Erasing Women

The above photo montage is of women in Iran prior to the Islamic Revolution. Today, Iranian women are required by law not only to cover their arms and legs with loose clothing, but also to wear a hijab in public. A once-vibrant and egalitarian society turned in breathtakingly little time into a land of coercive oppression.

Mass protests following the morality police (hold that thought) killing (allegedly, I am obligated to add) 22 year old Mahsa Amini for not wearing one of those symbols of subjugation. The theocrats have, in return, pushed back, and it remains to be seen what, if any, changes this flashpoint produces.

In her book Infidel, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali discusses how Islam teaches that the female form is so devilishly alluring to men that they cannot control themselves if exposed to it in the slightest, so therefore women must hide it, as well as be always under male-relative supervision when in public. The status of women in Islamic societies is only a step above chattel, given those and many other strictures and subjugations (e.g. fathers can marry daughters off without their consent). It's an oppression as bad as what Margaret Atwood dreamed up in her dystopian The Handmaid's Tale.

Yet it's still a recognition that women are women.

By contrast, in America today, there is a small but dominating cultural impetus to eradicate that distinction. The phrase "gender assigned at birth" is now government-sanctioned vernacular, and transgender treatments (both chemical and surgical) are "gender affirming." As a libertarian, I am wholly in support of adults' right to self-determination and autonomy. That includes what one eats, drinks, smokes, otherwise ingests or injects, and modifies. Yes, I speak of transgenderism. Do what you want, pursue your own happiness.

But... your pursuit must not override others' rights. Individual liberty without equality is a masquerade for oppression.

Furthermore, it must not stand contrary to reality. Be a trans-man or a trans-woman if that's your wish or your impetus, but that state of being does not alter the fact of your chromosomes, and in matters of human interaction (sports is one example, locker rooms are another), the fundamental difference between genders can only be eradicated by denying reality.

The modern, progressive-woke embrace of relativism notwithstanding, there are basic truths. Eggs come from the females of a species, and are fertilized by the males of a species. This is definitional, and there is no rational reason on the planet to rewrite this plain meaning.

Like it or not, there are differences between men and women.

Some, such as height and strength, are variable, but even in their variability, in the aggregate the differences are substantial. A woman may be taller than a man, or a woman may be stronger than a man, but in both the average and at the distribution tails men are taller and stronger than women.

Others are biological. The chromosomal differences create a divide that modern science can mask cosmetically but not undo. It may be unfortunate that you were born in the wrong body, but you can no more change that reality than a five-foot-five man can be made six-foot-six. We each endure the genetic lottery.

Acceptance is the advertised end-goal, and if acceptance were truly what was being pursued, I wouldn't be writing this. Acceptance can be achieved without denying biological reality, and it can be achieved without stomping all over the rights of half the nation's people. As Joe Rogan observed (I paraphrase), ‘there's nothing wrong with being a trans-woman.’

That's not the real end-goal of the activist subset of the acceptance movement. Acceptance is a trojan horse for denying the reality of the biological differences between men and women, and coercing everyone who believes that reality still matters to do so as well.

The real victims of all this aren't cultural, social, or religious conservatives. The real victims are women, of all political leanings. Having fought for decades to achieve equality and parity in society, they now face an existential threat to the essence of who they are, and not just in sports and locker rooms. Sex-based distinctions - which throughout human history stand as a recognition of biological differences between men and women - have been targeted for eradication. Sex-based modesty and privacy are no longer worthy of defense, because transgender individuals have been ranked above women in the grievance hierarchy. That this sexual “desegregation” isn’t limited to adult spaces is a source of terror for parents and children alike.

Some have lamented the "unmanning" of boys and, as they grow up, men by modern culture. Traditionally masculine traits are now presumed "toxic" unless demonstrated otherwise, with broadly deleterious results. Take five minutes for this Camille Paglia clip, if you would. Now, we have the equivalent being perpetrated on women, with trans-women leveraging the decades of effort and progress toward societal parity being sapped at the foundational level by this effort to eradicate their very identity.

This is not about acceptance. It is about the subordination of the rights of half the populace in deference to a tiny subset of people who, were they intellectually honest, should know better. I sincerely wish that Lia Thomas finds happiness, but that happiness must not come at the expense of female swimmers. Thomas (and Austin Killips, and CeCe Telfer, and Mary Gregory, and other transgender athletes smashing women’s records, or in the case of Fallon Fox, a woman’s skull) enjoys the benefit of what XY chromosomes confer to the body - advantages that cannot be erased by a few years of chemicals. The advantages are baked in, and irreversible. So, Lia, please do go on pursuing your happiness, but accept that the genetic lottery excludes you from competing against women in sport.

And, please, for pity’s sake, stop asserting that questioning biological men competing against women is “transphobic.”

If a couple years of "affirmation" treatment is all it takes to eliminate biological advantage, why aren't we seeing equivalent numbers of biological women who have transitioned competing at high levels against men? Anyone not ideologically blinded recognizes the fundamental unfairness of this all.

Acceptance is not a zero-sum game. One does not need to pull or push others down in order to achieve equality and societal parity. In fact, doing so is the opposite of equality. "Equity," the new buzzword meant to displace equality while fooling us as to its similarity to equality, is about inequality, about pulling and pushing others down so that a chosen few can benefit.

Advocates and activists will likely dismiss this as just another bit of cranky old cultural conservatism. It’s not. It’s about liberty and overlaying equality on physical realities. No dismissal, pejorative, or ad hominem will change any of that.

Coercing transgender acceptance via government's subordination of women's rights, liberties, and gender-specific spaces is little different from what Iran's mullahs (and the Saudis, and the Taliban, and the governments of many other Islamic countries) are doing. You don’t elevate an oppressed group by oppressing another group.

A follow-up article: