By Madeleine Kearns
Monday, September 09, 2019
Remember the viral
video of the Scottish teenager who was thrown out of class for saying there
are only two genders? Now there’s another clip, in the same genre, doing the
rounds. This week, approximately 150 parents and pupils (mostly girls, the footage
suggests) staged a protest against enforced “gender neutral” uniforms outside a
high school in Sussex, England.
Piers Morgan, the presenter of Good Morning Britain,
who attended the school in question, tweeted, “The protesting parents &
students have my full support. This whole gender neutral craze is out of
control. Let girls be girls & boys be boys.”
Interestingly, this kind of teenage activism appears to
be on the rise. The same goes in the United States. National Review
readers who follow my reporting on gender extremism will be familiar with
Selina Soule, the brave young athlete from Connecticut who, along with two
other girls, has filed a Title IX complaint with the Education Department, which
is now investigating the state’s policy allowing boys to thrash them in sports.
Back in March, 60 students (again, mostly girls) at
Abraham Lincoln High School in Iowa staged a walkout after a boy was allowed to
use the girls’ restrooms. Holding signs reading, for example, “We deserve our
privacy,” as well as showing stick-figure images of a man and a woman found on
bathroom doors, the young protestors chanted slogans such as “One over all is
not fair.” Making the same complaint, students at Boyertown Area High School in
Pennsylvania filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, though in May the Court
declined to hear the case.
So what is motivating these adolescents to walk out of
class, to contradict their teachers, to complain about unfairness? Have they been
radicalized by a hateful “anti-trans” ideology? Or have they become exasperated
by a world gone mad?
For Vox, Katelyn Burns — “the first openly
transgender Capitol Hill reporter in US history,” per the article’s bioline —
has written a lengthy piece on “the rise of anti-trans ‘radical’ feminists.”
For Burns, it would seem, principled opposition to gender ideology — be it
feminist, conservative, or adolescent — all comes from the same sinister place.
It’s an “anti-trans” conspiracy. A place of deep and twisted hate.
Burns begins the piece by discussing the Supreme Court’s
upcoming hearings in Harris Funeral Homes vs. EEOC, a case about a man
who was fired for failing to comply with his employer’s sex-based uniform code
after he began presenting as a woman. Burns explains: “The ACLU attorneys
representing Stephens [the complainant], in turn, argued that their client was
fired because Stephens failed to perform the sex role her employer expected of
her, violating the legal precedent established in 1989 in Price Waterhouse
v. Hopkins.”
Though there is no reason to think that those who drafted
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 understood sex to be anything other than
anatomical, Harris Funeral Homes vs. EEOC, which relates to
discrimination in employment under Title VII, is a far more complex and nuanced
legal argument than Selina Soule’s case, which relates to discrimination in
education under Title IX. Indeed, in addition to defining “sex,” the Supreme
Court will need to consider what the law says about sex stereotypes.
Let the culture-war narrative begin.
Really, though. Who are we to feel sorry for? The
gender-confused man who wanted to come to work in a dress? Or the traditionally
minded family business whose owners didn’t want to risk upsetting the grieving
families they serve? Perhaps to National Review readers, the answer is
obvious. But it isn’t National Review readers who need convincing. It’s
nine sitting justices and yer-man-on-the-street.
There is a great opportunity here, as Burns has clearly
realized, to quash the suggestion that non-traditionally minded people could
find the defense laid out by Harris Funeral Homes to be reasonable. For
this, Burns takes aim at the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), one of “the
so-called ‘radical feminist’ groups with long records of opposing the rights of
transgender people,” since WoLF filed an amicus brief for the Supreme Court in
support of Harris.
From the brief: “Simply, Aimee Stephens is a man. He
wanted to wear a skirt while at work, and his ‘gender identity’ argument is an
ideology that dictates that people who wear skirts must be women, precisely the
type of sex stereotyping forbidden by Price Waterhouse.”
Lest we be persuaded by this, however, Burns immediately
provides some crucial context: “Groups like WoLF are commonly referred to as
‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists,’ or TERFs. They alternate among several
theories that claim that trans women are really men, who are the ultimate
oppressors of women.” Thus, WoLF (the big bad wolf) = TERFs. Even more sinister
than the name “TERFS,” however, is their sin of association:
The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed
radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to
force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and
what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years. . . .
Online roots of the term TERF originated
in the late 2000s but grew out of 1970s radical feminist circles after it became
apparent that there needed to be a term to separate radical feminists who
support trans women and those who don’t. [Emphasis added]
Aha. The question begs. “Became apparent” to whom, and
wherefore?
The first link provided is to a piece in the Guardian
written by an Australian blogger who thinks she may have invented the term
around 2008 while waxing lyrical about the various ideological fault lines and
purity tests that contemporary progressives often wax lyrical about. The second
link directs us to a blog written by Cristan Williams — a “transsexual atheist
abortion clinic defender” and “your worst nightmare,” per Williams’s Twitter
bio — who says that “within feminist and trans discourse, the term refers to a
very specific type of person who wraps anti-trans bigotry in the language of
feminism.” Specific? I don’t know about that. I’ve seen TERF used as a
catchall for any person who challenges gender ideology on any grounds. If
you’re not a TERF, it’s that you’re associating with TERFS — who are,
apparently, as bad as Nazis.
Back to Burns: “Many anti-trans feminists today claim
it’s a slur, despite what many see as an accurate description of their beliefs.
They now prefer to call themselves ‘gender critical,’ a euphemism akin to white
supremacists calling themselves ‘race realists.’”
It does not convince. And why? Because the gender
extremists are attacking the radical feminists for their least ideological
premise. For their most commonsensical, easy-to-get, uncontroversial position,
as summarized by WoLF in its rebuttal to Burns: “Radical feminism is a theory
and practice of fighting for the rights of all women and girls, regardless of
whether they self-identify as transgender, and regardless of their ethnic
origin or political beliefs.”
What Burns & co are desperate to disguise is what’s
really uniting such a broad group of gender dissenters, from the teens in
Sussex to the women smeared as bigots by bloggers. It isn’t hatred, as gender
activists so relentlessly insist, but rather the belief that every woman
matters; that every girl matters; that the female sex — yes, sex — matters.
Which reminds me. When I sat down with 16-year-old Selina
Soule, the Connecticut track athlete, and her mother earlier this summer, I
asked each in turn to describe her politics. Selina’s mom is all over the
place. A Romanian immigrant who fled Communism in the 1980s, she’s voted both
Democrat and Republican in the past. Now she’s mainly worried that the country,
as evidenced by gender mania, might be “going to hell.” As for Selina, she
looked confused by the question and explained (as if I could forget) that there
are bigger things to worry about in high school.
It suddenly dawned on me. What we’ve all been missing.
Hans Christen Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is so overcited now that
it’s become trite. Yet we’ve forgotten a crucial detail. In the story, who is
it who cries out, But he isn’t wearing anything at all?
Ladies and gentlemen, women and men, females and males —
it is a singularly pure and innocent voice. Not the voice of an ideologue. The
voice of a child.
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