Femininjas

It has come to our attention that the VWHC has decided to exclude transgendered and intersexed women from Lu’s: A Pharmacy for Women. Our concern is that this further marginalizes women in a way that is detrimental to our well-being.

The Femininjas would like to see this change. We would like to help foster a community planning process to implement trans-positive policy through negotiation and dialogue rather than legal action.

We have heard from present and former members of the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective who would like to see women’s services include ALL women, but who have felt frustrated in their attempts to make change within their own organization.

We have also heard from many members of pro-trans feminist organizations throughout the community who would like a chance to meet and work together on a non-hostile resolution.

Thus, we would like to arrange a facilitated meeting between members of the VWHC and local pro-trans feminist activists, with the goal of changing the policy of the VWHC and Lu’s Pharmacy. We suggest sometime between now and Saturday July 25th, at a time and location chosen by members of the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective.

If you would like to be a part of this meeting for change, please contact us at femininjas@femininjas.com

We look forward to hearing from you by the end of Monday, July 20th.

Sincerely,

The Femininjas

P.S.   Please circulate this post wherever you like! (Femininjas.com permalink: http://tinyurl.com/lla64b)

There’s video on the Xtra West website

And an article in the Vancouver Sun

- The Femininjas

Hi everyone,

Chartreuse here. We had an amazing potluck last night and made some amazing progress. One of the areas in which we made progress was the website. We decided that because femininjas are a loose coalition (a very loose coaltion, if you catch my drift!) it’s not appropriate for one or two members…. I’m thinking of me and Dapper here…. to hog the website. From now on, the website will carry both official announcements and editorials, where individual ninjas can say their bit.

How to tell the difference?

1. Official announcements from now on will be signed ‘femininjas’. They will appear on the front page. They will be tagged ‘official.’

2. Editorials and unofficial announcements will appear in the sidebar and on a separate page, tagged ‘editorial’. They will sometimes also appear on the front page, but in this format:

<ninja name>: <topic>

Please remember that not all ninjas think alike, and that no one of us can assume to speak for all of us. This website is now an open forum.

Thank you everyone. We’re just crawling back out of our afternoon naps here. More coverage of the coverage will follow. In the meantime, get your fix at news.google.com. Oh and did I mention that at Straight.com, we’re taking up four of their top five most popular story spots? See:

http://www.straight.com/article-239961/transgender-ban-vancouver-womens-pharmacy-could-violate-professions-code-ethics

http://www.straight.com/article-239955/transgender-rights-activists-protest-ban-downtown-eastside-pharmacy

Response forthcoming

Femininjas News Release – July 10th, 2009

At 10:30am on Saturday, July 11th, the Femininjas, a Vancouver-based feminist group, will be filming as a transgendered woman tries to get a prescription filled at Lu’s Pharmacy, Vancouver’s new women-only pharmacy. We will film as Lu’s pharmacy decides whether or not to refuse her service on the basis of her transgendered status. If she is denied care, her denial will be followed by a brief non-violent action. We welcome media coverage, and will have a spokesperson on hand willing to talk to reporters.

The Femininjas is organizing this action because Lu’s pharmacy presents itself as a resource that welcomes all women, but its policies and actions say otherwise. As part of the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective, Lu’s refuses access or services to transsexual women, intersexed women, and women without whatever they define as “female physiology.”

This is not only unjust, it is illegal. A recent Supreme Court decision has confirmed that at least some transgendered women are legally women, and therefore entitled to full treatment as women under the law. Yet Lu’s continues to act as though trans women and intersexed women aren’t so entitled. The Femininjas maintain that, regardless of legal status, discriminating against someone on the basis of her birth sex is no different than discriminating against someone on the basis of the colour of her skin, or her sexual orientation, or her religious faith, and is no less illegal.

We praise the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective for promoting the health of women in Vancouver’s troubled Downtown Eastside. But we lament that its misguided, illegal policies make it the only business in Vancouver that explicitly refuses transsexual and intersexed women.  We wonder whether the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective did any community consultation before opening their business, as many of the Downtown Eastside’s most vulnerable women are just those to whom they refuse service. None of the health hazards of the Downtown Eastside care whether or not a women is transgendered. So why does Lu’s?

Past communications between the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective and the trans community have not been successful, and so we reluctantly take this peaceful, non-violent action, in a spirit of helping our brave sisters grow into the sort of organization that all women can be proud of.

For more information about the Women’s Health Collective and the policies followed by Lu’s, please see http://www.womenshealthcollective.ca/PDF/Our%20Political%20Agreements.pdf.
For more information about the Femininjas, join us at http://femininjas.com/.

Comportment

0. Be polite, respectful, and quiet. No chanting, no name-calling. No, not even ‘transphobic.’
1. Try to channel Ghandhi, not Ché.
2. If your neighbour is starting to look triggered, gently point it out to her and, if she’s willing to accept your help, try to talk her down.
3. Have love and compassion for everyone involved, especially those who work at Lu’s.

Speech

0. Praise the women’s health collective for putting in this wonderful new clinic…. but then lament its fatal flaw.
1. What Lu’s is doing is illegal discrimination. Mention that many trans women are legally female, so Lu’s is discriminating illegally. They’re not just immoral, they’re illegal. (Although legal status shouldn’t matter either!)
2. When talking to the media, stay on message. We’re feminists, and they’re ‘conservative feminists’. We’re (mostly) trans women, and they’re ‘non-trans women’. (“Cis” means nothing to most people.)
3. Emphasize shared needs of trans and non-trans women. Don’t talk about your transition meds. Talk about your asthma, your Zoloft, your methadone, your protease inhibitors.

If you’ve been across the Stanley Park Seawall, you might be curious about our chalkings. What do they mean? And did you miss any?

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Here at Femininjas, we don’t just talk about stuff — we talk about it, wait till the last minute, and then do it. And, because we’re all cam-sluts, we take pictures, too.
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