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November 10, 2024 - 8:00am
Is the US about to become the first country to restore protections for women and girls from trans ideology? If it happens — and that depends on whether President-elect Donald Trump means what he’s been saying over the last couple of years — the irony would be impossible to miss. Do we really have to wait for a politician who has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault to call a halt to the most sweeping attack on women’s safety and privacy in our lifetime?
The impact of Trump’s promises, if he sticks to them, would be far-reaching. He has pledged to get trans-identified males out of girls’ toilets and women’s sport. He says he will make the US Government recognise that there are only two sexes — he calls them “genders”, a common mistake, but he means male and female. He has promised to stop “gender-affirming” medical treatment, including prescribing puberty blockers, describing it as “child abuse”.
What he’s proposing is nothing short of a demolition of the creaking edifice created by trans activists. And if it can be done in the US, where they have had much greater success in promoting laws that wreck women’s rights, why not elsewhere? In the UK, we have a government committed to an opposite course, but resistance has always been more vocal — and led by women on the centre-left.
Organisations such as the Labour Women’s Declaration, Fair Play for Women and Woman’s Place UK have steadfastly made the case against the demands of trans activists. They’ve been denounced as “hate groups” by people who now find themselves in positions of power, including Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy. That puts Labour in the same place as the Democrats almost four years ago, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arrived in office and couldn’t do enough for the “trans community”. And look where that’s got them.
Much of the Left has lost its mind, and its moral compass, when faced by entitled men masquerading as “victims”. Politicians parrot claims about trans-identified males not having full human rights, ignoring their own complicity in giving them access and influence women can only dream of. Biden welcomed Dylan Mulvaney, an actor who has made a career out of his journey to “girlhood”, to the White House, while Harris wrote a letter congratulating him on “living authentically” as a woman for a year. Mulvaney subsequently tanked sales of Bud Light when the company employed him as a brand ambassador, a warning that the Democrats ignored.
Trump’s suggestion that he will take on the trans lobby from day one appears to be a calculated reversal of one of Biden’s first acts as president. On 20 January 2021, Biden signed an executive order extending what’s known as Title IX, preventing publicly funded schools from excluding transgender students from toilets and changing rooms that align with their “gender identity”. It was the beginning of a cascade of legislation that’s resulted in girls losing sporting scholarships and medals, while female athletes have been injured in the process of playing against adult men.
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To the eternal discredit of the self-indulgent Left, however, he may also be the politician who finally dismantles the privileges of men who claim to be women.
Interesting, assuming it goes through, that a so called misogynist has stepped up to support women against the trans movement and also just appointed the first female Chief of Staff in the White House. How will the left work their way through this?
Yes, it will be interesting. Aside from the predictable cacophony of noise from the activists, it will be the reaction of the MSM which might indicate whether the left is prepared to call time on this nonsense.
Suspect though, it might be a little too soon for teaching that old dog a new trick. It will take some time for the needle to move from the current state of denial to the new realities. Which it will have to do if the left is to become anywhere near relevant to real people and real life.
“How will the left work their way through this?”
How they’ve rationalised a black female Conservative Party leader should give you a clue. Convincing themselves she’s not really a proper black female because she doesn’t think the same things as them.
There is no reason to think he is a misogynist even if he might be fairly characterised as crude and rude at times. He is grounded in reality in a way that the intersectional Democrats are not and he is not into authoritarian social engineering in the way that they are.
There is nothing wrong with men wishing to live their lives as a stereotype woman so long as they accept that they are not women in a legal sense. The problem in the UK for April Ashley, who had trans surgery in 1960 and subsequently married Arthur Corbett, was that because April remained a man in the eyes of the law in those days Corbett was able to have the marriage annulled in 1970 and avoid having to pay alimony. This is no longer an issue now that persons of the same sex can now legally marry. Unfortunately, the trans lobby has subsequently persuaded parliament and others that there is something called gender that should enable men who wish to call themselves women and be treated for all purposes as women. That has thrown up the absurdity of men competing in women’s sports and accessing changing rooms, rape centres and other areas that women would prefer not to have men present.
Trump is simply in favour of reality rather than fantasy. I have no reason to think he hates men who wish to live as women. He simply does not wish to indulge their false claim that they are in reality women. Despite the hysterical attacks on him by the Democrats he has found sufficient support in the US to be able to assert reality in law. That is indeed to the discredit of the Democratic Party and both the Labour and Conservative Party should they not end they fantasy that a man can legally make himself a woman for all purposes.
“No reason to think he is a misogynist”. Really? ‘No reason’? None at all?
Well, he’s married three times, and in fact twice to women who were born overseas, so he must like women a great deal to put so much into hope, versus experience.
He also dotes on his daughters and female grandchildren, so certainly he doesn’t dislike all women.
Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t continually indulge them, and is as combative with them as he is with other men?
We are, after all, exhorted to treat members of the opposite sex as equals, are we not?
Yes, he has married three times and cheated on each wife—and one time very publicly, “best sex ever!” His wife, Ivana, was publicly humiliated. He barely knows his second daughter, Tiffany, who lived in California, and her mother had to push him to let Tiffany visit.
If we mean by misogyny a hatred or contempt for women then his hiring of a woman as his Chief of Staff and other previous female appointments and his frequent marriages seems to suggest he doesn’t harbour such hatred or contempt.
If, however, we extend the meaning of misogyny to generally behaving badly towards women then he might be a misogynist but he could equally be regarded as a misandrist on the grounds of his bad and boorish behaviour towards many of his fellow men even if that behaviour doesn’t involve a sexual element since he appears not to be bisexual.
The extended meaning robs the word of much meaning since boorish behaviour towards women by an individual frequently is accompanied by similar boorish behaviour towards men suggesting that it is often an equal opportunity boorishness rather than directed exclusively to women.
The left will simply ignore the fact of the first female Chief of Staff in the White House. It will be a non-story for them, just as the twitter files were.
The reversal of Roe v Wade allowed the question of access to abortion to be settled by each state individually. Thus, each state now determines for itself whether to allow abortion and under what circumstances. The left finds it very upsetting to let the electorates of the states decide this sort of question instead of having the Supreme Court impose the leftists’ will on everyone. Bluntly, they don’t trust the people when they vote, and this says something about them.
Wrong. Roe didn’t impose an anybody’s Will on anyone, it allowed everyone a choice according to their own conscience.
If you’re opposed to abortion the answer is simple – don’t get one.
Are you American?
Who knows but allowing women to kill unborn children is still murder by another name….
You idiot down voters; it’s a question, What’s wrong with you?
The point of being opposed to abortion is to stop abortion, not to choose to avoid it only for yourself.
US is same as EU now where each state gets to decide what it’s abortion laws are.That’s all. I don’t hear you complaining about EU.
So the question is: who should decide that an act is a matter for the individual conscience – given that it is clearly contentious?
Abortion is not constitutionally protected. It is that simple. The Supreme Court over reached with RvW and that is why it was struck down. You can be anti-guns and chose not to own one. You can be anti-abortion and chose not to have one. The difference is the first is constitionally protected and the second is not.
Delegating to the individual states can continue down the rabbit hole because “individual right” vs the unborn child are weighed differently by state. You may agree with CA position and disagree with Florida. There is no perfect solution with abortion but the US made clear that a “1 size fits all” only makes the prochoice group happy.
If you’re opposed to stealing, just don’t steal.
That’s a tad specious
Guttmacher Institute shows significant increase in abortions since the Dobbs decision. Findings from the Monthly Abortion Provision Study show that an estimated 1,037,000 abortions occurred in the formal health care system in 2023, the first full calendar year after the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade. This represents a rate of 15.9 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age,* and is a 11% increase since 2020, the last year for which comprehensive estimates are available. It is also the highest number and rate measured in the United States in over a decade.
One must always be cautious when accepting estimated statistics about a controversial matter that are offered by groups – like Guttmacher – with an official position on them. The media/research ecosystem is loaded with these kinds of self-serving studies. It’s one reason both the media AND scientific research have lost credibility.
It’s untrue to say the current Labour government is where the Democrats were four years ago. The Labour Government accepted the Cass Report and extended the ban on puberty blockers for kids, and walked back from self-id. Both of which are policies the Biden administration took a very different view on.
The spectacle of trad-left British women, willing on an old fashioned boomer-time American business magnate. Um, “the irony would be impossible to miss”. Circumstances make for the strangest bedfellows, do they not?
Only if you believe in identity politics and everyone is boxed into little groups everywhere (trad-left women and boomer magnate for example) is this “ironic”. Do I really have to explain how no one belongs to one group to the exclusion of all others? Or that people do different things and think different things about… ummm… Different things?? In the US, people who voted to retain access to abortion also voted Trump. The Horror
Precisely.
‘…he calls them “genders”, a common mistake, but he means male and female…’
In all my years except for the last few, gender and sex were synonymous in common usage – only in scientific terminology was there a (technical) difference. That the author buys into the language mangling of her enemies is part of the problem, and the reason the TERF feminists have got themselves into trouble. I don’t know if the author can see it, but it’s 1984 territory. Don’t do it – don’t let your opponents hijack language and redefine words by participating in the redefinition by using it. Fight aggressively to preserve the original meanings of words by continually using them in their original sense, and force your opponents to conjure new words to express their stances. The landscape of meaning will be clearer and to your advantage. We can start with the words ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ which no longer mean what they used to (if Rory Stuart or William Hague are politicians on the Right, then I’m a hyperdimensional modality of the colour purple), and we can move on to reclaiming the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer’.
Excellent, let the truth be told.
Can we consign “islamophobia” to the bin marked nonsense on stilts, while we’re at it?
I am looking forward to seeing the legal definition Labour have said they will produce. I suspect that they never will because they know that it will be torn to shreds from multiple directions.
I tend to agree, though I don’t see the harm in using the word “gender” to refer to social perceptions and ways we view men and women. Sex is biological, the use of gender refers to what we perceive about those differences; the cultural perceptions that vary quite radically from culture to culture. The idea of “maleness” varies radically between the Muslim culture and young English men. The harm is how activists have hijacked the word gender.
The problem is that we do not know to what extent gendered behaviour is independent of sex.
Genetic research, and commonalities across cultures, suggest the link is strong. For many feminists the claim was that gender (personality, behaviour, role etc) was in no way determined by biological sex, but only by society. This separated the two concepts in a way which clearly does not reflect reality. It is ideologically driven.
So we were well down the rabbit hole before trans came along.
You do make a valid point.
Appreciated. Clearly genes play a role, and society plays a role, and both interact in complex ways. And in any case we are only talking about average differences, not some sort of rigid, exclusive binary.
Yes, radfems/GC women have wanted it all ways. Women ARE equal in every way, there is no male/female brain and women must be allowed to do every job (apart from the horrible ones like down the sewers which men can keep) including those where physical strength, speed and size are critical such as the fire service or police. But simultaneously women must retain their own spaces and sports because they’re physically inferior to men. Women are no more empathic, caring or nurturing than men, that’s just socialisation – but the role of mother must be sacrosanct. Lesbians must be allowed access to sperm to have children – but it’s different when it’s gay men wanting surrogates (yes, I get the burden is rather different). And it’s virtually impossible to get any of the groups mentioned to condemn Islam which is of far greater danger to women’s rights than any man in tights.
One could make the case that you until yesterday gender was used in a literary/linguistic or aesthetic sense. Calling a vessel “she”, gendered languages such a Spanish attributing femininity or masculinity to certain words (“la” montaña, “el” oso). These appear arbitrary to some degree as far as inherency goes, but they rightly reflect the binary sexual space.
So in that estimation, trans activists hijacked that sense of gender, letting them use that arbitrary sensibility to bait and switch meanings with sex.
If one wanted to spend any time it mental effort indulging nonsense…
I agree that gender can be useful to describe our perception of men and women, maleness and femaleness. The problem arises when gender is reified, ie, taken to be concrete, real and objective like sex, which is precisely what gender ideology does.
The problem is that you get into changing gender with age.
Exactly. “Gender” is a grammatical term used to categorize nouns, adjectives and participles in certain languages, such as the Indo-European ones. It’s a term quite apart from sex, which is a quality of people and other living creatures. To apply the term “gender” to people is to make a metaphor, such as when we say “Time is a river.” A statement that is literally true cannot be a metaphor. However, if we forget this and start to believe that a metaphor is literally true, then we believe something untrue is in fact true and, of course, there are consequences. We see them every day in discussions about transsexuality. If someone told you his square root is 3 or that he himself had a logarithm you wouldn’t take that literally for a moment no matter what, if anything, this person meant about himself metaphorically.
And the word “nice” doesn’t mean what it used to. Does that mean nice things aren’t nice? The meanings of words change, they get repurposed. I’m sorry – but this is just a silly argument. As they say: it’s not even wrong.
You mean of course that your own is a silly argument? Or that any argument about the correct or incorrect use of words is a difficult one. The meaning of a word migrates through it’s incorrect usage and may become to mean it’s antonym in usage, often jokingly, then sticks unintentionally, and the whole process, of recovering the humour and the irony, has to begin over. The greatest danger to use of words is when they are asked to conform, or must mean one thing. What I mean is, when they are not allowed to carry humour or irony, and instead lose their freedom, to become instruments of a dictatorship. With politically engineering these mutations the first step is to turn an adjective or whatever into a noun, apparently, not just so that something abstract can be mistaken for something of substance, but because all nouns have the seed of their antonyms in them, and can be used to mean the opposite thing. Which meaning you choose decides your partisanship.
I do so love a bunch of men opining on abortion and women’s right and telling us what we have got wrong. However, if you check out the literature you will find that the word ‘gender’ has meant for many years the sex roles we all perform. Sex is immutable, gender is endlessly maleable and performative. Gender questioning feminists seek to clarify and preserve the ordinary meaning of words in the interest of preserving communication and assist dialogue. Sadly it doesn’t seem to be an aim shared by those in trans activist community who wish to colonise language as well as women’s safe spaces, sport, changing rooms and loos.
Yes, i’d broadly agree with this – otherwise, why have two words meaning “the same thing” as PK suggests when one would do? I’m sure there will be plenty of other examples of similar multiple words meaning the same thing, but not the potential for cultural warfare to take place around them!
Time to clarify therefore. Let sex be the sex as per visible characteristics at birth; let gender be the expression of those characteristics, which can indeed vary between individuals, but leaving the immutability of one’s sex.
That’s ok, but some aspects of personality and behaviour are clearly rooted in sex (ie they are genetic). So are they sex, or gender? Gender (in the feminist sense) is generally taken to mean social (not biological). Whereas you seem to be defining gender as a behavioural expression of physical sex.
“…The word ‘gender has meant for many years…”
That depends on what you mean by “many years”. For the great majority of my life ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ meant he same thing.
Each new generation doesn’t get to change to common usage by fiat; especially not when the motivation is so obviously political.
And for the first third of my life gender was used as a grammatical term only. The only people who knew the word were those studying Latin, German or French at school. No-one else ever used the word ‘gender’ at all. So, it all depends on how old you are.
Oh, woe! So much depends upon how old one is.
Yawn!
The meaning you give for gender is that of the (radical) feminist movement. Some trans activists (those who follow Judith butler) broadly agree with this, and see gender as performative.
Others see gender as something innate, which maybe at odds with physical sex. Some of these latter are clear biological realists. They believe that the brain is gendered, and that the gender of the brain can be at odds with the physical body.
obviously the two definitions are at odds, but what they have in common is that they believe that gender is flexible in relation to physical sex, and is not automatically determined by it.
Did you know that there are physical differences in the structure of the male and female brain?
If you read the comment again, you’ll find I’m describing the ideological positions of feminist and trans activists. Nothing to do with what I do or don’t know.
On physical brain differences: feminists generally deny their existence or importance. Some trans activists very much assert brain differences and claim, with some evidence, that the brains of trans people resemble their target gender. I’d like to see more evidence, but see this as quite possible.
Since you ask, I do believe in innate sex based brain differences, and believe they influence behaviour and personality to a significant degree. But research is ongoing.
Agree. Words matter
I think “gender” first became common in place of sex, and meaning the same thing, when people started answering the sex question on forms with a yes or no. To all intents and purposes they meant the same thing until it became trendy to change gender. I have never understood “trans rights” seeing as how they have always had the same rights as everyone else. It has never been a right for biological men to compete against biological women in women only sports. Allowing them to do so is dangerous and wicked and those who agree to it should be ashamed. It is made even worse if people say it is OK if the men haven’t been through puberty. That just encourages the use of puberty blockers on boys who are too immature to decide their future life.
You point to what I think is a very under discussed, under estimated point. It does seem like prudish bureaucrats swapped in the word gender so they didn’t have to mention s-e-x, which then inadvertantly lays the ground for trans activists to frame the whole issue in away that captures the meaning for normal people who have to fill out official forms.
Yeah but no. They’re handy categories. Sex is immutable: male and female. Gender is the role. So you can be whichever gender you like but you’re still the sex you were born. Women have retreated to the simplest of arguments and forms – but that still allow the other side to do what they will. If you don’t give them gender or sex how do you argue any of it at all?
Ivan Illich was the first to take ‘gender’ out of the grammar closet. See his book ‘Gender’.
Trump almost certainly won’t do it all because there’s so much to unpick, progressive state houses will fight him, and attention will shift. But a good first step and easy win will be Title IX and female sports because that can be done without legislation.
The big story here is how sharply the issue cut through, especially with some groups Democrats traditionally count as their own, for example urban Latinos.
Early reports are saying that the Trump ad of Harris promising state funded trans surgery for prisoners was the game-changer of the campaign. Democrat-leaning voters who had been able to ignore the issue suddenly realised what lunacy the reality of “just being kind to an excluded minority” really means.
Identity politics ideologues on the political left have been able to sell “trans rights” so far through ambiguity about what is really at stake and platitudes about inclusivity. If this marks the moment where the penny drops with the public at large that if women cannot define themselves as a different sex to men, then the whole basis of women’s rights is destroyed, then it will indeed be momentous.
The sudden realisation of what trans rights means reminds me of being a young teenager in the UK in the 1970’s, when PIE were on tv being supported by Labour politicians. The public suddenly realised what they meant and rejected it.
But not Harriet Harman
Who’d have thought women would vote for more than just abortion rights. Crazy.
The right to an abortion is a pretty fundamental right though.
The one thing they weren’t voting about was abortion rights because those debates are now happening at state level.
Harris could have won with a Reagan-like wipeout and it wouldn’t have made any difference on that score.
Removal of the perversity of trans/homosex and its promotion by state sponsored indoctrination in schools and adoption by equally stupid corporate HR missives can’t come soon enough. The reduction of Nandy et al and their NGO sponsors to the dustbin of history is way way overdue. The language of micro aggressions, safetyism and trigger warnings also must be ejected with the bullies that promote it. If Trump can accelerate this then he will have humiliated the liberal progressives for the lying contemptible Marxists they really are.
trans and homosex are two different things. The TQ movement is actually anti-homosex (see all the articles on ‘transing away the gay’.
Thanks. I didn’t realize this still needed to be said (and hope it rarely does).
Agree and both are corrosive perversions with trans as the vehicle of big pharma and tranhumanism.
There’s nothing really odd here. Trump is not pro identity politics or woke in any form. Trans comes under that umbrella. Likewise, appointing competent women on the basis of competence not gender is what you would expect.
What would be really interesting (solely as a thought experiment) would be an agenda that was both anti trans and anti abortion, or which sought to rollback trans and rollback gay marriage. What then?
I would say (although it is a guess, given that I am not one) that to the average American, “trans rights” isn’t really a thing, because they don’t really encounter any trans people in everyday life. However, I think most Americans are pro-abortion, which explains why even a lot of Red States are putting pro-abortion amendments into their State Constitutions.
”It’s an open goal for Trump — and a horrible dilemma for women who detest his character and his politics. ”
In the words of Ric Flair: ‘Whether you like it or don’t like it, LEARN TO LOVE IT, because it’s the best thing going today!’
Just on a tangent:
Someone’s gotta explain to me why “gender” is now verboten; to be replaced by “sex”.
“Gender” means “type”. There are two major types of humans; male and female. It’s perfectly appropriate to use it. Especially since we have been using it that way for many generations.
This nonsense about dictating my vocabulary is just a form of (attempted) bullying. It needs to stop.
(Apologies to the author for using her very agreeable essay as an excuse to rant)
I disagree. “Gender” as applied to a type of person should be used to mean an identification with a traditional of stereotypical sex role. “Sex” should be used to denote biological sex.
I wrote attempted bullying. Your telling me ‘should’ means nothing to me.
I think this explains the feminist version by Germaine Greer https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=germaine+greer+explains+gender+vs+sex&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DMzFKdm8SDKw
Thank you. That short video of Germain Greer explaining the difference between sex and gender is excellent.
One of many reasons I voted for Trump/Unity.
Careful Joan you seem to be suggesting politicians should be judged on what the actually do and achieve as a result, rather than what they say and what is said about them. That will never catch on in your lefty circles where it is all about rhetoric and smearing those who don’t agree with you.
Will have to wait and see. Many of the autogynephilic billionaires who finance the trans movement may just switch to the MAGA movement and peddle their influence there.
Trump does not care about women or ‘gender affirming’ medical treatment for teenagers.
Yes, we need to keep an eye on the autogynephilic billionaires, especially on social media.
Trump does care deeply about one thing: Trump.
That’s nonsense. Of course Trump cares about women. Just because he does so through a prism of what you’d doubtless dismiss as chauvinism does not make this untrue.
Let’s hope! Because … “Much of the Left has lost its mind, and its moral compass, when faced by entitled men masquerading as “victims”.
Democrats I once thought were bright, autonomous thinkers are positively ovine when it comes to gender ideology. I’ve had to wonder — and this has hurt — if their support for gay rights several decades ago was just the progressive litmus test of that era, rather than the thoughtful, rational alliance with gays and lesbians — actual men and women, just like them — I assumed it to be.
In any case, I am now an Independent, glad to see that RFK, Jr. — for whom I voted — will have a chance to tackle corruption and crapola in America’s pharmaceutical and food industries. And I look to Trump to restore federal rights and protections for vulnerable youth and women that Biden, Harris and their ilk have eroded in obeisance to gender ideology. Thus may the immutable material reality of “female” — which is not simply some issue, but the life-shaping experience of half the population — be again respected in law and policy.
Thanks for this piece.
“Much of the Left has lost its mind, and its moral compass. . .”
One of the greatest myths of the modern age is that socialism and by extension socialists ever had a moral compass. It doesn’t and they don’t. Socialism is the worst, most immoral political philosophy that has ever existed, not just because it is evil (it is, but then so are tyranny and despotism) but because it seeks to conceal its hideous nature under a veil of false virtue. At least tyrants and despots have the honesty not to pretend they’re decent, upstanding citizens whilst they’re busy pillaging and exploiting. Socialists, however, will stand on a hill of the dead and claim that all the deaths were necessary and justified because it was done for the greater good of the collective.
At it’s very core socialism believes that man is a social creature and not an individual one. That his social nature is more important than his individual needs and desires. From this (false) premise springs the entire rotten edifice of socialism: that the collective is more important than the individual, that collective rights are more important than individual ones and that collective freedoms trump individual freedoms, and that any individual who has the temerity to disagree with, or question the will or authority of the collective should be re-educated (forcibly of course) until they become the perfect socialist man, and if they refuse then they can be cancelled and if that doesn’t work then there are always the gulags and death-camps.
History is littered with dead, by the million, as a direct result of this appalling ideology.
Yet somehow those on the left always fail to make the connection. They gibber daily about fascism. “He’s Hitler”, “You’re a Nazi”, “You’re a Fascist”, they cry, at every opportunity, whilst blissfully unaware of the irony of their position; that communism and fascism are simply two ends of the same stick, with socialism being the big fat bit in the middle that joins the two. If you start with socialism then your ultimate destination can only ever be one of those two ends. They might as well cry “You’re Stalin”, “You’re a Red Guard” or “You’re a communist” – but strangely never do because they lack the intellectual honesty to see or admit to the connection.
There is no morality in socialism since at it’s core it denies the concept of the individual; it denies individual rights, freedoms, agency and choice. It should be resisted, fought, and destroyed at every turn wherever it is encountered. the last word must go to the man who encapsulated it so well:
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
I agree with all that in principle. I have just never understood why (when it comes to the US Right anyway), the desire to promote “individual rights” stops when one wants to do something which the Christian Churches oppose.
I’m not sure. Force of habit perhaps? Most religions, when subjected to scrutiny, reside on extremely shaky moral grounds.
The notion that murdering your baby is a fundamental woman’s right disfigures this otherwise passable article.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting “murdering babies”. “Aborting fetuses” is quite a different thing.
How wonderful it is to have Trump’s victory shedding light even into places like Clare O’Neil’s electorate in Melbourne, Australia. In Australia might has always been right, criminal police like the MARCUCCI have never been opposed, let alone punished. Because crime thrives in chaos & poverty.
If course Trump has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault. That kind of deflection from discussion of the real issues is page one of the Alinsky playbook.
I was originally very worried about the overturning of Roe v Wade because on the face of it, it looked like an authoritarian overreach by the politicised dimension of the US Supreme Court.
Now though I am very much persuaded that the issue of abortion in a country like the USA where so much power is devolved to the states, always ought to have been a matter for state legislatures. It’s exactly the sort of issue to which freedom of conscience ought to apply, and not a matter where the federal authority rules. What would have been disastrous but which did not happen, is Roe v Wade gets overturned at the Supreme Court with a newer determination that bans abortion and imposes this law upon state legislatures. That was always the danger with having the issue decided federally.
On the main point of the article, the apparent savage irony of Trump the great misogynistic sex-offender turning out to be the one who sorts out the pig’s breakfast of radical transgenderism, this is only an ideological shock for those silly enough to believe in progressivism in the first place. Perhaps this shock might persuade some of its adherents to review the assumptions they keep making about men, capitalism, freedom of speech and the rest of things they typically hate for no good reason, but I won’t hold my breath.
I don’t much care for either sides’ take on this bizarre issue.
Firstly, transsexuals don’t need to be continually reminded that they aren’t whom they claim to be. The brutal medicalizing processes involved – powerful cross sex hormones, irreversible surgery on one’s genitalia, and the reaction from one’s peers, as well as from society (particularly for the less convincing) must be difficult enough .
That said, they need to understand that natal women are generally leery of people whom they don’t know, and who lived as males for much of their lives, disrobing in front of them. Most women are understandably uncomfortable with that possibility, presumably moreso if “bottom” surgery isn’t required or isn’t completed.
Men and women also don’t compete athletically against each other very often, outside of doubles tennis or something similar, for obvious reasons. Men are on average much taller, stronger, and heavier, and have larger lung capacity and endurance than most women, on average. A mediocre male athlete would often be a champion as a female, and could very possibly injure a female competitor.
These are simply facts.
Neither side wins much in the way of argument by forcing the point. If you have a p***s under your dress, that’s entirely your business. But when you’re entering a locker room, restroom, or athletic competition, it necessarily becomes someone else’s, as well.
Furthermore, the gender dysphoric are clearly individuals who are suffering. They should not be forced to suffer ridicule, condemnation, nor prejudice on top of the other things they endure.
It wouldn’t be terribly difficult for both sides of this debate to be mindful of these things.
The idea behind our Republic is the fact that states retain the majority of their rights in governing their population, not a central government authority.
Roe v. Wade absolutely needed to go and the decision is now left to the individual states and their residents to decide.