Cahoots Workshop and our community call on all Women’s Workshops in Aotearoa to publicly and clearly declare their inclusiveness and support for all trans and non-binary people alongside cisgender women.

Women’s Workshops are created in response to the gender inequality that women face in practical spaces. Women are often excluded from traditional practical spaces and skills through structural and social norms. Practical skills and the spaces where we learn them are dominated by men.

Women’s Workshops directly challenge this norm by removing barriers. They are spaces that exist to combat gendered exclusion and marginalisation. In these spaces, women do not bear the burden of masking, minimising themselves, and deferring to men. The result is empowerment, enjoyment, and shifting personal and social understanding of practical skills.

Transgender and non-binary people suffer exclusion and prejudice resulting from the same gendered systems and cultural expectations which negatively impact cis-women. Trans and non-binary people tend to suffer greater harm from these systems than cis-women.

All spaces which work to improve gender equity must explicitly welcome, care for, and protect those most marginalised by gender inequity: trans and non-binary people. Women’s Workshops which actively exclude trans and non-binary people do not combat gender inequity. Instead, they perpetuate it by participating in the oppression of even more marginalised genders. Women’s Workshops that remain silent on the issue still harm these marginalised groups because silence is perceived by vulnerable trans and non-binary people as erasure, invisibilisation and thus exclusion.

It is essential for Women’s Workshops to clearly and publicly show their trans and non-binary inclusiveness in order to communicate safety and allyship to their most marginalised communities. Vitally this clear communication also denies implicit support to regressive individuals or groups who seek to actively exclude trans and non-binary people.

Cahoots has prepared the accompanying resource pack to support organisations in understanding the need and then implementing supportive and inclusive policies and practices. We are firm on the need for inclusion, but we have crafted these resources to show care, to gently explain, and to guide. By coming on this journey Women’s Workshops will not lose what makes them special, they will thrive. We offer our own workshop as an example, and we offer ourselves and our stories to answer questions and provide advice.

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Claims made in this open letter are supported by Why Trans Inclusion Belongs in Every Women's Workshop - a resources setting out the logical and ethical reasons for trans inclusion in women’s workshops.

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