It might be a sign of the end-times, or simply a function of our currently scrambled politics, but earlier this week, four feminist activists — three from a self-described radical feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front — appeared on a panel at the Heritage Foundation. Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological, and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected. For this, they were given a rousing round of applause by the Trump supporters, religious-right members, natural law theorists, and conservative intellectuals who comprised much of the crowd. If you think I’ve just discovered an extremely potent strain of weed and am hallucinating, check out the video of the event.Feminism right now seems unassailable, but the way women are handing over their identity to trans "women" suggests they're not really in charge--the men are, still. The gay men, and they like men in dresses. Always have.
I’ve no doubt that many will see these women as anti-trans bigots, or appeasers of homophobes and transphobes, or simply deranged publicity seekers. (The moderator, Ryan Anderson, said they were speaking at Heritage because no similar liberal or leftist institution would give them space or time to make their case.) And it’s true that trans-exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs, as they are known, are one minority that is actively not tolerated by the LGBTQ establishment, and often demonized by the gay community. It’s also true that they can be inflammatory, offensive, and obsessive. But what interests me is their underlying argument, which deserves to be thought through, regardless of our political allegiances, sexual identities, or tribal attachments. Because it’s an argument that seems to me to contain a seed of truth. Hence, I suspect, the intensity of the urge to suppress it.
The title of the Heritage panel conversation — “The Inequality of the Equality Act” — refers to the main legislative goal for the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ lobbbying group in the US. The proposed Equality Act — a federal nondiscrimination bill that has been introduced multiple times over the years in various formulations — would add “gender identity” to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, rendering that class protected by anti-discrimination laws, just as sex is. The TERF argument is that viewing “gender identity” as interchangeable with sex, and abolishing clear biological distinctions between men and women, is actually a threat to lesbian identity and even existence — because it calls into question who is actually a woman, and includes in that category human beings who have been or are biologically male, and remain attracted to women. How can lesbianism be redefined as having sex with someone who has a penis, they argue, without undermining the concept of lesbianism as a whole? “Lesbians are female homosexuals, women who love women,” one of the speakers, Julia Beck, wrote last December, “but our spaces, resources and communities are on the verge of extinction.”
No sooner had women established themselves as a political faction than they're giving away the franchise. The Equality Act and the movement from which it emerges says anyone gets to be a woman. Regular women of course were never been consulted.
There is social and, now, political value in being a woman, and the ladies are being conned out of it by gay men, which is kind of funny when you get past the disaster it represents: the charming gay con man swindling a gullible woman out of her fortune is a familiar trope.
Women established themselves politically by destroying the old, putatively limiting definitions of femininity, converting their old social privilege for legal and political privilege. The trans rights movement, should it continue as it is, will render that privilege meaningless, and there's no road back to the oppressive old pedestal.
A culture of you-go-girl propaganda, sexual hysteria, resource looting and demagogy does not a female identity make.
We see now that femininity has always been too important to leave to women.
That Heritage panel is chilling.
The lesbians on this panel point out how the trans movement contradicts what they represent, and liberal secular values generally, identifying femininity with make-up and dresses. The whole drag fixation is just another glaring contradiction we can't see for all the contradictions.
But gay Andrew Sullivan sees the great zombie horde will eventually come for him:
This is the deeply confusing and incoherent aspect of the entire debate. If you abandon biology in the matter of sex and gender altogether, you may help trans people live fuller, less conflicted lives; but you also undermine the very meaning of homosexuality. If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid, you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights. “A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapses.” Contemporary transgender ideology is not a complement to gay rights; in some ways it is in active opposition to them.Faster, harder you might say, if you want to hasten the end. The Narrative really is eating itself, but that doesn't mean it has to lose power--the demographic shift taking place still promises one-party rule, and soon. America faces the prospect of rule by a Democratic Party that can't govern for the same reason it can't be voted out.
