Login
NYC Pride – 6/25/2023
My name is K. Yang, I’m a former trans rights activist & LGBT non-profit whistleblower. I was just kicked, hit, pushed, mobbed by dozens of people in Washington Square Park.— Stop Female Erasure / K Yang (@StopXXErasure) June 25, 2023
A brilliant and brave woman I know named K. Yang posted a video from NYC Pride on Sunday, showing her being mobbed by a gang of Pride-goers, frothing at the mouths, rabid with anger at a lone woman daring to stand up for herself and millions of girls and women around the globe.
Holding a sign reading, “Defend female sex-based rights,” and another with the words, “Trans ‘Rights’ = Big Pharma, Big Banks, United Nations Propaganda,” Yang was verbally abused, threatened, and assaulted by a number of men (surely claiming any identity but “man”) and screamed at by women in the crowd. Yang, once a trans activist who realized the (ever expanding) 2SLGBTQ+ was a misogynist, corporate con and began calling it out, tweeted:
“Two [men] followed me calling me a “bitch.” They began to explain misogyny to me. I was called a “cis bitch” by a [man] who claims to be a [woman]. Another begins the gang assault by hitting me, yet another kicks me from behind. #CisIsASlur“
Many of you have likely observed the endless stream of fear-mongering propaganda force-fed to us by mainstream media outlets, politicians, and NGOs, insisting “attacks” against the “2SLGBTQ+ community” are on the rise. In the month leading up to Pride, these claims have been amplified in what has become an ongoing war against reality.
On June 6, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national “state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States… following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.”
What they are referencing is not, in fact, any actual “assault” — legislative or otherwise — but a series of bills passed in various red states preventing youth from being given harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on account of a declared “trans” identity.
What has happened is that states like Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota, and Kentucky (among others) have passed laws preventing the medical transition of kids. This legislation protects minors from making adult-influenced decisions that cause irreparable damage, rendering youth sterile before they have even had a chance to explore intimate relationships and their sexualities. The long term effects of these drugs are both known and unknown, leading to bone loss, increased risk of cancer, and all sorts of other obvious and perhaps less obvious problems related to interference in the natural, healthy development of human bodies. We don’t have enough long term research on this kind of experimentation to know the extent of the damage, but we do know there is damage.
The tragic story of Jazz Jennings, whose mother thrust him into the spotlight as a “trans child,” and who has now undergone four “sex reassignment” surgeries, all of which have resulted in painful complications, should have acted as a warning. Today, the 22-year-old struggles with eating disorders and depression, and will likely never experience sexual pleasure or be able to have children.
You cannot simply stop puberty, feed a developing child or teen hormones that increase cancer risk and result in a host of other side-effects in adults, and assume no harmful repercussions for youth. Yet, that’s what these NGOs insist, claiming these treatments are “life-saving” and medically necessary, and that laws limiting these interventions constitute an “assault” on “LGBTQ+ people.”
The response to this legislation has been hyperbolic, to say the least, suggesting that kids feeling confused or troubled by their changing bodies and entry into adulthood flee their hometowns in search of states that will allow these interventions.
An HRC guidebook directs youth in their decision to leave their homes for “friendly states” that allow minors to alter their IDs and bodies, no questions asked, and encourage them to find their “chosen families,” described as “people who are in your life, not because of biological ties, but for love and support, to celebrate you and help you no matter what.”
This kind of rhetoric is common to trans activists, who often recommend youth identifying as trans abandon their “non-supportive” families (labelled “abusive” for failing to encourage transition) for a “chosen family,” who support and validate their transition. “Come talk to me about your secrets — your parents don’t really love or understand you, but I do” should be treated as a red flag of epic proportions, but within trans activism is normalized.
Moreover, the irony of describing a “dizzying patchwork of discriminatory state laws that have created increasingly hostile and dangerous environments for LGBTQ+ people” becomes obviously rich when we look at how women are treated by these groups. In the past five odd years, women and girls have not only lost the right to women-only spaces — including change rooms, shelters, and prisons — and lost the right to compete on fair grounds, among females, in sport, but have lost the right to speak out about this. Women who have challenged gender identity legislation and policy have been fired, assaulted, censored, threatened, blackballed, ostracized, deplatformed, and banned from social media.
And all this has been perpetrated against women with impunity while being gaslit into oblivion by public officials, the media, institutions, corporations, progressives, activists, NGOs, and human rights organizations. We are told over and over again that it is not women, but the “LGBTQ community” who are under attack and in dire need of our support.
Nonetheless, yesterday, GLAAD, a non-profit originally founded to fight for gay rights (recently expanded to advocate the LGBTQ cultural revolution) published an open letter calling on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter to “Stop the flow of anti-trans hate and malicious disinformation about trans healthcare.” Signed by a dizzying number of celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Haley Bieber, Elliot (nee Ellen) Page, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the letter claims “Dangerous posts (both content and ads) created and circulated by high-follower anti-LGBTQ hate accounts targeting transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people are thriving across your platforms, directly resulting in terrifying real-life harm.
The letter labels “misgendering and deadnaming” as “hate speech,” claiming that correctly sexing individuals or daring to acknowledge a name change is “utilized to bully and harass prominent public figures while simultaneously expressing hatred and contempt for trans people and non-binary people in general.”
By framing pushback against and discussion of the harms of transing kids as “disinformation and hate,” and claiming refusal to call men women as “dangerous,” GLAAD is able to demand censorship, insisting these social media companies “urgently take action to protect trans and LGBTQ users on your platforms (including protecting us from over-enforcement and censorship).”
It is all very urgent. An emergency. People are dying because of true statements and free speech. Not any real people, but certainly people in our imaginations. Either way, we are not used to being challenged and it is triggering.
On June 1, Marci Ien, minister for women and gender equality and youth, issued a statement to mark the start of what the Canadian government has rebranded as “Pride Season,” saying:
“While it is important that we take the opportunity to recognize the hard-earned victories of the Pride movement, we must continue pushing back on the sharp rise in anti-trans hate and anti-2SLGBTQI+ legislation, protests at drag events, the banning of educational books in schools, and calls against raising the Pride flag.”
She followed this statement with the announcement that the Liberal government would be “moving forward with the development of a new Action Plan to Combat Hate – that will address hate faced by 2SLGBTQI+ communities and, specifically, hate faced by trans people.”
Where is the Canadian government’s action plan to address the silencing, marginalization, and harassment of women who speak up about their sex-based rights and about biological reality? Where is our “feminist” Prime Minister on women’s rights and the actual assaults perpetrated against female inmates by the violent male criminals he has allowed to be transferred to female prisons?
Nowhere.
Justin Trudeau’s government didn’t stop with an action plan. On June 5, Ien announced that the government would be pledging $1.5million in “emergency funding to ensure Pride festivals stay safe across Canada.”
Safe from what? Where is the emergency?
Half of the population are losing their rights without any genuine public consultation or debate, and the government leaps to action, pouring money into a trend that is already the most well-funded marketing campaign I have seen in my life.
Today, Pride is a corporate-sponsored event that is celebrated as though it is the national religion. Dissent is unacceptable, but even if it were allowed, who is attacking Pride-goers? Nothing of the sort has been reported, nor was anything of the sort even threatened. What I did see was a lone woman mobbed by deranged, violent Pride fanatics, enraged that anyone would dare challenge their faith.
I would, frankly, never attend one of these things out of fear of being assaulted or worse, so clearly Yang is braver than I. We should all be enraged at the lack of support for women and women’s voices from those in power, who dare lie to our faces while we suffer the consequences.
The post The Pride industrial complex ignores threats against women and doubles down on the myth of 2SLGBTQ+ ‘hate’ appeared first on Feminist Current.
For the past 40 years, my mother, Lynne Cohen,* has gone swimming several times a week at her local pool in Ottawa. Beginning in her teens and continuing off and on throughout her life, she swam competitively on teams and in triathlons. Her local pool has served both as her training ground and as her go-to for regular exercise. After decades, she knows most of the other regular swimmers, some of whom have become good friends. The pool has been a central part of her life for years now, but last month her once innocuous activity became unsafe.
Last week, as always, my mother finished her swim and went to the changerooms to shower. She and the other ladies — also regulars at the Nepean Sportsplex — chatted in the showers, catching up on news as they always do. My mother wrapped herself in a towel as she stepped out of the shower. There, facing away from her, was a naked man. Shocked, my mother hurried over to a corner of the changeroom to get dressed. The man, now standing across the changeroom, was over six feet tall, with a combover. He got dressed, turned around and leered at her, then left the changeroom.
Shaken, my mother rushed over to her friend, asking if she had seen “the man in the women’s changeroom.” The other woman nervously confirmed that yes, she had. They continued their conversation in hushed voices, afraid and feeling violated, yet did not mention a thing to community centre staff.
My mother is 66 years old and no shrinking violet. A longtime journalist in Ottawa, her writing reflects her heterodox views and tenacity for challenging dominant narratives. I have never known her in any circumstance to shy away from confrontation. In the decades she has been swimming at this pool, she has had several run-ins with the lifeguards, management, and other swimmers. From too-slow swimmers clogging up the fast lane to the Covid-related mask mandates, my mother has always fearlessly spoken her mind. During Covid, she fought back so relentlessly against having to wear a mask on the pool deck for the few minutes before entering the water that we worried she might end up in handcuffs. She wasn’t charged, but she did face a short-term suspension from all City of Ottawa pools as a result of her protests.
Yet when a man walked naked through the changeroom while she was in her most vulnerable state, my mother went silent.
Ten years ago, this incident would have been viewed unequivocally as a crime. Someone would have called the police, and the man would have been arrested. He would have been labelled a sexual predator and likely charged with voyeurism. But today, not one woman in the changeroom dared speak up, complain, or request help from staff in dealing with the issue.
These women would have very recently been considered the vulnerable population in this situation, and had the power of both social norms and the law on their side, yet now were self-silencing. Why?
We all know why: with four magic words — “I am a woman” — the intruder and potential predator becomes the vulnerable one, thereby protected from criticism, punishment, or accountability. Today’s political climate demands he be welcomed with open and loving arms into the female-only spaces, and that anyone who says different is labelled not only insensitive, but hateful.
The most astounding part of this story is that no one in the changeroom even asked if he identified as a man or a woman. For all anyone knows, this anatomically male individual may have been totally unaware that he had access to a convenient loophole. For all we know he might have answered, “Of course I’m a man, but I wanted to undress in the women’s changeroom.” Why then, did not a single woman say anything?
After my mother told me what happened to her, my initial reaction, like that of my father’s, was outrage. I was furious. To my mind, she was the victim of a crime. I kept asking her, “Why didn’t you say something?” Her answer was, “What’s the point?”
For the rest of the day, I was disturbed and shaken. I had to force the incident out of my mind just to function, to take care of my kids, to act normal. I was afraid not only for my mother, for myself, and for my daughter (how could I ever safely take her to the pool or any other place where she would have to undress, knowing at any moment she could be exposed to a naked man?), but for the entire world.
There is a saying, “Where there is no God, there is absurdity.” I am a religious person and believe this statement in a literal sense. I believe that human beings are not only physical beings, but deeply spiritual ones. Once our food and shelter are managed, we search for meaning. Humans have souls that require sustenance just as our stomachs do. A Higher Power and religion meet the needs of our spiritual longing and free our minds to deal with this physical world and all of its infinite challenges.
But I also believe that in this quote “God” can be interpreted to mean “objective and universal truths” — transcendent truths, immune to the whims of man. Where there is no truth, there is absurdity.
Postmodernism and gender ideology have helped society cast off the chains of objective, universal and verifiable truths. Mercurial self-identification is now the North Star that guides us. We left God and are now knee-deep in absurdity.
I won’t even address the massive issue that is decades of hard fought for women’s rights eroded within just a handful of years on account of gender ideology and the belief that “trans women are women.” Many more intelligent and stronger women have taken this issue head on.
I’m just a little person: a stay-at-home mom trying to launch each one of my children into this world. But what is a world or society where a woman is violated and can’t speak up because everyone will turn on her and call her a bigot? Where a person cannot name a crime and perpetrator? Where a person cannot speak the truth about the reality before her eyes?
We’ve become two different peoples speaking two very different languages and believing in two modes of living. One camp believes in some form of objective truth and labels humans as either male or female. There are endless variations in the ways that humans express themselves, but there are only two sexes. The other camp believes in a post-modernist version of constructed truth and that there are dozens of “fluid” genders that negate sex and biology. They also believe that anyone who does not subscribe to this belief is a heretic and as evil as a Nazi.
How do these two camps speak to one another? The two belief systems require very different laws and social norms. If there are only two sexes, the man in my mother’s story is not allowed in the women’s changeroom. If sex is a social construct and can change through self-declaration or self-perception, that man can be a woman and is therefore allowed in the women’s changeroom. Today, it seems the latter camp has won, and we no longer share a common understanding of basic truths or even of language. Words like “man” or “woman” that were once universal are no longer.
A society that does not have a shared language cannot share thoughts. A society that is divided on whether or not there is an objective truth, outside of our own feelings and emotions, cannot set laws or policies that work for the broadest range of people.
A society where women and girls are cowed into silence when a crime is perpetrated against them for fear of being labelled the enemy is a shaky society indeed.
*Editor’s note: Lynne Cohen, the author’s mother, gave permission to publish her full name in this piece on June 11, 2023, after original publication.
Lindsy Danzinger is a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her three children. She lives with her husband and children in Toronto, Ontario.
The post My mother is courageous, but faced with a man in her change room at Ottawa’s Nepean Sportsplex she went silent appeared first on Feminist Current.
For many years now, I have been accused of “shaming” people for their sexual pastimes. This is in large part because of my criticisms of porn and the sex industry.
To be fair, I probably have written and said less than positive things about various kinks and fetishes, particularly of the violent nature. I’ve never been particularly shy about my view of men who need costumes, skits, creepy scenarios, or pornographic performances in order to get off. Your body is quite literally built to enjoy sex: just regular old penis in vagina sex. Now, of course, this “regular” sex is called “vanilla” in defense of the people who have conditioned their bodies and minds to need a bunch of bells and whistles just to do what nature intended, long before the invention of smart phones and Hentai. But requiring a silly costume or a near death experience for either you or the object of your ejaculation signals a problem to me.
While in the past porn was something you had to go out of your way to find, often in rather embarrassing ways — stealthily going into Red Hot Video after dark or purchasing a plastic-wrapped magazine from behind the counter at your local corner store — today, it is not only easily accessible, but unavoidable. You really can’t exist online without porn being pushed on you in one way or another — via porn bots in your comments or dms on social media, pop ups on torrent sites, or what is simply embedded into pop culture — music, movies, late night jokes, your fav Twitch streamers, etc.
It is far from taboo — rather, it is expected. Men will often tell women that any man who claims not to use porn is lying.
The overriding message is that porn is a normal — even healthy — part of men and boys’ lives. It is a long running joke in comedy films and locker rooms, but also something girls and young women expect to have to participate in. For the younger generations, “sending nudes” is part of dating, watching porn with your partner is recommended as a fun and sexy way to get in the mood, and performing pornographic scenarios in the bedroom is expected. For young women today, one’s social media feed is an opportunity to display one’s fuckability in exchange for validation from men and OnlyFans is viewed as little more than a side hustle.
Unfortunately, much of the fault lies with third wave feminism. Modern faux feminism embraced “sex work is work” as a mantra, insisting that porn and prostitution are just jobs “like any other.” Anyone who suggested these were not spaces of freedom, neutrality, or empowerment was guilty of “slut-shaming.”
The reality is, of course, that young women who get into the sex industry tend to get used up and spat out quickly, with little to show for it financially, but instead stuck with a lot of regret, often some trauma and additional mental health issues. The eternity of the internet becomes a lot more upsetting when there are videos of you at your most vulnerable out there for life. The lie told to young women by this industry-approved “feminism” is meant to empower them to feel proud of their choices but fails to tell them the truth: that some choices are harmful, even if you shroud them in a veneer of sexual liberation, and actual self-worth never comes from the superficial.
It isn’t, let’s be honest, sexually liberating to perform unpleasant, degrading, or painful sex acts with men who don’t care about you, that you would never engage in voluntarily. That’s someone else’s sex dream — not yours.
But while women often leave the sex industry with a heaping of shame, what of the consumer?
Men’s relationship to porn tends to leave out the woman factor. Odd, considering the whole point is meant to be the woman on the screen. But to the consumer, the question of how she got there, how she is being treated on set, whether or not she is in fact enjoying herself, or what mental, financial, or emotional state got her there is erased from path towards the main event: orgasm.
Considering the messages we are bombarded with — that porn is normal, a harmless fantasy, and a healthy release for men who can’t access the real thing — you would think men and boys (as I think we all know, most young men start watching at around 11 years old these days — sometimes earlier) would have let that old-fashioned shame go. But they haven’t.
If you talk to men about their porn use, as I do quite often, most will tell you that the minute they orgasm, the sense of shame rolls in. It is often, I’m told, quite nauseating — a sense of disgust with oneself: “What have I just done, I am an animal” kind of thing.
You might chalk this up to shame around sex, as some attempt to, but that doesn’t make much sense. It’s not as though after having sex with one’s partner you feel a sense of regret. In fact, sex is (if done properly) the thing that bonds us and brings us closer in an intimate relationship or marriage.
I posed a question about porn-related shame in my Substack chat yesterday, curious to see what insight men might offer, asking:
“I want to hear from you (men, in particular): why do men feel ashamed of their porn use? Porn has been fully mainstreamed and normalized–we are told it’s nothing more than a harmless fantasy, perfectly natural, and even a healthy outlet that reduces male sexual violence (this is a myth, for the record), yet I hear over and over again that men and boys feel shame after masturbating to porn. Why? Be honest.”
A number of responses stood out. One man named Des told me that “A lot of men have some pretty confused attitudes towards arousal,” pointing out that “Boys can become aroused by the weirdest of things… including things that are taboo or otherwise ‘wrong.’” He went on to say:
“The thing that is especially personal to me, because I wasn’t especially ashamed of my interest in porn when I was younger, is the insidious, creeping increase in the ‘extremity’ of pornographic content. It took an experience of being traumatised by some video I stumbled upon in my search for something “new” to make me stop and withdraw from porn altogether. I used this experience as an opportunity to learn about the problems porn presents and to work through the residual feeling of shock and disgust from the awful video I saw.”
This made a lot of sense to me, considering what male friends have told me about their sense of shame around porn use. Essentially, the nature of internet porn is that it drags you deeper and deeper down evermore extreme and gruesome holes. You are fed videos you might not be seeking out, but masturbate to anyway, leaving you with the knowledge you just jerked off to “daddy-daughter” porn, “step-brother gives unsuspecting sister a surprise,” or some facial abuse video, wherein a young woman (and hopefully not an actual girl) is choked and violated until she is brutalized and crying.
If you didn’t feel shame around watching this kind of thing there would be something seriously wrong with you. Yet this is mainstream porn now. It’s not some niche fantasy. It is what will pop up should you end up on Pornhub crusing for something “normal,” whatever that means…
A man named Jacob said:
“Shame serves a social function. I don’t think you do feel shame unless you anticipate/experience social alienation. The excuses and justifications are just defenses of people who are hiding feelings of insecurity. Porn itself is marketed as ‘naughty,’ ‘taboo,’ and ‘barely legal.’ That it’s shameful/anti-social is part of the engine that drives its compulsive use. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think if it really was normalized/mainstreamed to the point someone didn’t feel ashamed, i.e., still felt socially supported and connected, it would just become apparent that it’s not very satisfying or fulfilling. You’re punching a chemical reward button in the brain of a social animal that’s supposed to bring you closer to other humans. You need to feel disconnected first before porn provides any relief. It’s like the Rat City experiment. I don’t think men in really connected relationships would even want to use porn.”
I found this quite insightful. Sex is designed to bond us: our bodies release oxytocin, which is called the love hormone for a reason, bonding mothers with babies and couples with one another. If your body is producing oxytocin on account of watching porn, you’re bonding with a person who isn’t there, isn’t bonding with you, and in a way isn’t even real. You aren’t actually connecting with anyone. Instead, you’re training your brain to crave and seek out the scenarios and imagery you see in porn, which are often abusive or immoral, but also leave you lacking. You have the orgasm but the bond with another human doesn’t follow, so you end up feeling alone, empty, and isolated when you are meant to be feeling the opposite.
What follows is the addiction cycle, wherein you continue to seek the oxytocin, so use porn, get the rush, but then feel alone, empty, ashamed so must seek it out again.
In this context, the shame makes sense: you’re doing a thing that is meant to make you feel good but doesn’t in the long term, only for a blip. It’s never satisfying the thing it’s meant to satisfy.
But of course it isn’t only single, lonely men who use porn. Men with partners are avid users as well.
The fact so many women normalize this as nothing more than a harmless fantasy that has nothing to do with them has always baffled and troubled me. To start, those are real women and girls in the videos your partner is consuming — women and girls who are possibly being trafficked, abused, or raped. They are at very least mentally unwell, and are probably suffering physical consequences from what happens on porn sets as well. One would think you wouldn’t want your partner supporting the abuse and exploitation of women and girls, at least.
But beyond that, why on earth would you be ok with your partner “bonding” sexually with other women?? This doesn’t strike me as any different than cheating. Sure, you won’t end up with an STD, but your partner is engaging in sex acts with strange women regardless. Have a boundary. Come on. You deserve it.
Men in relationships, no matter how much they’ve told themselves porn is their right (After all, she’s not up for it all the time — what is he supposed to do while she’s tired or grouchy or out of town? Suffer?) must know, deep down, that jacking off to 18-year-olds in the basement is not a respectful or ethical act within a relationship. And because you’re probably hiding your porn use from your partner, knowing she won’t be happy about it, even if she is playing out-of-sight-out-of-mind, the porn use functions as an ever-growing mountain of lies, creating guilt — an emotion akin to shame. You might be hurting her, the person you claim to love; you’re hurting your own mental health and ability to connect sexually and otherwise in your relationship; plus you’re actually hurting a whole bunch of women and girls you don’t even know on the other side of the screen.
Not a great recipe for self-respect!
It’s almost like mantras can’t alter biology and people’s inherent sense of ethics. And it’s almost like these industries and ideologies are going out of their way to mindfuck you into being an unhealthy, unethical person so you’ll keep coming back.
Don’t let em.
The post There is a reason men feel shame about their porn use, and it’s time for them to pay attention appeared first on Feminist Current.
A common galvanizing trope among progressives claims the good and open-minded among us are in a constant battle against the evil right, who wishes to stamp out the struggling and marginalized. This holds true in the trans debate.
Just last night at the Met Gala, actress Gabrielle Union told Variety she and her husband, former Miami Heat basketball player Dwyane Wade, had decided to leave Florida on account of the couple’s “trans child.” She explained that “in 2016, there was a move towards a less inclusive world,” going on to imply that their children would have nowhere to attend school were they to stay in Florida, as schools in the state were not “open to teaching facts and accurate history.”
“Where can they say gay, much less trans?” Union asked, referencing a parental rights bill passed in Florida in March, inaccurately dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. She expressed concern that she and Wade “might get arrested for affirming [their] child’s identity.”
Her commentary was odd, considering that it those who challenge gender identity ideology and the practice of transitioning kids who are under threat, not the other way around. Indeed, a Vancouver father was jailed in 2021 for refusing to go along with his child’s transition. Bill C-6 (which later became Bill C-4) passed in Canada last year, claiming to ban “conversion therapy,” but in fact criminalizing therapists and medical practitioners who do not practice the “affirmative model” — which means confirming a child’s “trans identity” unquestioningly, and placing them on a path towards medicalization.
These reversals aren’t new. Indeed they have been the go-to narrative in the media for many years now.
Last month, The New York Times published a piece entitled, “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives.” In it, Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters argue that the swift rise of trans rights activism began on account of the right having nothing left to fight against once gay marriage rights were won. They write:
“The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.”
It was frankly one of the strangest reversals I’ve yet to read on this issue, blaming conservatives for igniting the fight for trans rights rather than the other way around.
It is true that this movement appeared suddenly, as if out of nowhere, leaving many of us searching for an explanation. What other movement in history has taken hold of every institution, media outlet, and political party so quickly?
The answer, though, is not in Republican strategizing. It is much more simple than that: it was about funding.
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that same-sex couples had the right to marry. This decision was, as reported by The New York Times, “the culmination of decades of litigation and activism.” This changed things for individual gay people, of course, but it also changed things for the gay rights organizations who had been fighting for this decision for years. The charities and NGOs and civil rights organizations once heavily invested in advocating for same-sex marriage no longer had a raison d’etre, and as such lost a key justification for future funding.
Gluing the “T” to the LGB allowed for an easy transition into a new civil rights movement, using the same language and mantras of “born this way” and “accepting people as they are,” as well as a need to fight for “equal rights” on this basis.
Indeed, it was the Democrats and Democrat-adjacent organizations that were looking for a new way to galvanize their base and solicit funding, and Republicans were frankly the last to catch on.
Trans intrusion on women’s spaces and the women’s rights movement began long ago, but didn’t really take hold until money was involved. While we often hear men on the right demanding to know “Where are all the feminists?!” the feminists were in fact the only ones to notice the advancement of trans ideology and its impending threat to women’s spaces for many years. Second wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Germaine Greer spoke out against the very sexist lie that a man can transform himself into a woman through stereotypes and cosmetic alterations long before this was on the radar of Republicans.
In 1977, Steinem responded to the situation of James Humphrey Morris, a British army officer who transitioned to become Jan Morris, and the transition of tennis player Richard Raskind to Renée Richards, by writing that, “Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism.” While it was important, she believed, to “protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision [to transition], and to be identified as he or she wishes,” it was also clearly not a “feminist goal.” A preferred solution would be to “transform society” so that men feel comfortable stepping outside traditional masculine roles and women can step outside the rigid limitations of feminine stereotypes, without need to “mutilat[e] our bodies into conformity.” Steinem added that, “In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals.”
In 1973, Morgan, a founder of Ms. Magazine, was even more forthright, responding to a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a “male-to-female transsexual” folk singer at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, by saying in her keynote speech:
“I will not call a male ‘she;’ 32 years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman;’ one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”
Greer, ever outspoken, wrote an article for The Independent magazine in 1989 entitled, “On why sex-change is a lie.” It began:
“On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem.
I should have said ‘You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’”
Greer went on to describe how this man would mysteriously turn up outside her hotel, and that while he “certainly considered that he was psychologically a female… he behaved exactly like a predatory man.”
Her article could have been written today, though it likely wouldn’t have been published. Needless to say, we were warned:
“Knee-jerk etiquette demanded that I humour this gross parody of my sex by accepting him as female, even to the point of allowing him to come to the lavatory with me. Bureaucratic moves were afoot to give him and his kind the right to female identity, a female passport even…”
Predicting exactly the future that came a couple of decades later, Greer wrote, “The general populace, despite the evidence of their eyes and ears, will go along with this bluff.”
Where were all the feminists?!
Radical feminists continued this fight for the years leading up to 2015/16, which is when gender identity ideology began to take hold across institutions, followed by the passage of gender identity legislation.
I was interviewed for a 2014 article by Michelle Goldberg published in The New Yorker entitled “What is a woman?” My interview was omitted, but she spoke with a number of other feminists who had organized a conference in Portland in an attempt to discuss the encroaching ideological and institutional takeover. Goldberg documents numerous attempts by such women to speak against this, all of whom were subsequently shut down, no-platformed, threatened, and harassed endlessly — cancelled, as it’s known today. Lierre Keith, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, and Julie Bindel were among these women, as well as many lesser-knowns.
I interviewed Lee Lakeman, a founding member of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Collective (VRR), in 2012, about her battle to defend women-only space at the shelter and transition house, beginning back in the 90s. VRR has been plagued by attacks and accusations of “transphobia” ever since, resulting in the City of Vancouver pulling their funding in 2019.
Great efforts were made to suppress debate surrounding not just the social and cultural phenomenon of transgenderism, but the related legislative changes. Because most of the pushback was coming from women with no financial or political power, that was not hard to do.
I am aware of course, that the modern, mainstream feminist — the kind of “feminist” who did have a voice within Democratic organizations, well-funded institutions, the mainstream media, and academia — went along with the whole thing. This baffled me for a long time. I didn’t understand the funding mechanisms behind the whole operation, and was livid at seeing organizations that should be among the most invested in understanding how the female body works — reproductive rights organizations, for example — suddenly and in unison erasing women from their work and politics.
~~~
On September 2, 2016, Planned Parenthood tweeted that “Menstruators in New York started to #tweetthereceipt celebrating the repealed tampon tax…” A day later, the Planned Parenthood account reported that “Purvi Patel has been released from prison, but people continue to be criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes.”
These tweets might seem innocuous, but were significant. Where once would have been the word “woman,” we saw “menstruators” and “people.” And Planned Parenthood was not alone. The word we had always used to describe adult human females rather suddenly had cooties.
In 2013, Lauren Rankin, an American reproductive rights activist, wrote that “abortion rights activists have overlooked and dismissed a very important reality: Not everyone who has an abortion is a woman,” adding:
“We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions. Trans men have abortions. People who do not identify as women have abortions.”
Rankin explained that an organization called the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF) was “leading the way on becoming more gender inclusive around the issue of abortion,” directing a change in language. NYAAF had changed its language a year earlier, in 2012, replacing sexed language in its mission statement with words like “anyone,” “every person,” and “the people who call our hotline.” In 2013, they explained that “embracing gender inclusivity” meant “not assuming the gender pronouns that our callers use and replacing ‘woman’ with ‘people’” on their website, and had taken it upon themselves to “reach out to the LGBTQ communities and inform them that NYAAF helps fund abortions for all people, not just women.”
In 2015, Fund Texas Women, which pays the travel and hotel costs of women who need to get an abortion but don’t have access to a clinic nearby, became Fund Texas Choice. Co-founder Lenzi Scheible wrote:
“With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans* people who needed to get an abortion but were not women. We refuse to deny the existence and humanity of trans* people any longer.”
At the time, longtime feminist and political columnist Katha Pollitt noted that while the idea that the word “woman” was “exclusionary” or “cissexist” might “sound arcane to most people,” this directive had been “quietly effective” in reproductive rights activism.
She was right. But most had not yet caught on to this push to erase women from language.
Why, of all places, is this starting in the reproductive rights movement? A movement that, if nothing else, is centered around about female bodies and autonomy?
The truth is in the funding.
Big name funders and billionaire philanthropists like Jennifer Pritzker, the Arcus Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and Jon Stryker not only fund numerous trans rights and LGBT organizations, but Planned Parenthood. At the same time it was decided the “T” would be added to the “LGB,” the associated New Speak was applied across the board, not just to trans lobby groups and LGBT organizations, but to reproductive rights organizations and clinics across the US.
Journalist Jennifer Bilek has done ample work demonstrating the funding sources behind the trans ideology takeover, pointing out that men like Pritzker also fund the now trans-obsessed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who joined Planned Parenthood as a major player in the institutionalization of “female-erasing language.”
Not only that, but Planned Parenthood has since moved into the trans market, selling kids on puberty blockers and hormone treatments. Today, the organization claims to be America’s “second largest provider of hormone therapy.”
Embracing trans ideology was rendered mandatory for any organization wishing to continue getting funding from these corporations and donors. If you’ve ever wondered why UN Women has continued to insist “transwomen are women” despite endless pushback from women or why the Twitter accounts of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRC) appear to be run by woke teenagers, it’s useful to know that Arcus, founded by Stryker, is a key funder. Of course the Democrats are compromised as well. As Bilek also points out, even Obama’s campaign was deeply connected to and funded by Pritzker.
Needless to say, this was no “grassroots movement.” It has never been “the civil rights issue of our time,” as then Vice-President Joe Biden called it in 2012. Certainly it wasn’t “the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics” in response to “gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender,” as Nagourney and Peters claim in The Times.
From the moment men began attempting to identify their way into womanhood, feminists have been there, saying “no.” Some of those women became compromised, as apparently Steinem did, recanting in 2013, claiming that her words were “taken out of time and context” and that what she “wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.” Others always were — careerist in their intentions and profiting too much from their cowardice to veer towards truth.
The reason, I now realize, that radical feminists could speak up against transgenderism was the same reason they weren’t heard: radical feminists aren’t funded by anyone.
Once mainstream feminists made their activism their careers, they became dependent on the same funding sources pushing trans ideology from the top down. While feminists like me who had always worked independently, free to push back against what I saw as the anti-feminist third wave and the big name women who kept their message neat and tidy and confined to Democrat-stamped messaging, struggled to understand why anyone would fall for this clearly anti-woman nonsense, it actually did all make sense.
When you start putting your paycheck ahead of your integrity, you’ll say anything. Even “menstruator.” Even “transwomen are women.”
It’s fair to say that since this debate has finally exploded into the public realm, the fight against transgender ideology has probably become a grift for some men on the right (and beyond). But this is not where it began. It began with the selling of the “T” to people who needed the money, and continued to the point of practically no return because those pushing back didn’t have a bargaining chip.
The post It’s the funding, stupid appeared first on Feminist Current.
Attacks against Trans women are attacks against the women’s movement and the fight for better equality and justice.#TransDayOfVisibility #TransRightsAreHumanRights
Read the full story by https://t.co/ZIUBAuI38Q‘s founding publisher, Judy Rebick: https://t.co/G8o62tC3Zo
— rabble.ca (@rabbleca) March 31, 2023
Last week, longtime Canadian feminist and leftist, Judy Rebick, published a piece at rabble.ca, the site she founded, entitled “My feminism is Trans inclusive.” It in, Rebick explains that she has never written on trans issues before, but having been accused of being a “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), she wished to reject the label, and offered an apology of sorts for having testified in support of Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR), who were forced into a human rights case brought against the transition house and rape crisis line by Kimberly Nixon in 1995. Nixon had been rejected from a training group with the collective on account of having been born a man, and on account of the fact the transition house and collective was women-only. Under apparent pressure from her leftist comrades, Rebick explained, in her recent piece, that she “didn’t really understand the issues involved,” that she had “believed that gender was socially constructed,” but was “ignorant,” and has since learned and changed her position. Rebick does not explicitly say she disagrees with the ruling in favour of VRR, and no longer believes VRR should have the right to define their own membership and maintain a women-only space, though she does criticize the organization for “excluding trans women.”
In the following letter, Lee Lakeman, a founding member of the Vancouver Rape Relief collective, responds.
~~~
Dear Jude,
Over the last couple of days, three friends have sent me your statement published at Rabble. Like many, I have not read Rabble in years. The suppression there of any debate about ideas not supported by the party put me off. As it happens, I was reading the work of a young feminist in New Zealand writing about the barriers and difficulties of responding with integrity to the events in our lives. So, with her example, I think it best that I try.
You published your piece, “My Feminist is Trans Inclusive,” at Rabble, so I am submitting to Feminista, Feminist Current, Vancouver Women’s Space and Fairer Disputations, which may not be perfect media, but that’s what I have, just as you have Rabble. Perhaps a friend will forward it to you. If not, then maybe we have no remaining connections. I haven’t yet responded to my other friends who contacted me about your statement, but as you and I have been friends and comrades, my first response is to you:
I’m sorry that you have been pressured to apologize for doing what you thought was your ethical obligation when you provided testimony in the BC Human Rights Court to protect the legislated rights of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter from a wrongful accusation. I was grateful at the time and I remain grateful that you gave of your commitment to women’s liberation. If it is of any consolation to you or if it can satisfy those pressuring you, I don’t think it was your testimony, but rather the BC NDP government’s provision in Human Rights Law, ensuring equality-seeking groups have the right to define their own membership, that convinced the judges. And I’m sure you can argue that you have avoided the many situations since (including those before the various courts now) in which women have asserted this legal right that we confirmed in 2005. I’m sure that this excellent legislation is the real target. They want you to mislead what remains of second wave feminist support for the NDP.
Your explanation that you were ignorant at the time and have been educated since (presumably about whether women get to organize on our own terms) seems unlikely to satisfy those who press you for apology and contrition. It’s obvious that some want to display your contrition, to expose an image of you bowing down in contrite humiliation (perhaps as a cautionary tale before those in debate or confusion) while you still have a Canadian level of fame and importance as the legacy media’s chosen face of second wave feminism.
I must say that such a change of mind and your right to express it is completely understandable given the current state of things and your choice to express a change of mind is something I defend even as I find this change wrongheaded. I hope they are satisfied with this halfway measure and you won’t need further defending.
Those of us who believe the evidence of bodies — especially of our eyes and ears — that sex differences are real and matter, who think and recognize important patterns of oppression based in part on those differences, who still struggle for women’s equality and liberty (and particularly among those of us who struggle against rape, some of whom have chosen to support women’s rights by organizing separately), beg to differ.
Who knows how all this division and disagreement will end, but forcing women or any people to say what they do not perceive, believe, or think; disallowing groups of like-minded women to organize against sexist violence and in our own egalitarian and humanist interests; forcing individuals or groups of the oppressed to stand silent while witnessing the oppression of others; and forcing pathetic examples of insincere contrition or renunciation of women’s genuine efforts does not bode well.
Lee Lakeman
The post A letter to Judy Rebick, from Lee Lakeman, on changing one’s mind appeared first on Feminist Current.
It is just over 200 years since the women’s suffrage movement began in Canada. Not even 100 years has passed since we were declared legal persons, and all women, regardless of race, won the right to vote. A mere handful of generations have passed (which, historically speaking, represent only a drop) since women won their sex-based human rights. And once again, our rights are uncertain.
I am of a generation of women whom feminists warned not to become complacent. I reaped the benefits of the sacrifices of first and second wave feminists. I took for granted that women had gained inalienable rights that could not be revoked. I have been in a long slumber of complacency.
As a therapist, I think a lot about the concept of “the shadow”: the power of that which we do not want to face within ourselves — things like complacency and fear. If we do not turn towards our shadow, it can obscure our consciousness and blind us to psychological forces that may become unseen drivers of our actions, such as misogyny.
~~~
I grew up in a radicalized, fundamentalist religious organization run by a hierarchy of men. Women were not permitted leadership roles that might allow them to disrupt the established power structures. The organization’s dominion was cult-like: people were instructed not to befriend anyone outside the organization and to cut off even family members who did not believe. Followers were convinced of an impending apocalypse — a doomsday that would never arrive.
The male fraternity of leaders claimed they possessed the one true interpretation of what God himself demanded from earthly beings. The organization’s views were often science-denying. They forbid followers certain life-saving Western medical interventions, and taught that dinosaur fossils were fakes, evolution was a lie, and humans were only a few thousand years old, created by an aged, male God. They brainwashed followers into believing magical stories of demons hovering nearby, waiting to enter followers’ minds if they were not vigilant against the intrusion of “misinformation” or evil from the outside world.
The organization’s leaders demanded converts believe that myths and lies were real. They interpreted biblical teachings literally in order to legitimize enforcing women’s subservience to men and to gender-stratified roles. We were taught that women were only an extension of men, because we were made from the original man — Adam’s — rib.
Dissent from the dominant narrative was prohibited. Followers who could not reconcile material reality and scientific facts with the magic and superstition the organization fed us were deemed heretics. Anyone found to be introducing ideas that challenged the approved narrative, no matter how rational, was labelled an apostate. Punishment was meted out through forms of humiliation, public shaming, and ostracism. Likewise, those who left on their own accord were shunned — treated as though they were dead.
~~~
I took for granted that, when I left at age 15, I would survive. I sought freedom and autonomy. I wanted to define myself as a young woman distinct from who I had learned I was under extremist, fundamentalist religious dictates — merely the rib of Adam.
So one cold fall evening, with several plastic grocery bags stuffed with clothing, I left. I used the money I had been saving for driver’s education to pay for my first month’s rent in a rooming home. In my room I had a small fridge, a countertop stove, a pillow, and a sleeping bag. Most importantly for a girl on her own, I had a door that locked.
I was courageous (and likely also reckless, given my adolescent brain’s propensity to underestimate risk), yet never reflected on how my courage rested on the backs of the women who came before me. It was only because of the relentless work of women who had fought for my freedom that I was able to leave and get a job, make money, and provide myself shelter.
I was struck by the freedom I could exercise by choice. I knew even at the most difficult times that there was hope because I could make choices that would determine the course of my life, for good or ill. No one would force me. I was free.
Decades passed and it never occurred to me that my rights could be precarious.
~~~
When I saw the attack on women’s sex-based rights begin to gain momentum in the West, in the form of gender identity ideology, alongside the hard left’s science-denying radicalism, I did not join the public outcry. I watched as the very same sort of magical thinking from the extremist religion I grew up in took over many faculties of post-secondary education. The academy — once a bastion for the pursuit of truth through critical thinking, science, and debate — began to look a lot like a religious cult of the left.
I watched as ideology moved from the academy into our cultural institutions and then through society. Some parts of history became acceptable to remember, and others not, creating selective cultural amnesia. It was suddenly a social justice right to spew hate and vitriol, or to deface, burn, or otherwise destroy cultural symbols and institutions. Science — the method of investigative observation, questioning, hypothesizing, and testing that helps create knowledge — was labelled a politically-biased, colonial “idea.” Not even math was immune, with some academics suggesting the “belief” that 2+2=4 was not reflective of “other ways of learning,” and therefore not always true.
Gender studies — an outcrop of postmodernism and constructionism — chipped away at the biological, immutable fact of sex differentiation, insisting the sex binary was not real. It posited that humans could be deconstructed into disparate parts and existed on “spectrums,” that perhaps dozens of “genders” existed, and that male and female were not fixed categories. Those who wanted to erase the sex binary weaponized both invented genders and pronouns, targeting any person who did not agree as “discriminatory.” As this ideology dismantle
When these beliefs were challenged using scientific evidence, data, or historical and present realities, in a further Orwellian turn, truth itself was labelled bigoted.
It may have been institutions that introduced these ideologies and newspeak, but it is individuals that ushered in the crisis we face now. It is only because of each person’s willingness to ignore, conform, pretend, and lie that we allowed science-denying ideology to first become common vernacular, then the dominant narrative.
I had lived this before. Humans with rational faculties will abandon reason, sacrifice their own family members, and subscribe to outrageous and harmful ideas in order to maintain their position in the tribe.
I watched from the sidelines as women were deconstructed into non-entities, and children were set on by those determined to dismantle immutable categories dictated by nature. I sat in a terrible mix of fear and lethargy until I could not anymore.
I needed to investigate my shadow.
~~~
I understand now that I was acting from a part of me that still subscribed to the internalized misogyny I had learned in my youth. I knew that taking powerful action — to not comply and to speak the truth — meant that I had to confront two specific fears.
One I had met before in the rare, but dangerous, predatorial men with whom I had crossed paths as a young, vulnerable girl on her own. And, as any woman who has been intimidated, overpowered, or physically or sexually assaulted by a man knows, men and women are very different indeed. This is a physical reality that vulnerable women face more often. If a man loses his way and combines predatorial behaviour with physical prowess, he becomes a danger that can not only harm, but kill us. For women, sex-based rights, such as the right to women-only spaces, are not optional.
In 2017, trans-identified people were granted special rights and protection under the Canadian Human Rights Act, preventing discrimination on account of gender identity or expression. This was not enough for some. The demands became intrusive, as self-identified transwomen insisted also on access to women’s spaces and sports.
Some women said “no.” These women have been subjected to an endless barrage of threats and hate from trans activists who demanded subservience.
This scared me for a time. No one wants to meet the mob.
I don’t believe that most men are misogynist or that all transwomen want to destroy women’s rights and safety. But we must ask what it says about a man — trans-identified or not — who refuses to respect a woman’s “no.”
It is important also to note that there are numerous women supporting this ideology, allowing men to trample over women’s boundaries. The phenomenon of women offering up women’s identities and sex-segregated spaces to men who demand it may be related to internalized misogyny, but is more likely a part of what Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz described as the confusion of offering the teat of compassion when one should be wielding the sword of discernment. These women believe they are helping a marginalized population, but they are hurting half the population and abandoning their own, and others, rights and safety in order to “be nice.”
Fear also visited me because I had previously experienced exile from the group. Although I gained my freedom and autonomy at a young age, it came at a high cost: losing my family and community. Shunning takes an incredible psychological, emotional, and physical toll. Those of us who want to say “no,” and fight to protect our sex-based rights know we will be subjected to a modern version of old-fashioned mobbing and shunning. The deep slumber of unconsciousness can be a compelling alternative to facing our fear.
Yet there is a driver even more powerful than fear, and it is the protective and courageous force of love. A woman who watches another woman be harmed and does nothing psychologically damages herself. Women also cannot collectively watch children become victims of delusional ideologies and still face the mirror. Ignoring our protective instincts demands an incredible separation from ourselves. When we are connected to love for self and other, we know both rationally and instinctively that we have a responsibility to protect each other and children.
~~~
We are at a profound historical moment. In a few short years, efforts to erase biological women have snowballed. The ideologies that seek to deconstruct all categories and boundaries of protection are now dominant narratives in our mainstream media, public school systems, legal and justice systems, workplaces, and even, disturbingly, our medical and related health institutions. It is a surreal experience to witness ideology get into bed with science.
Community organizations across Canada have quickly fallen in line. Women’s centres have opened their doors to “self-identified women,” obliterating long-standing community supports for women. Even women’s rape shelters are open to biological males. The oldest rape crisis centre in Canada, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, was subject to vitriolic attack after refusing to allow access to biological males. The shelter was targeted with hate. Dead vermin were nailed to their door. “F**k TERFs” and “Kill TERFs, trans power” was graffitied across their windows. Activists petitioned to have this community pillar’s funding pulled, and Vancouver City Council caved. The shelter did not. They were attacked for saying the one word perpetrators of aggression or violence against women do not respect.
In 2017, Canada’s Liberal government paved the way to compromising women’s sex-based rights when they passed legislation ostensibly to protect people from discrimination based on gender identity and expression, but which far exceeded its purported aim. These laws entitled activists to manipulate language, which is what allows us to speak about and understand reality, so women could no longer be spoken about. Progressives applauded such female-obliterating language. Women became “birthing people” and “uterus-bearers.” They produced chest milk. A woman might have a penis, or male gametes. A woman was a thought. A woman was a feeling. A woman was a fiction.
Around the developed world, men who self-identified as women were allowed into women’s prisons, health centres, bathrooms, shelters, changerooms, and gyms. Men were self-identifying as female competitors in women’s sports. These men started smashing records. Women who had worked their whole lives to reach their competitive potential were being beaten by biological men. It was — it is — unbelievable.
In 2023, we are at the precise place feminists warned we would arrive should we fall into complacency. Hard left extremism, fervently religious in nature, has pulled us nearly to the nadir of its radicalized, science-denying demolition of rights and protections. Science denial harms women and children the most. It defines women as non-persons, viewing them instead as subjects of men, and uses children in harmful ways as pawns of radicalized ideologies.
In Canada, we are led by a head of state, Justin Trudeau, who is leading the demolition, declaring “transwomen are women,” and whose government has paved the way for the decimation of women’s sex-based rights and the ability to differentiate ourselves autonomously as persons from men.
We must make conscious what has been alive in the shadows all this time. There are still some men who believe women’s identities belong to them. To them, women are only a rib of Adam, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. This historical moment is evidence of the society we create when we fall into slumber, refuse to see our shadow, accept myths as reality, and deny science and history.
Women have historically been refused legal personhood specifically and only because of our sex. The purpose of the women’s suffrage movement was so we could take equal part in the political system, just like the only other sex: men. This was not only so we could participate fully in public life, but so we could vote in favour of our own interests.
Those of us who have been complacent are waking from a long slumber precisely because the threat of not facing the shadow of cultural misogyny is so high. Each time those who want to erase women threaten or intimidate one of us, they wake up legions more. As our right to exist as biological beings unique from men, to choose women-only spaces, and to represent ourselves are again being colonized, we must not allow ourselves to shirk from fear but face it. Women know we are not a fiction. And we will force leaders who dwell in the shadows, believing we do not exist, back into reality when as embodied females we enact our legal right to vote and remove them from power.
Carla Duda is a therapist and author of the upcoming book, “The Art & Practice of Responsibility: Improve relationships, create meaning, foster well-being.” Learn more about her work and writing on topics like ethical therapy, relationships, and parenting at carladuda.com.
The post Adam’s Rib: I escaped a fundamentalist religion only to find women’s rights under threat on the outside appeared first on Feminist Current.
FreshRSS 