean “WOMAN” anymore? How are we going to describe our abusers and how will the culture understand what women endure if the word man doesn’t mean “MAN” anymore? How are we going to demand our human dignity if the word “vagina” is replaced with “front hole” (as presently dictated by the LGBT organization Human Rights Campaign) and if the law accepts the legal existence of “male vaginas” or “female penises”? Remember that in most countries, rape is legally defined as a penis entering a vagina. Are we really to suddenly believe that women have penises and are raping other women?

Feminism, since its beginning, demanded the right of self-determination for women who had suffered thousands of years of oppression and had seen their oppression justified by “male science,” male theology, male art, male ideology.

Women have suffered (as men have also done) from rigid and ignorant gender stereotypes. Because that is what “gender” is: rigid stereotypes and social roles. Transgenders have ridiculed womanhood by reproducing a pornified and humiliating image of “femininity.” Members of the Greek Parliament, the law you are going to discuss, will legalize those false and oppressive stereotypes. It will legalize the idea that “woman is a feeling,” a costume to wear, a mask under which a non-person is hiding. This law will erase the reality of the sex and all human history, human culture, human language and human reality, in order to promote the alienating idea that woman is the person who can buy hormones, cosmetic surgery, wigs and makeup to enact a “feminine stereotype.” This law ignores and erases from the Greek constitution the very reality that if two persons have intercourse only the biologically female can be impregnated. This law ignores and erases from the Greek constitution the very reality that all rapists know: that a woman is not a feeling, but a female adult human whose feelings and experiences can be constantly ignored. If you are not certain about what a woman is, please, ask your mothers.

Mr. President of the Hellenic Republic

MPs of the Hellenic Parliament

Women, men and transsexuals of Greece

Don’t erase women. Don’t erase human material reality.