Perpetuating the Cycle of Abuse: Feminist (Mis)Use of the Public/Private Dichotomy in the Case of Nixon v. Rape Relief
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article addresses the human rights case between Kimberly Nixon, a transsexual woman, and Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter (Rape Relief), a women-only collective, by critically analyzing the legal arguments and justifications put forth by Rape Relief and its counsel. Nixon was denied the opportunity to volunteer at Rape Relief on the basis that she was allegedly not born a woman and was not treated as one her entire life. By engaging in a discursive analysis of Rape Relief's oral arguments, Rape Relief's co-counsel Christine Boyle's academic arguments, and the judicial decisions related to the human rights complaint, I argue that Rape Relief exploited the governing assumptions of the public/private divide in its attempt to justify its exclusionary policy against transsexual women volunteers.As my title suggests, Rape Relief's use of the public/private dichotomy could be understood as perpetuating a cycle of abuse: it appropriated and perpetuated a legal principle that has consistently been used to the disadvantage of all women in society. Ultimately, I posit that Rape Relief's arguments worked against the interests of both transsexual and non-transsexual women.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".