The Alabama Senate County and Municipal Government Committee advanced the “What is a Woman” Act on Tuesday, which is a bill that defines gender terms to correspond with the scientific biology of the individual.
Senate Bill 92 (SB92) is being sponsored by State Senator April Weaver (R-Briarfield) and will be taken up by State Rep. Susan DuBose (R-Hoover) in the House.
DuBose discussed the importance of this law Thursday on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“So, the ‘What is a Woman Act’ simply defines male and female by the time-honored definitions,” DuBose said. “It’s common sense. It makes no immediate changes to anything in the state of Alabama, but it provides very important clarity to the courts so that if legislation comes this way, our courts can point to those definitions, which will be in code, and be able to say, ‘Look, this is where Alabama stands on the definition of male and female.’ So the future implications are very important to our state.”
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The lawmaker emphasized that this is not about anything other than protecting the rights of women in Alabama.
“Look, this is not taking away any rights from anybody,” she argued. “Everybody deserves opportunity to live, work, play with respect and care. So we’re not taking away rights from anybody at all with this bill. We’re simply defining women, and we’re actually protecting women’s rights. Women need to have, in some cases, safe spaces. Think about the female dorm at universities. This definition gives us the opportunity to protect spaces like that going forward.”
DuBose also explained how the bill makes it clear this is about defining sex instead of gender.
“We need to clarify the difference between sex and gender,” she said. “Sex is determined at birth. It is fixed. You are either male or female. In some very very race instances there is an option where you would click unknown in the birth certificate because these individuals are born with a rare disorder and later on they have surgery and they choose their sex. That’s extremely rare. But the fact is sex is defined as male or female and is fixed at birth.
“Gender, which is what society, what you start referring to everybody, your gender identity, that can be anything you want. Your gender identity is how you feel on some particular day, but that can change from day to day. But we are defining sex as male or female. We need to make sure we’re not confusing our language because the other side is trying to intentionally confuse us, intentionally trying to get us to use the word gender.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
