[T]he far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women don’t count.
The right’s position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.
Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda.
[T]oday, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”
The noble intent behind omitting the word “women” is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.
Women, of course, have been accommodating. They’ve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. They’ve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair — rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports — is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own.
But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?
Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.
Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves.
But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don’t exist. Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.
Gender identity workbooks created by transgender advocacy groups for use in schools offer children helpful diagrams suggesting that certain styles or behaviors are “masculine” and others “feminine.”
Didn’t we ditch those straitened categories in the ’70s?
Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own — with their own specific needs and prerogatives.
Source: Opinion | The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count – The New York Times
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Re the overturning ov Roe v Wade. I have never had an abortion – and never needed one. I will never know whether that was good luck or because I couldn’t conceive (I was raped). Abortion is a contentious issue – and maybe Roe v Wade went too far. When my older sister was in hospital having an abortion (at 10 weeks) she was in a ward with 3 other women also having abortions – none of whom were having their first. It is a sad fact that some women use abortion as a means birth control. ‘My body my choice’ sounds so ‘affirming’ but we now know much more about the foetus the we did when Roe v Wade was decided i.e, how the foetus feels pain from as early as 12 weeks. There has to be a better way than relying upon hopelessly inadequate court judgements.
How does having multiple abortions mean one is using it as birth control? A friend of mine had an abortion at 16 after being raped by two older classmates. She was not on birth control at the time because she was not sexually active.
Several years later, she had a second abortion, because she got pregnant after her abusive boyfriend tampered with her birth control, resulting in her getting pregnant.
Neither of these were instances of using abortion as birth control, and it’s horrifying to think that if she had given comfort and support to a young woman going through this for the first time, that young woman’s family would then assume she was using abortion as birth control.