University sides with white, trans student against Hispanic feminist scholar's right to speak and organize for women's rights

A Dominican scholar working toward her PhD at a university in England was targeted for harassment by another PhD student, and the school took the side of the harasser. Raquel Rosario Sanchez's alleged harasser did not want Rosario Sanchez to chair a meeting by Woman's Place UK in Bristol, a group that advocates for women's rights and opposes gender self-ID. For this advocacy, Woman's Place UK has been called a "hate group." It was a complaint of "hate" against the women's rights group that began Rosario Sanchez's difficulties in 2018.

In response to the complaint from the biological female, Nic Shall, who identifies as transgender and believes women's advocacy that excludes males is "hate," the University of Bristol took Shall's side. The extent to which the school took the side of a biologically female student against the female student Shall harassed is shocking, to say the least. In their attempts to be inclusive and tolerant, the University of Bristol sided with a white, biological female English citizen against a brown, female, immigrant student.

In a statement on the matter, Shall claimed to be the victim, and posited concern for "an international student, or someone without secure migration status who could be deported as a result of University bullying?" in the future, like the woman Shall was harassing, who feared for her visa to stay and study in the UK.

Rosario Sanchez's works to defend women from male aggression, professional and academic career was concerned with violence against women, and as a result, she became the subject of a harassment campaign that called her names, called for physical violence against her, and smeared her as bigoted and phobic for standing up and speaking for human rights. Shall had a great many supporters, both within the University and without, while Rosario Sanchez, alone in a foreign country and on scholarship, was isolated, targeted, and her concerns ignored.

"Feminists are used to hearing excuses for the appalling behaviour of trans activists, but here was an academic institution explicitly downplaying threats and abuse levelled at one of its students," wrote Joan Smith for Unherd. In fact, an open letter from feminist scholars went to Vice Chancellor High Brady to back Shall against Rosario Sanchez and to further state that it is hateful to believe that biological men who identify as transgender are not women is "hateful." It was signed by some 200 professors who undoubtedly believe that they are anti-racist and opposed to the patriarchy. They are not.

After four years of trying to get the University of Bristol to take her complaints of harassment seriously, Rosario Sanchez brought suit against the university, and recently released her victim impact statement publicly. What followed was 75 pages of gripping testimony about how a bright young woman came to study in England, full of hope and excitement, and became unwitting victim of an academic culture that puts protections for gender identity over those for biological sex.

Rosario Sanchez's statement is a powerful testament to the turns the gender identity movement has taken in its efforts to suppress, oppress, and diminish women both in public and private spaces, online, and in culture. At every step of the way, the harasser who sought out Rosario Sanchez was uplifted, protected, believed and allowed to continue bullying the immigrant student.

Correspondence within the university, per Rosario Sanchez's statement and the documents that back it up, shows that her concerns for her safety and the continuance of her academic study were nowhere near as pertinent for the university as the complaints and grievances of one trans-identified student. Shall's name was protected and obfuscated by court order while Rosario Sanchez's was made visible again and again both by the university and Shall as he continued to protest her right to speak on behalf of women and the need for sex-based protections.

The story of Rosario Sanchez, her courage, her silencing, her unwavering dedication to fight for women against erasure and against male abuse is a testament to the tenacity of the feminine spirit.

Trans ideology is nothing more than the latest effort by men to suppress, oppress, and denigrate women. Trans ideology, the belief that "woman" is not a sex classification of the female sex, but a set of complex identity feelings that can be possessed and embodied by biological men, has infiltrated all areas of education and public policy in every anglophone country in the world.

Currently, in Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, women have less rights than men who claim they are women. Women do not have rights to sex-specific spaces. They lack the rights to speak up for themselves to the exclusion of biological men, to be incarcerated separate from biological men, and in these nations, women have even lost the right to use words to identify themselves as separate from biological men. (Even the persistent use herein of the term biological is in an effort to not offend or raise ire.)

Across the governments of these nations, concepts of maternity and other sex-based relationships such as mother, daughter, sister, aunt, and niece no longer designate relationships of women to others in their family. Instead, men who say they are women also lay claim to this vocabulary. This has gone so far the legislation about maternity and childbirth, agencies and organizations, including health agencies and organizations, no longer understand these words to apply solely to women and women's experience. Instead, biological men who claim to be women, and their supporters, have pressured companies that provide menstruation products to also advertise them to biological men who claim to be women.

For far too long, women in western nations have acquiesced to this. We have gone along to get along. We have been nice, we have accepted the total co-option of our spaces, our language, and our bodies by men who claim they are women. We have done this because we are agreeable, because we are compassionate and empathetic, and as such, as women, we have been easy to push around.

Biological men who claim they are women and their supporters have been fully able to suppress, oppress, and silence women primarily because, as women, we have given way to their wants and wishes. Men have been pushing women around for a long time, and this is just the latest mode of their patriarchal combat against the fairer sex.

Biological men who claim they are women and then use that status to push women around while claiming that "woman" is an amorphous complex feeling, that male penises are actually "girl dicks," that lesbians who don't want to engage in sex with biological men who claim to be women who are attracted to women (i.e. straight men in dresses) are transphobic, that children they have fathered should call them "mother" once those biological men begin to claim they are women, and that any woman who objects is bigoted and needs to be silenced, are nothing more than classic, patriarchal bullies who do not exemplify any characteristics of femininity or being female.

In many cases, these biological men don feminine apparel, grow their hair and fingernails long, wear make-up, and get silicone breast implants. Most do not undergo castration. Once they've outfitted themselves according to stereotypes of female appearance, they behave fully like men.

They bully, harass, demand, push their way in, take over women's spaces, women's conversations, women's language, and demand they be seen as just one of the girls. Every woman knows that they are not. No matter how big she smiles, how much she advocates for that biological male to have the same sex-based protections she has, or states her pronouns, every woman in every western nation knows that there is a distinct difference between women and biological men who claim they are women. We know. Women who say they do not know are lying, as are the biological men who claim they are women.

These biological men who claim to be women and their supporters are so loud that their voices can be heard above the pleas of the women who refuse to lie or accept lies. Presidents and Prime Ministers give sway to these men and in so doing claim to be protecting women. But they are not, they are protecting liars and harming women by denying women the very definitions of their existence.

We are our bodies, we are our hormones, we are our relationships, we are our behaviors—both learned and ingrained, we are not reducible to any of these. Women are adult human females. Sex is not a mutable condition.

Biological men are not women. Biological women are women. This is not controversial. What is offensive is not that women should say and know this, but that anyone should deny that it is fact. Rosario Sanchez has spoken for all of us, and we must back her, and her statement, as fully and vocally as possible.

Correction: an earlier version of this article stated that the harasser was a biological male identifying as transgender.