By Christine Rosen
Thursday, December 16, 2021
A new form of misogyny is taking hold in
contemporary culture. It comes in the guise of a liberationist philosophy, a
transformational movement dedicated to open-mindedness. Its advocates believe
they are ushering in a world in which one can be whomever one chooses to be.
And in doing so, they are treating womanhood itself—the defining feature of
half of humankind—as though it is a disposable commodity.
Under the dictates of this new dispensation, anyone,
regardless of physiology, must be allowed to lay claim to the biological
realities of the female body. Anyone should have the right to call themselves a
woman.
The misogynistic nature of this revolution has escaped
proper scrutiny precisely because it is understood as progressive—as literally
better than everything that has come before. And it casts everything that has
come before as suspect: All forms of social organization and every idea that denies
this movement’s claims have been deemed retrogressive and actively harmful to
the forward march of greater rights for all.
This is an audacious form of woman-hatred, especially
since it comes in the guise of opening up womanhood, of extending its benefits
to all. But by doing so, it becomes nothing less than an assault on what it
means to be a woman. And it is not being understood as such by its advocates
and their fellow travelers because of a potent combination of two factors:
First, people’s fears of being labeled bigots, and second, a genuine and
commendable effort to extend compassion and care to a very small minority.
That compassion has largely been met with hostility. It
is becoming increasingly clear that the new misogyny shares one feature with
the old: contempt for women. The difference is that the contempt is now coming
from the radical extremes of the trans movement. As the signs carried by trans
activists who recently protested a women’s conference in the UK read, “Suck my
dick you transphobic cunt.” This is not progress. This is misogyny.
These radicals insist on redefining women in masculine
terms. Women are as tough as men; they are not biologically different from men;
indeed, many of them were born men, came of age as men, and, despite having
lived in the guise of women for but a scant portion of their lives, feel
entitled to take positions of power away from women. Even motherhood must be
acknowledged as something men should be allowed to claim as their own.
Classic misogyny claimed that men were better than women
merely by dint of being born male. The new misogyny insists that being female
isn’t an essential biological fact but a mutable identity, something anyone can
be. It gives men permission to say to women: We can be women, too.
This flies in the face of all history and experience of
Homo sapiens. Biological differences between the sexes are real; indeed, those
differences make it possible for us to exist. Literally. But today’s radical
egalitarians do not like the consequences and choices that flow from that fact
and are currently attempting to erase it from our collective cultural
experience.
Acknowledging the distinction between biological sex and
how one expresses one’s gender identity is not the issue. That cultural battle
has largely been settled in favor of greater acceptance of fluidity in gender
expression. No, this is something more radical, and it is poised to turn a
nascent fourth wave of feminism into a form of female cultural erasure.
Feminists have long argued that although men and women
are fundamentally different, they deserve equal treatment as a matter of human
rights. “Ain’t I a Woman?” was the plaintive demand of feminist Sojourner
Truth. The trans-rights movement answers that demand with: There is no such
thing as a woman.
And so women now find themselves unwittingly forced into
the position of revanchists, trying to reclaim territory they long ago won in
their struggle for equality.
* * *
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
published in 1792, the pioneering British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft
memorably insisted that women were rational beings, as capable as men and as
deserving of opportunity. “I shall first consider women in the grand light of
human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold
their faculties,” she wrote. “Virtue can only flourish among equals.” The men
of her time were not easily convinced; Horace Walpole called Wollstonecraft a
“hyena in petticoats.”
Yet by the 19th century, the emergence of what is now
called “first-wave feminism” had made gains, particularly around the demands
for female suffrage. The feminism of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration, led by
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, embraced the idea that women were
different from men but no less equal. Indeed, they often invoked women’s
supposedly superior moral sense to argue for an expansion of their rights in
the political realm.
In the 20th century, so-called second-wave feminism
focused on extensions of these public rights, such as the right of women to
make money while working in a job of their choosing, to obtain lines of credit
in their own name, and to serve on juries. By the 1960s, feminists were also
winning battles for greater reproductive rights, reform of divorce and
marital-rape laws, protections against domestic violence, and equal pay and
educational opportunities. Many of those rights were enshrined in federal laws,
such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of
1972.
This second wave, though more radical in some ways, still
often invoked women’s unique qualities as women as justification for seeking
political power. “The personal is political,” a phrase much in use in the 1960s
and 1970s, signaled that commitment. In their efforts to combat misogyny and
sexism in politics and culture, second-wave feminists created new, women-only
spaces (such as domestic violence shelters) and developed theories about
women’s leadership styles as more cooperative and inclusive than men’s. And the
battle against sexism waged by the second wave still acknowledged the
biological realities of being a woman, even if a few outré figures insisted
that those realities also potentially limited women’s opportunities; a radical
thinker named Shulamith Firestone dreamed of a day when women would be
liberated from biology through the widespread use of artificial wombs, for
example.
By the 1990s, third-wave feminists extended the feminist
critique further, coopting previously sexist tropes and misogynistic language
such as “bitch” and engaging in a more “sex-positive” approach to womanhood.
They were critical of their second-wave feminist mothers; many rejected the
label “feminist” entirely. Culture, not politics, was their chosen battlefield.
Within every wave of feminism, women struggled among
themselves with biological essentialism and the attendant questions it raised.
Did the ability to become pregnant and give birth hamper women’s ability to
succeed in society, for example, or did it create an imperative for society to
offer special protections for them? Feminist theorists continue to argue about
whether defining women in any way related to biology reinforces the very thing
that has been used to justify the oppression of women for centuries.
Despite considerable disagreement, however, no one before
had denied women the reality of their own biological existence. Rather, the
argument that triumphed and made women in the Western world some of the freest
people on earth was that whatever differences existed, women were of equal
value to men in public life, and their immutable qualities (including
motherhood) were as central to human flourishing as the immutable qualities of
men.
Today, a fourth wave is emerging, but it does not
resemble anything like the feminism of the past, because it contains within it
the radical notion that biological sex differences are not real.
* * *
Its early iterations can be found in the 2000s, when
women’s-studies departments at universities began recasting themselves as
gender-studies programs. To study women is to acknowledge the realities and
limits of biology. To study gender is, according to its most radical
proponents, to study the limitless experience of any number of self-defined
identities.
The godmother of gender theory, Judith Butler of UC
Berkeley, argues in her book Gender Trouble that “male”
and “female” are merely arbitrary, constructed categories, a binary based not
on any biological realities but rather on oppression. Gender is a performance,
a game anyone can and should play, and any efforts to create special
protections for women or acknowledge the limits of physical differences between
men and women are merely excuses made by the patriarchy to hoard power.
Everything is socially constructed, including the physiological experience of
bearing children (which Butler describes not as a miracle but as “the
compulsory obligation on women’s bodies to reproduce”).
Instead, Butler argues that by not recognizing biological
realities, “the culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to
its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of
cultural possibilities.”
But how open is that future if it requires everyone to
adhere to a dogma that denies biological realities? Butler and her many
acolytes have taken literally Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman.” In her landmark 1949 book, The Second
Sex, Beauvoir observed how social and cultural forces shape one’s
perception of oneself and the public’s idea of what a woman is and should do.
Hers was a plea for greater understanding—by men, social institutions, and
women themselves—of the fact that the experience of being female created unique
challenges and insights not always understood or respected by the other half of
the species. However revolutionary its aims, Beauvoir’s analysis was grounded
in biological realities.
By contrast, anyone who believes that biological
realities root women in a particular experience is, according to the new
dispensation, a “TERF,” or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In a recent
interview with the Guardian, Butler went even further, calling
anyone who argued for sex-based rights (and sex-exclusive spaces such as
women’s prisons, rape crisis centers, and the like) a fascist: “The anti-gender
ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our time. So the TERFs
will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism.”
* * *
There are many people outside the academy who are eager
to embrace such radical ideas because by doing so they believe they will help
trans people, whom they also believe to be at serious risk. Reporting on a
recent protest by trans activists against Netflix (for airing a Dave Chappelle
comedy special they think is transphobic), Variety noted that
among the protestors was the creator of the series Transparent,
Joey (formerly Jill) Soloway. “Trans people are in the middle of a holocaust,”
Soloway declared. “Apartheid, murder, a state of emergency, human rights
crisis, there’s a mental health crisis. There’s a suicide crisis, a bullying
crisis, an anxiety, depression, self-hatred state of emergency crisis.”
If this were true, tolerance for dissenters from the new
orthodoxy would rightfully be seen as a serious moral error. Perhaps that is
why trans activists insist that compulsory acceptance of the idea that biology
is a figment is a necessary stop on the road to true tolerance. Colin Wright
has observed at Quillette that “as more and more people refer to themselves as
trans, nonbinary, two-spirited, and gender-non-conforming, there’s been a push
to realign the objective reality of biological sex to match one’s subjectively
experienced gender identity. In the emerging view, the very notion of males and
females existing as real biological entities is now seen as obsolete.”
This is a more extreme claim than saying that sex exists
on a “spectrum” or that gender is a fluid category that allows for a range of
expressions. As Wright notes, according to the reigning trans ideological
posture, “a person may literally reimagine their biology, as if by alchemy, by
merely stating so.”
Embracing this is not optional. Trans activists insist on
the transformation of words and their meaning so as not to offend the extremely
small minority of people who identify as women but were not born female. To
show proper respect, we are told that women are no longer women, but “people
with vaginas.” Women are not mothers, but “birthing people” or “chest-feeders.”
The new misogynists have cleverly coopted the language of
feminism and its emphasis on misogyny. Trans activists denounce what they call
“transmisogyny” and discuss the implications of the “cotton ceiling.” The
latter phrase is a reimagining of “glass ceiling,” the supposedly invisible
barrier to women’s career success that second-wave feminism devoted a great
deal of energy to shattering. By contrast, the “cotton ceiling” refers to
women’s underwear, and, as the BBC described, the phrase is “intended to
represent the difficulty some trans women feel they face when seeking
relationships or sex.” Planned Parenthood of Toronto hosted a workshop devoted
to the cotton ceiling; its director described the session as exploring “the
ways in which ideologies of transphobia and transmisogyny impact sexual desire.”
These changes have happened quickly, most noticeably in
the transformation of the meaning of words we have used for generations. The
results have been jarring. A Huffington Post headline from October read,
“California Governor Signs Law to Improve Outcomes for Black Birthing People
and Babies.” The Centers for Disease Control under the Biden administration
embraced the trend, encouraging “pregnant people” to get COVID vaccinations in
late September.
Similarly, in September, the British medical journal the Lancet advertised
its latest issue on social media with the quote “Historically, the anatomy and
physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.” Lest you think these
new semantic rules are equally applied, a few days earlier, the Lancet had
no problem promoting an article about prostate health with the following
statement: “About 10 million men are currently living with a diagnosis of
prostate cancer—making it a major health issue.” It is only women whose bodies
have been erased and replaced by “bodies with vaginas.”
The deliberate sowing of confusion about what to call men
and women was also on display when the Biden administration announced that
Rachel Levine, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human
Services, was made a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service
Commissioned Corps. The administration boasted that Levine was both the first
transgender appointee to reach this rank as well as the “first female four-star
admiral.”
But Levine in fact is not biologically female (she
transitioned in 2011, when she was in her forties, but lived most of her life
as a biological male). She identifies as a woman, and it would have been more
appropriate to say she was the first woman to achieve that rank, or more
precisely, the first trans woman. But the use of the word “female” by the Biden
administration was purposeful. It is meant to elide distinctions based on
biological realities, denying half the population its unique characteristics,
all while those who use the term are patting themselves on the back for their
inclusiveness and tolerance. No wonder the announcement prompted cynicism; as
one observer noted on Twitter, Levine’s appointment proved that “anything women
can do, biological men can do better.”
This is not an argument for denying Levine her right to
identify as she chooses. But dehumanizing biological women by turning them into
abstractions such as “bodies with vaginas” and “people with cervixes” is not
striking a blow for tolerance and equality. It is the bureaucratizion of
misogyny.
And it spares no one. This fall, the American Civil
Liberties Union chose to honor Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the
anniversary of her death by removing the word “woman” from something she had
said during her confirmation hearings. The doctored statement now read, “The
decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person]’s life, to
[their] well-being and dignity.” Just a year ago, the ACLU had published the
same quotation with the word “woman” still intact.
The effort to transform words and their meaning is part
of a broader effort to police behavior regarding who can and cannot speak for
women and their experiences. Just as an earlier generation of activists made
use of “queer theory” to pursue a political agenda that called for “queering”
normal spaces and activities (to chip away at “normativity” in hopes of
eventually erasing the concept of “normal” entirely), today’s activists seek to
use language to confuse what is understood as average or normal while also policing
the behavior of others.
* * *
This effort extends beyond semantics. It also demands the
destruction of female-only spaces. If, as trans activists demand, we accept
that someone born male can identify as female, then we must also accept that they
should have access to women’s spaces. Contrary to what progressives claim,
however, this idea is neither popular nor justified by historical precedent.
When women understandably object, citing concerns for their own physical safety
or privacy, they are not listened to respectfully, nor are their concerns
treated seriously. Rather, they are called bigoted.
Transphobia is also wielded as a weapon against anyone
who challenges born-male people competing as women in sports competitions.
Trans women with significant physical advantages, like the mixed-martial-arts
athlete who identifies as female and pummeled a born-female competitor while
wearing an “End Trans Genocide” T-shirt, are using the biological advantages
that come from having been born male (and experiencing male puberty) against
women. Women are losing out on college scholarships, membership on Olympic
teams, and careers in professional athletics because trans women who compete
with a significant physiological advantage are beating them (in the case of
mixed-martial-arts competitions, quite literally).
Trans activists tend to downplay the idea that
trans-female athletes compete at a significant advantage compared with
born-female athletes. Yet trans women have clearly figured this out. University
of Pennsylvania student Lia Thomas, who is biologically male and competed as a
male in NCAA Division I swimming for three years, now identifies—and competes
as—a woman. Not surprisingly, she is obliterating female competitors thanks to
the great physiological advantages she has as someone who was born male and
went through puberty as a male, with the resulting increase in strength, muscle
mass, and bone density. “Thomas blasted the number one 200 free time and the
second-fastest 500 free time in the nation,” SwimSwam news reported after a
recent meet, where Thomas broke Penn’s existing women’s swim records. As a
male, Thomas was one of many good but not exceptional swimmers. But by
competing as a woman, Thomas has now become an Olympic-caliber athlete. And her
extraordinary boost in status comes at the expense of female athletes whose
training and determination can never overcome Thomas’s obvious physical
advantages.
The absurdity of calling this situation a blow for
equality was captured well in a recent episode of South Park called
“Board Girls.” The episode features a character, Heather Swanson, who
transitioned from male to female two weeks earlier and goes on to win every
female sports competition in the town. Sporting a full beard and a masculine
physique, she trounces the wife of “PC Principal” in the town’s “strong woman”
competition. Her comeuppance comes in the form of the “board girls,” an
all-female board-games club that destroys her in competitions that do not
require physical strength.
South Park was parodying something that our
nation’s cultural elite have embraced uncritically: the notion that the way to
stop the stereotyping of women as the weaker sex is to have women’s desires,
interests, and accomplishments represented by people who were born male.
This extends to the workplace, where people born male are
now granted the moral authority to speak on behalf of all women. Consider a
recent profile of Natalie Egan in Elle. Egan, a self-described
failed former “tech bro,” transitioned to female and soon rebranded herself as
the voice and face of gender equality in the workplace. “It wasn’t just because
she was trans,” Elle notes. “It was because, having left the
identity of a successful white man behind, she was experiencing marginalization
and vulnerability.” Egan’s executive coach says Egan “really had the experience
as a woman of not being taken seriously, and not being acknowledged as an
equal.”
Egan now enjoys lucrative invites as a keynote speaker at
women’s networking events and is selling an app, Translator, that “works with
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Human Resources departments at companies
like Claire’s and ViacomCBS.” Good for her, but Egan’s handful of years living
as a woman does not automatically grant her the authority to speak on behalf of
women in the workplace.
Most disturbingly, the new misogyny demands that women
conform to trans ideology in even the most intimate situations: the people to
whom they feel sexually attracted. Trans activists insist that desire itself is
socially constructed, and so can be deconstructed to conform to trans demands
for acceptance.
A much-lauded new book, The Right to Sex, by
the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan, begins with an unusual disclaimer: “At
birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ though many bodies must be
mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest
against the decision that was made.” She goes on to ask, “Is anyone innately
attracted to penises or vagina? Or are we first attracted to ways of being in
the world, including bodily ways, which we later learn to associate with
certain specific parts of the body?”
In other words, sexual desire and sexual preference are
merely learned behaviors, roles we can take on and discard as we please. “Some
bodies are for other bodies to have sex with,” Srinivasan states. But not every
body. To the gay man who expresses “disgust at vaginas,” she asks, “Is this the
expression of an innate, and thus permissible revulsion—or a learned and
suspect misogyny?”
In practice, this approach to desire has led to the
policing of sexuality on a grand scale, particularly of lesbians, who insist
that they are attracted only to women with female sex organs. The BBC recently
interviewed lesbians who had been threatened and labeled transphobic because
they acknowledged that they were sexually attracted only to biological women.
As the reporter notes: “They described being harassed and silenced if they
tried to discuss the issue openly. I received online abuse myself when I tried to
find interviewees using social media.”
The sex-shaming is driven by a small number of activists
who have outsize influence thanks to social media and cancel culture. “I’ve had
someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler,” a 24-year-old lesbian woman
told the BBC. “They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a
room with me and Hitler.” Her crime: “She says she is only sexually attracted
to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has
sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.” As a result, she
has been called transphobic, a TERF, and a “genital fetishist” by trans
activists.
Another lesbian activist told the reporter, “Lesbians are
still extremely scared to speak because they think they won’t be believed,
because the trans ideology is so silencing everywhere.” “This word
‘transphobia’ has been placed like a dragon in the path to stop discussion
about really important issues,” another said.
In a recent interview with the libertarian UK magazine
Spiked, lesbian activist Kate Harris was blunt about what is happening: “At its
very heart is misogyny. It’s so regressive, so misogynistic and so homophobic.
It reinforces all the old stereotypes that we thought had gone.” Harris notes
emphatically that this is not an argument for intolerance against trans people.
“We want every single child to grow up being what he or she wants to be, not
tied down by pink or blue gender roles,” she says. “I have fought for 50 years
for people’s right to do what they want. Wear a dress! Call yourself Ariadne!
But don’t say you are a woman. And don’t say that I am transphobic if I don’t
want to have sex with you because you’re a man with a penis wearing a dress.”
* * *
At its root, misogyny is a hatred of the things that give
women their unique power and their unique vulnerability—the biological
differences that make women as a group physically weaker in hand-to-hand
combat, for example, but powerful enough to perform the labor of pregnancy and
childbirth. And to outlive men. One of feminism’s salient achievements was
arguing that those unique qualities did not make women morally, intellectually,
legally, or politically inferior.
The new misogyny in effect says that it does. It claims
that since everyone who wants to be a woman does not have to be born that way,
it’s offensive and bigoted to believe the biological facts that flow from the
truth that one is—as the title of feminist Adrienne Rich’s 1976 book put it—Of
Woman Born. It forces on society a lie about women and enforces it through
illiberal intimidation. It is neither tolerant nor liberating.
Spiked reported on a recent feminist human-rights
conference in the UK, where women, many of them survivors of male violence, had
convened to discuss issues such as rape, domestic abuse, and sex trafficking.
Trans activists picketed and tried to shout down speakers, including women who
had organized to protect other women from rape in a Kenyan refugee camp. Trans
activists claimed the conference “puts the lives of our trans and non-binary
friends in danger” because it focused on the needs of those born female.
One of the most prominent critics of trans activist
extremism, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, has been attacked
relentlessly on social media by activists after she tweeted support for a woman
who had lost her job for saying biological sex was real, and for supporting
lesbian activist Magdalen Berns, who had argued publicly that lesbians should
not be called bigots merely because they aren’t sexually attracted to trans
women. As Rowling wrote in a statement on her personal website, she has dealt
with “threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with
my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be
burned.”
In late November, however, Rowling posted on Twitter that
police had to get involved after trans activists posted pictures of themselves
in front of her house with her address clearly visible in a blatant attempt to
dox her. She noted how many women she’s spoken to, including many with no
public profile, who “have been subject to campaigns of intimidation which range
from being hounded on social media, the targeting of their employers, all the
way up to doxing and direct threats of violence, including rape.” She added,
“None of these women are protected in the way I am. They and their families
have been put into a state of fear and distress for no other reason than that
they refuse to uncritically accept that the socio-political concept of gender
identity should replace that of sex….I’ve now received so many death threats I
could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out.
Perhaps—and I’m just throwing this out there—the best way to prove your
movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and
threatening us.”
Genuine tolerance for trans people doesn’t require the
erasure of the characteristics that half of the population believes to be
intrinsic to their sense of personhood. Erasing women to inaugurate a “new
normal” regarding gender is destructive, not tolerant. And it offers no
recognition that what might be acceptable for adults (trans-friendly bathrooms)
could be uncomfortable for vulnerable women (domestic violence shelters) or for
children.
An extremely small minority is not merely demanding
tolerance to live as they choose; they are demanding that the overwhelming
majority conform to the language and practices they insist upon, or else be labeled
evildoers. They demand that everyone declare and perform their own gender
preferences and pronouns and proclivities with no regard for privacy or
restraint.
It’s a strange bargain: not, in the tradition of previous
eras of feminism, to extend the rights and protections of womanhood to people
born male who now want to live as women, but rather to denigrate the very
category of woman, both in language and in function, by claiming it for
themselves. The disrespect is staggering. And so is the danger.
