Say, “Be careful what you wish for” or call it the law of unintended consequences. For decades feminists screamed “I am woman, hear me roar” — now it’s “Hear me squeal — a man just walked through our door!”
The issue? Men claiming womanhood (MCW, a.k.a. “transgenders”) are invading women’s spaces — such as bathrooms, locker rooms and prisons — and are entering female competitions, taking away gold and glory. Examples are MCW who in recent years won “women’s” titles in weightlifting, cycling, sprinting, golf long driving and even a beauty pageant.
This is no pretty picture to feminists. Wizened old Germaine Greer took heat in 2016 for saying that men getting a medical procedure “doesn’t make them a woman.” Ex-tennis star Martina Navratilova is currently being ostracized for writing that having MCW in women’s sports is “insane” and is “cheating.” Feminist writer Meghan Murphy just sued Twitter for banning her for tweeting “Men aren’t women” (my, my, employing white male linear logic!). And feminist Julia Beck (video below) was kicked off a Baltimore LGBT committee for using masculine pronouns when referencing, the nerve of her, a man.
Now, I’ve produced more material inveighing against “transgenderism” than you care to know (and that I care to have written). Yet there’s something here preventing me from endorsing these feminists’ fight unreservedly; it’s a striking blindness to a striking truth afflicting both liberals and most conservatives.
To wit: Feminists are now merely being hoisted with their own petards. They themselves laid the foundation for the transgender agenda they bemoan.
Let’s take a trip down Bad Memory Lane. For approximately three decades, the prevailing feminist doctrine was “gender neutrality” theory; it held that the sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences and, therefore, raising boys and girls the same way will result in their being identical beneath the skin. This was embraced so radically that as iconoclastic feminist Camille Paglia once related, feminists would corner her on college campuses in the ‘70s, glaring, and swear that hormones didn’t exist and that, even if they did, they couldn’t possibly influence behavior.
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Though I never believed it, I was accosted with this theory as a teen and young adult, as many of you no doubt were. It was convenient for feminists. After all, convince people of the sexes’ sameness, the thinking (feeling?) goes, and there can be no justification for keeping women from traditionally male arenas.
The social pressure brought to bear was profound, too. “Gender neutrality” theory was Science™, opposed only by knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, backward Neanderthals. Sound familiar?
The connection to transgenderism should be obvious. The feminists spread notion A, “that the sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences.” Then transgender activists came along and merely espoused B, a corollary:
If you change the superficial physical differences, you can be the opposite sex.
You can draw a straight line from one to the next — B absolutely, logically follows from A.
Related to this, some feminists complain that if a man can be female just by saying so, it dilutes the idea of “woman.” But did feminism not start this dilution with sameness-beneath-the-skin doctrine?
Moving on, feminists also claimed that not only can a woman do anything a man can do, but, by gum, she can perhaps even do it better. Children were inculcated with this “Girl Power” propaganda via cartoons, films and shows portraying unrealistic, masculinized female characters trouncing 300-pound men with ease.
This belief was applied to sports, too, with feminists claiming that the only reason men perform better is that they’ve had “greater opportunities.” Quack researchers even asserted that women’s marathon times would equal men’s by 1998 and that they’d achieve parity in shorter distances early in the 21st century (in reality, the intersex performance gap actually widened in the ‘90s).
This had the desired effect. When I used to work with kids, I encountered an 11-year-old boy who, it came out, supposed the women’s mile record should be better than the men’s; another lad of about the same age believed that the performance gap between the sexes was “very slight.” In this vein, Sportscience News reported in 1997 that “a pre-Olympic poll of 1,000 adults last May found that 66 percent of Americans believe ‘the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels’ (Tharp, 1996).”
This is serious dislocation from reality. Note here that the 800-meter-run record for 14-year-old boys is better than the women’s world record; that Australia’s national women’s soccer team, then ranked fifth in the world, lost a 2016 scrimmage to an under-15 boys’ team 7-0; and that, more or less, this reflects the general intersex performance gap. But, again, the illusion is convenient for feminists. I mean, if women would equal men athletically but for discrimination, we’d better kick the opportunities and funding for them into high gear, right?
That is, it was convenient — until that desired effect had a side-effect. It’s another corollary: If the sexes’ athletic performances aren’t that much different to begin with, and if women are destined for parity, what’s the big deal about MCW competing in “women’s” sports? What advantage could the MCW really have after the chop-chop and flop reduces their testosterone levels?
No, not everyone believes the above. But enough do — because of feminist brainwashing — to sorely weaken the opposition to MCW in women’s sports.
The last point is that there’s real poetic justice here. Feminists spent decades aggressively invading previously male-only arenas, from the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel to once exclusively male clubs to boys’ athletic teams to men’s locker rooms (female sports reporters). Now men — albeit those masquerading as women — are invading women’s spaces and the feminists cry foul. For years, however, they did everything they could to portray men and women as interchangeable parts. What did they think would happen?
They didn’t think. They were led by their passions, their emotions, like children, ignoring that ideas have consequences. Just because you’re wholly illogical — and even may dismiss logic as a white-male phenomenon — doesn’t mean your arguments won’t be taken beyond their utility for you and to their logical conclusion.
Yet feminists still haven’t learned. Ever seeking leverage via emotion-based, politically correct appeals, some now have the temerity to call transgenderism a “men’s rights movement” enabled by “straight men” who are “all about the trans.” It apparently eludes them that women currently have greater complicity in advancing transgenderism because they tend to support the leftists pushing it (e.g., percentagewise, women went Democrat 59-40 in the 2018 midterms; men went GOP 51-47).
Then again, maybe men deserve more blame than one may think. If our great-grandfathers had never let feminism rear its ugly head in the first place, we might not be where we are today.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
