Statement from Raquel Rosario Sanchez

Raquel Rosario Sanchez was unable to get to our London meeting, A Woman’s Place is Resolute due to personal circumstances.

She was due to speak on our fifth resolution, Sex Matters.

Raquel sent this statement to be shared:

Good evening, everyone!

I am very sorry that I can’t be with you tonight due to unforeseeable personal circumstances. I am confident that my Woman’s Place UK sisters will make sure you will have an energising public launch of our campaign objectives. I was particularly looking forward to speaking tonight about the importance of sex.

Sex matters because there is nothing semantical or ethereal about the oppression of women; it is all very material. As our fifth resolution states, we demand “rigorous collection and analysis of sex-based data and that high-quality research must be central to the development of any services, policies or actions which address women’s needs or which challenge sex discrimination and inequality.” As I have emphasised before, sex is a biological variable that ought to be considered in all stages of medical research. Sex-based research is vital to countless medical issues ranging from cardiovascular disease, cancer diagnosis and lung diseases to the interactions and implications of sex differences in placental health. We are barely beginning to grasp the importance of sex-based research and the fatal impact of neglecting to take our female sex into account when addressing disease, medicine and drug treatment.

Beyond medicine, the importance of sex affects every single feminist issue under patriarchy: from bride kidnapping, women’s refuges and services, reproductive health, women’s sports, the burdens of care work, the feminised face of poverty and the disproportionate impact of austerity on women to political quotas for women, the statistics on male violence against women and employment discrimination. All feminist work, around the globe, hinges on us having clear data on sex-based oppression and on society being able to develop policies that are evidence-based.

Over generations, countless women have fought hard and fiercely, locally and internationally, for women and girls to be counted and for our discrimination to be monitored so that we can better understand our oppression and subsequently eradicate it. Nobody has the right to tamper with that perpetual struggle to the point in which these services for women and monitoring efforts become useless and not fit for purpose. On that cheerful note, I wish you all an invigorating public briefing. I look forward to meeting many of you around the UK in the near future as we push forward our campaign for the rights of women and girls, together.

Big hug!

Raquel

@8RosarioSanchez

Philipa Harvey stepped up at short notice to substitute for Raquel. You can watch her speech here.

 

Links to all the speeches are here:

1. Women have the right to self-organise

2. The law must work for women

3. An end to violence against women

4. Nothing about us without us

5. Sex matters