Keeping It Going
Today I offer a lulu from the gender wars. In Australia, lesbian groups are fighting for their right to have women-only events, events that exclude heterosexual men. For reasons that should be obvious, but that are rejected by the more-woke-than-thee people who now insist that if a man self-identifies as a lesbian, then he is a lesbian and therefore should be accepted by lesbians and admitted to their events.
One reason that we've reached this level of lunacy is something I've pointed out time and again: advocacy organizations rarely close up shop once their goals have been achieved. In this case, Equality Australia, which a decade ago formed to pursue same-sex marriage, is now fighting to completely erase sex from the law, in favor of "gender identity." As stated in this clip, the priority inevitably becomes "to keep their organization going."
Advocacy groups, once formed, funded, and structured, become businesses. Businesses that not only provide structure and purpose to those involved in them, but that have actual employees and others who rely on the revenue streams they generate. What to do if your business model is suddenly made obsolete by your success? What to do if you set out to support the legalization of marriage, and marriage gets legalized? Why, find a new cause, of course, and since you were at the fore of social progressivism when you formed, you would look to the new fore for your new purpose. A mission based on sexual orientation gets replaced by a mission based on gender self-identification.
What if your prior constituency is harmed by your new purpose? They must not be at the fore any more. So, under the bus they go. Lesbians who fought within and alongside your organization for the right to have their marriages legally recognized can now safely be erased in favor of the assertion that if a man identifies as a lesbian, he is a lesbian, no matter that he's got meat and two veg dangling between his legs.
As is noted in the clip, this is a perversion of the original intent, of the mission. It abets the perverts who see opportunity - and yes, there are perverts out there who declare themselves lesbians in order to fulfill their sexual proclivities, not because they feel like women inside. We've seen men about to be sent to prison declare themselves women so that they can be sent to women's prisons, we've seen men who want to intrude on women's locker rooms do the same, and we've seen men who want to set athletic records do the same.
I do not and cannot know what goes on in someone's head, and if someone feels he or she is a woman in a man's body or vice versa, I will not argue otherwise. You do you, and I'll afford you the same baseline respect I offer anyone else.
It is irrefutable, however, that there are biological differences that are not erased simply by declaration, and it is also irrefutable - and tautological - that lesbians are not sexually interested in persons with male genitalia. Forcing lesbians to allow lesbian-identifying men into their spaces and events is bonkers, violates every precept of freedom of association, and is validation of Orwell's lament.
Beyond the detachment from reality, there are multiple lessons:
Advocacy groups are not immune to the vagaries of human nature.
Earnestness does not convey legitimacy.
Being at the fore of cultural progressivism does not make you right.
Aggregating different constituencies under broad banners like LGBTQIA2S++ doesn't actually mean that they share common cause.
Organizations that claim to champion a broad collection of groups usually don't, as we see in today's example. This is because their first mission is "to keep it going," and organizational size - driven by constituency size - is directly correlated to perpetuation
. Once we understand this underlying motive, it becomes far easier to understand their behaviors.
They are no different than politicians, whose first goal is always to get re-elected. We should apply the same level of skepticism to both.
It's true of every form of advocacy hypocrisy. Take homelessness. In spite billions of dollars spent on Housing First over thirty years, homelessness has increased, deaths from exposure and overdose climb, and more people are unsheltered, broken, and homeless. In the face of these facts, "advocates" continue to insist that the infusion of just a few more million dollars, or the creation of new “game changing” departments, or the establishment of more poorly managed shelters are the answers. It boils down to this: if it weren't for the problem, what would advocates have to fund, or manage, or bleat about?
Idiocies at their finest….