Recent letter writer Anthony Giardina somehow wasn’t able to get to the substance of Karen Bercovici’s July 9 guest column [Conflict of rights: Gender identity dismantles women’s and girl’s sex-based rights“] in his critique. It seemed he instead wanted to simply rail against Bercovici and against the issue of sex-based rights for women that she wrote about, with the overall goal of trashing her intelligence and belittling the important content of her column.
Did the letter writer even know about the men allowed to be placed in women’s prisons before reading her column? Can it be he doesn’t care about the sexual harassment these women endure, held captive at MCI Framingham, and in numerous prisons across the U.S., Europe and elsewhere in the world where convicted males are allowed to identify as women and thus be placed in women’s prisons? The violence perpetrated by men in women’s prisons isn’t covered by mainstream press, so Bercovici’s reference to it is significant.
How about men’s appropriation of women’s rights to compete in female sports, established legally in 1972? We are left to guess how the writer feels about that since he doesn’t refer to that piece of Bercovici’s column, either. Does he honestly feel that women such as Bercovici who speak out about this fraudulence are “deeply ignorant”? I would urge read Stephen Hussey’s July 8 column in the Greenfield Recorder [“Reality over ideology“] published shortly after the Supreme Court ruling was issued in June to get a sense of the importance of sex-based categories in sports.
Giardina’s letter insults Bercovici, presumably with the intention of shutting her up, and to attempt to preemptively silence other women from speaking out about sex-based rights, in contrast to his directive to “assume humility.” The attempt to silence is duly noted, but women will continue to speak out about the hard-won rights for girls and women, and how those rights are impacted by gender identity ideology.
Paige Bridgens
Northampton