Op-Ed: How Feminism Got Hijacked
“If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”
The left’s enthusiastic embrace of the trans movement is creating a rift within the feminist movement.
Zoe Strimpel writes at the Bari Weiss Substack:
“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”
“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”
“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”
The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)
“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.
What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”?
Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.
But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.
It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
So if saying “women” excludes transgenders, is this not a tacit admission that “transgender women” are indeed NOT women but rather mutilated men? Can we stop with the delusion of calling them “she” and “her”? Can we stop being enablers of mental illness?
If transwomen believe they are women, how would the term “woman” exclude them?
But, since the establishment has apparently embraced the trans movement maybe it is now too ‘normal’ for the ‘revolution,’ so they have to move the critical theory goalpost to keep the revolution going.
Which begs the question what’s the next move? Mandatory puberty blockers for all? sex change in the womb? Eradication of the speech center in the brain? Eugenics in the name of public health?
Please. You’re introducing logic to people who believe with all their hearts that they’re members of the opposite sex just because they want to be. I read a tweet from one of them a week ago that said he’d just had his first “period cramps.”
When your imaginary world is subjectively constructed out of comic strips and wet dreams, there are inevitably places where parts of it viciously corrode and dissolve other parts due to flagrant polarity reversals. I leave the dangerous work of exploring the interstices where reality intrudes to those who insist on living there. I don’t get paid enough.
Solzhenitsyn said the thing you must never do is repeat the lie. That they cannot control.
clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny
Just a myth of a Golden Age which never really existed.
One thumbs up just for the delightful snark value.
It was recently reported that 2 women in a NJ state prison got consensually pregnant by a transgender. inmate. When I first saw the headline, I had hoped it was non-consensual, as I would have loved seeing NJ tying themselves in knots defending a big lawsuit for failing to protect an inmate from an obvious danger.
“When I first saw the headline, I had hoped it was non-consensual”
Hah!
Next, you’ll be telling me that the plumber and the pizza delivery guy aren’t raging horndogs.
“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”
I would have asked her how she(?) qualified under the litmus test of “black and a woman” to get her nomination.
That said, as a biologist, I can say, quite authoritatively, that a woman has an XX and a man has an XY on the 23rd chromosome.
Every. Single. Time. It’s SCIENCE! Funny that the party that thinks it controls science can’t realize the truth.
The debate comes from psychiatry and the inability of some to grow up and accept what they are and make the best of it. I am never going to be an astronaut, a 7 foot tall NBA basketball player or a girl scout, and no matter how much I wish to be one, I will never be one. I can wear the uniform, but the truth always lies inside. Look at “Lia” Thomas compared to his teammates. He is enormous, and definitely male in structure. No matter how tight his bathing suit or how much duct tape he uses, he will never be an XX.
Let’s stop enabling gender dysphoria.