Is Sweden the best place for women?

I don't think Eva Gabrielsson would necessarily agree that it is.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6301629.ece

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Sweden AFAIK still has a ban on the physical punishment of children. It's been in place since 1979 or thereabouts. Finland has the same legislation. I can't help but think that better public policy on children is going to reflect positively on public policy on women.  Anyway, this relates only to issues of family law and violence. Just thought I'd add this.

To be fair though, Sweden also has a much more developed social safety net than Canada's, thus reducing the need for a woman (or man in some cases) to turn to such a trade in the first place.

Of course those who can work should work. If no one worked, we'd all starve to death. It might be more accurate to say that universal education and other services at least eliminate th eneed for exploitative work.

Respectively:

Yes. I think a culture that enforces monogamy by supporting domestic violence is germane. And that non-reciprocal intimate partner violence often indicates that one partner in a relationship has successfully established a climate of fear to which nothing but docile acquiescence is possible.

And from Bedford v. Canada:

c. Effect of the Impugned Provisions

[125] Many of the applicants' experts provided the opinion that the impugned provisions increase the level and risk of violence against prostitutes. For example, they contended that the provisions at issue:

a) Limit the places and ways in which prostitution can be practised that can lower the risk of violence;

b) Sustain stigmatization of prostitutes and prostitution; and

c) Create a conflicting victim/criminal status in the eyes of the police, which leads many prostitutes to believe that the police are not willing to protect them.

Also, The Fraser Report, (1985) is mentioned.

[142] Many of the applicants' arguments find support in the Fraser Report. For example, the Fraser Report concluded at p. 378 that "the way in which street prostitution is currently carried out, results in a profession which is often dangerous, especially to the prostitute, but also to the customer at times." The Fraser Report found no evidence to support a connection between prostitution and organized crime. The Fraser Report noted that prostitutes were aware that a husband or lover with whom they shared a voluntary and supportive relationship could be seen as their pimp, and were therefore unwilling to be open about these relationships for fear of the repercussions for their partners.

Also there is this woman's testimony.

I can believe that women are people without believing we're a unidirectionally oppressed class based on the presumption of how we're bodied. I can believe that what I do with my body is my choice and that no means no ought to be basic principles of human interaction, but apprently if I call out a female on male domestic abuser, who has publicly relies on a, 'he deserved it' argument, I'm suddenly a somehow unfeminist? I'm alienated by many people who identify as feminist and I'm defined as feminist by many people who have written their own definitions. I really don't like the litmus test because it's coming from a place that has denied women like me their basic agency. I don't think, for example, you can support Vancouver Rape Relief, considering they run a hate-site as their reaction to the Nixon case, and legitimately say one is a feminist, but I tend not to make the argument about that and try to respect people's self-identification.

To illustrate, I'm also a classical conservative, but I know a lot of people who identify that way wouldn't call for the nationalization of the energy industry, call for open borders with regards to immigration, or a carbon cap-and-trade system where all credits are owned by the government, or for that matter a massive expansion of income supports and increase in income taxes, single payer dentistry, pharmacology, and public transit...

I generally try to discuss issues with people on the merits of their positions instead of trying to read people out of an ideology, though I will often grouse about nomenclature. That's a silencing tactic, one that I've often seen followed up with:

9. Perception/acceptance of my gender is generally independent of:

(3) My adherence to traditional roles of my gender (both "too much" and "too little")

(4) Holding sexist, sex-negative, or rape-culture beliefs

(5) Holding feminist or sex-positive beliefs

From the cis privilege checklist.

If you have any further questions regarding my analysis, I'll be glad to respond.

"In actual fact I support Vancouver Rape Relief completely."

So you support them running prop pieces that say:

To the untutored eye, she looks a bit like a man in a dress, which is not surprising in that she is equipped with a full set of XY chromosomes.

...

"Should you be able to change genders if you don't like the one you were born with? In Canada, the institutional answer is yes, and plenty of trained professionals will help you do it. They will diagnose you with gender-identity disorder or gender dysphoria, and they will offer elaborate, painful and mutilating cures, which, in B.C., are covered by health insurance. Maybe you'll feel better after, or maybe not. No one really knows."

But what if the right answer is not yes? Paul McHugh, chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, calls it malpractice. "Surgical sex change is nonsense, resting as it does on the preposterous assumption that one's biologic constitution is as much a malleable artifact as one's dress," he wrote recently."

Yeah... this is all about the cis women and not trying to delegitimate their trans sisters in any way...

Anyway, I'm not going to go fifteen rounds on this, other than saying that these women make it a point to keep women that they have problematized, from Ms. Nixon to the Swedish Documentarian Evin Rubar who was told while filming her documentary, "The Gender War" (I'm not going to post the whole thing, but it's at 6:53 here.) that she couldn't expect help at a women's shelter after interviewing someone who complained that she was abudcted by an "anti-trafficking agency" and again, it strikes me as just another regime of gender policing and not a preferable one and the tactics are of the base kind that would make Lee Atwater blush.

Also, remind, I'm looking forward to seeing you call susan davis a racist too because she wants to not have her consensual (as much as any form of employment) work criminalized. I'm also opposed to the Ugandan government's stance on human rights, so please, let's mention that and accuse everyone on the LGBTQ board of white privilege then too.

Well, their government is made up of more than two people, and is passing laws that harm sex workers, is refusing to even look at the Duluth model where abusers also receive treatment and has an efficacy of 65-80%, and the second person to whom you refer was no low-ranking volunteer.

And I would love to see that suit. I won't even hire counsel. They hate trans women, as demonstrated by their display of some virulently transphobic materials on their site as a reaction to a discrimination suit that would easily have been won had Bill C-389 been enacted into law. I do suppose that might have had something to do with the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition's sudden cooling on continuing a parliament which had been dysfunctional for some time by that point, but that's just conjecture.

I'd finally note that unlike VRR, I'm not advocating for discrimination against an already marginalized group of women. The only logical reason for someone to oppose aboriginal women receiving full access to governmental or non-governmental supports wouldn't be that they had white privilege, but rather that they were supporting a racist policy. The two, you see, while mutually exclusive, are not

Say what you like, but we most certainly do not live in a society that privileges trans female identity over cis female identity, so there must be some other reason that you resist allowing trans women access to the same services as cis women... I mean, if the organization is to serve all women, and trans women are women... ah. I begin to see where the logic might break down for you and a trans-misogynistic hate group that has an essay on their website that refers to trans women as, "men in ewes clothing."

Do you see where refusing to respect a trans person's gender identity, and thus privileging birth-assigned identities is inconsitent with saying that a policy is not transphobic, and in the case where women are specifically targeted transmisogynistic? I fail to see how consistent that is with helping women. I fail to see how people can't see the paralells between trans medicine today and reproductive medicine in the 1970's, and I fail to see how a rape victim who has gone through a great deal of abuse, oh, and works as a counsellor who finds her background invaluable for helping other marginalized people was washed out, within fifteen minutes of her arrival, for the sin of having been involuntarily poisoned by testosterone.

Note: I don't know why I keep accidentally calling Kimberly Nixon Cynthia Nixon... guess I really liked Tanner '88.

I think I have made my point.

No, this isn't a relativist argument with lots of grey area like whether it was anti-feminist for Henry Morgentaler to charge a co-pay. This is propaganda with the express goal perpetuating a patriarchal institution whereby women, more than a quarter of whom are lesbian, by the way, are, "morally mandated out of existence," as one sub-contrator for the Reagan Administration put it. This is leaving women without support when they are raped, attacked, murdered, for the crime of daring to assert their womanhood.

vs. the right of cis women to define the gender of trans women.

I am frankly shocked that you can defend that as a feminist perspective. Not surprised, but shocked. You are supporting a system that lets women die silently, driving them to suicide. It's CARAL v. Patriarchy all over again. And as a victim of a very public, very humiliating, sexual assault, I can never allow your false equivalency to go unchallenged. I should go brew some tea or something... this can't be good for my blood pressure.

There. Fixed that for ya.

Nah. I'm going to continue to call you out on your cissexism masquerading as feminism. As does this woman.

I'll just respond with this woman's post... oh, and of course, to get back on topic, Sweden, at least the last time I checked, requires trans women in lesbian relationships to get a divorce... that might now be moot with same-legal-sex marriage, but mandatory surgery, apparently is also fair game in Sweden.

Again, as I said, for the analogy to hold any water at all, we'd have to live in a society that privileges trans female identities over cis female identities.

Also trans woman is two words. You'll note that cissexists don't like to separate the two because then they would have to acknowledge that trans is an adjective used to describe a woman.

It also assumes that the socialization of trans women is a typical male socialization, that we don't absorb female socialization, that we aren't taught for example, that we're not women if we're overweight, or if we're not high-femme or if we like girls, or sports, or beer, the deliciously estrogenic drink.

But hey, it's a trans thing. You wouldn't understand. Neither does the author preaching for assignment essentialism, as though what some man said at my birth defines my gender better than I do.

A kissy-face does not strike me as a particularly respectful reply... in fact, I'm reminded from the scene where Judy's beaten in Better than Chocolate for the sheer temerity of using a public accommodation.

ETA: By the way, in the aforementioned propaganda piece that is transparently intended to incite hatred against trans women, the piece which remind loves so much, the aforementioned incident in the michfest showers actually was a post-operative trans man.

Therein lies the rub. Those men, trans men, (please remind, at least be kind enough to not degender us by giving birth assignment equal status with identified gender trans men are men, they were female assigned at birth, but they were never female), as Lu's Pharmacy was very clear in stating, were womyn-born-womyn by their metric. And yes, it's insulting for women to call those men their sisters and meanwhile refuse the women who are clamouring not to be centered, just to be accepted, instead of being erased, and having other womyn, like mAndrea, crow about helping doctors deny trans women treatment, talking about the 'rejects.' Rejects of heteronormative, mostly male, doctors, who, I imagine, didn't think they'd make ideal women, wnatever that means.

As Julia Serano, trans feminist author, (who I think you'd like because she points out the scorn that misogynists heap on trans women because they are convinced that womonhood is such a contemptible state,) has said of WBW policies:

They exclude trans women because they don't respect us as women.

And they welcome trans men with open arms... because they don't respect them as men.

I was convinced, actually as one festie recently posted, that because I liked sports and videogames and girls, that I must be a boy... I clung desperately to that when I was a teen. It didn't matter that I ended up being attracted to other women who, odds were, I'd find out were lesbian. It didn't matter that I had a perpetual thousand-yard-stare before I transitioned, and despite lots of people telling me I was conventionally attractive as a man, (in that really boyish way, thank goddess) I hadn't been kissed by the time I was twenty-six. Straight women don't like women, so there was a perpetual disconnect... It didn't matter that I was regularly degendered by the men I had to go to school with, especially when I refused to participate in some really sick language... you know how junior high is. I wouldn't have it. All I knew was that I'd go home, curl up in a ball, and ache to be seen for who I was.

But they keep girls like me ignorant, you see. You'd think in over fourteen thousand hours of provincial curricula, trans people, would've merited an hour... and not an hour where the most visibly trans are shown, clinically derided as freaks, and the class is duly frightened. No, not even that... and despite a wait for treatment that was comprised of estrogen, progesterone, and spironolactone, a blood-pressure medicine when my BP was 155 over 95, of eleven months less a day, I refused to bend to the desires of my doctor to make me his model of a woman. I refused to dress high-femme, because being a woman isn't about heels or skirts or makeup, or performing one's gender. And ultimately, after I got treatment... I just stopped trying to pretend I was a man... I didn't police my behaviors for the first time I can remember. It was sort of amusing to see my hands start to move reflexively when I talked. Anyway, I hate the narrative, but some people need to hear it or otherwise I'm not a living breathing womon, I'm an ideological concept.

I was born a womon, cisheteropatriarchy tried his damndest to delude me into thinking that I was a man. Ultimately, despite all the misogyny they throw at all womyn, cis or trans, they failed.

Anyway, back on topic: Here are some women attacked by men and their concerns are dismissed by the police, in Malmo. And the forced sterilization and unmarrying and not granting autonomy to women until they're 18 continues. I'd conclude that Sweden isn't much better for women than any other western country. It's probably better to be the kind of feminist who belives in unidirectional birth-assigned-gender-conflict theory there though. They can say openly the kind of busted things and enact the kind of misogynistic laws that some can only hint at here. I of course am not. Among other things a system that excludes womyn from womonhood because it needs clean little lines as badly as the patriarchy does is patently offensive to me.

Further, I reject a system that teaches women to be pieces of meat and most men to be expendable meat shields, all to benefit those who actually benefit from patriarchy. They are mostly men, but almost all men are not them. We will never defeat the patriarchy if we assume all men are reaping its rewards instead of simply being differently oppressed, probably less so, but again, that'd depend on whether you valued status or life more. If we can't call the NFL with it's 55-year life expectancy, leaving 600 more broken bodies in its wake every year, not counting the college players, all for an average of what they'd earn in a warehouse during the same 25 years they just lost (3 playing 22 dying early) a sexist institution, what can we call it? If we can't call the sixty-hour work week family-and-life-devaluing sexism, what can we call it?