(More) influential women must swim against this anti-women tide - will they?
Several women commentators casually call the trans movement a male supremacist movement, suggesting that it's led by men who want to undermine women. But the truth is more complicated.
Who led this "fight" against women and womanhood?
Frankly, lots of influential women. And in recent years they came together to protect the rights of trans girls (who're boys) and trans women (who're men), or those born as boys, or intersex individuals who've undergone male puberty, at the cost of protecting the rights of girls and women.
What did these celebrity women do with the immense power they had? They handed it to manipulative or misguided men. Many are now seeing the disastrous consequences of their stupidity, their complicity. But too many women and girls have already paid a price.
Judith Butler, in many ways the mother and grandmother of the trans cult theory, is a woman.
"More than 465 women...." [The Hollywood Reporter, March 31, 2021]
Meghan Markle reportedly said on LGBT rights, "This is a basic human rights issue, not one about sexuality."
Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington, Drew Barrymore, Julianne Moore and Naomi Campbell, Cher, Jodie Comer, Sally Field, Ariana Grande, Mila Kunis, Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Minogue, Margot Robbie have long been prominent supporters of LGBTQ campaigns, often making a point of showing that support with ample hints that those who don't support these campaigns are somehow wanting (transphobic or homophobic). It's almost as if some of these women, not content with enabling their own children to come out as trans, hope that someone else's child will soon claim to be.
The raging debate about trans women or biological males (or intersex folk who've undergone male puberty) in women's sports is merely a symbol of a space that too few influential women are struggling to regain.
That shouldn't blind us to the fact that it's a space that too many influential women first ceded.
Many influential, privileged women have been the most vocal (often more vocal than men) supporters of trans rights, at the expense of women's rights.
A Hall of Fame (or Shame?) depending on your understanding of what harms women.
Many influential women may have more to do with this poisoning of the waters than they admit. Especially those who campaigned to ensure the discourse becomes (and stays) anti-women. Regardless of how extraordinary their achievements in other spheres, their record in this conversation is far from exemplary.
Recall Bazaar's hugely influential piece, by a woman, as far back as 2018. Jennifer Wright wrote several pieces damaging to women and womanhood, but even by her standards her worst, most damaging piece was the one that bunched women with transwomen.
Wright was wrong. But never more wrong than she was here.
Over the years, thousands of high-profile essays, research papers, surveys, speeches, letters, tweets like this from women, by women have been either embarrassingly naive or simply disingenuous. That doesn't mean they weren't dangerous - to women! Link here.
Canadian Carol Hay's feminism, as displayed here, seems more pantry-prattle than philosophy.
It definitely gets the blood stream going to speak of battles and freedom and the like but who's fighting? For whom? Who's winning freedom? Who's losing it?
CNN host Brianna Keilar tells a guest that "some" girl children already know, as children, whether she's going to want to have a baby or not, or what testosterone will do to her uterus, or that she'll increase her risk of attack (where she to take puberty blockers or go down the route of sex transition).
Assuming the UN has been demented on this score, you'd guess that UN Women would at least ensure that women's rights wouldn't be clubbed or confused with transwomen? You guessed wrong.
Every practice flows from a policy that's been approved, usually at several levels.
America's National Organization for Women (NOW) echoes a curious claim of many feminist institutions and individuals who paint the pro-trans lobby as a diabolical patriarchal strategy to keep women down, as if men are the main or only villains. But often it's not men, but women who're doing their best to keep women down by including men in women-only categories.
Biden-Harris White House spokesperson said that parents fearing for their children's safety as they compete against children who've been transitioned is fearmongering and gaslighting, in effect she demonized such parents.
Kamala Harris's choice of Tim Waltz as a presidential running mate had more than a little to do with his pro-trans stance in Minnesota; that was Harris showing powerful men in politics that they could ride the Harris wave if they shared her brand of politics, including — and especially — on trans issues. How many men can you spot in this cheery photo (below) of Waltz bulldozing pro-trans policies into Minnesota?
The Hollywood Commission, first inspired by a movement to protect women, and for long run largely by women, handpicks trans-issues as a flagship cause.
Writer Moira Donegan has made a career out of falsely or frivolously targeting men and of aggressively promoting trans lobbies. The Guardian added to her veneer of respectability by making her one of their US-based columnists.
Did men or transwomen simply ram through anti-women policy? All on their own? Without the implicit or explicit but decisive support of women champions, at every stage?
What if women had voted en masse, as a 'block', to counter what they'd perceived as patently anti-women? Would draft (let alone daft) policy have become policy?
Instead, what have some of the most powerful women been doing? They've made it harder for other, ordinary women to stand up to trans lobbies. Only women with courage, clarity and conviction have been able to call them out. That some influential women (J K Rowling, Julie Bindel, Maya Forstater, Helen Joyce, Kathleen Stock, Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans, Abigail Shrier and a handful of others) have been swimming against the tide is comforting. Even among this lot, at least a few might wonder if they're as influential as a Michelle Obama or a Kamala Harris or an Oprah Winfrey, who sadly championed the demented side. So, they're still only a handful because of the multitude of influential women that they're, sadly, having to battle.
Would this handful need to swim against the tide at all, if it was truly with them?
Why didn't more influential women, enough influential women swim against the tide when it mattered, well before pantry-chats became protocol, before Papers became policy, before bills became law?
In campaigns for policies that, eventually, harm women, whose voices have often been the loudest, whose fists the highest, whose placards the largest, whose grins the widest?
At every other level, is there evidence that influential women used their legitimate power to consolidate and fight anti-women policy? Or are the voices of women behind the already powerful voices of transwomen? The first Director of the Gender Policy Council (GPC), since it was established in March 2021, is a woman: Jennifer Klein. Klein and her colleagues have been advising the White House on gender issues since the days of the Clinton-Gore administration.
None of this woman-powered strategy is recent.
The GPC ensures a "whole-of-government approach to advance gender equality and gender equity" and led implementation of the first-ever National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality in the U.S. The acknowledgements section of that Strategy confirms the "contributions" of over 30 U.S. federal government agencies, 250 nonprofit and community-based organizations, civil society groups, faith-based organizations, unions, and academics in "a total of 15 issue-based convenings" hosted by the GPC. It acknowledges the contributions of over 270 "girls, young women and gender nonconforming youth leaders". Weren't women and girls approving these dangerous ideas, at every stage? Or were they protesting ferociously, publicly, consistently but were silenced or cancelled out?
Were these women helpless, voiceless all along? How did they allow things to get to such a stage?
It's now frankly impossible for men or transwomen to simply 'mute' women. Women are too powerful, as a block, to mute any longer. Could it be, instead, that many women - at several levels of policy - muted themselves by actively framing discussion against women?
Unless these women start wielding power that they already have, where and when it counts, it's always going to be easier to blame 'individuals' (Lia Thomas, Iszac Henig, Laurel Hubbard), 'men' (and their misogyny) or sports federations or 'the system' or the 'men's rights movement'. This is especially true of women who can inform policy from the grassroots up.
Not all trans women are naughty or nefarious but many are both.
Some aren't even trans, but merely born with heavier opposite-sex features than normal that warrant a third category; in sports, they must be restricted to competition in a separate category from men and women who meet the norm. But inclusion mania had to have its way and include them in the category for women.
Sensible women activists are understandably overjoyed at the passage of bills that protect their private spaces from the intrusion of transwomen. They rejoice at votes in their favour. They cheer legislators behind the Ayes and show the finger to those behind the Nays.
What they're not doing is looking closer at women behind the Nays. The women, whose votes they must, in fairness, take for granted but can't. Or at least haven't been able to, until recently, and only after outcry from affected women and girls on the street. These papers became bills and were put to vote because women who could have spoken up didn't - didn't speak enough, soon enough, loudly enough, consistently enough, collaboratively enough, creatively enough.
Did Executive Order 13988 become a reality in January 2021 without the support of influential women at every stage of design, drafting, re-drafting, consultation, announcement and implementation?
Did new Title IX rules come into effect in April 2024 without the support of influential women?
To accept that is to ignore the complicity of these influential women at every stage and deny the agency they had all along to avoid precipitating (and if not, to at least prevent or to alter) a course that has been and continues to be devastating to the majority of women who have little/no influence.
Wielding woman power means women voting with courage and conviction, not complicity or convenience. At the humblest of gatherings, not just at the highest committee benches. To expect men or transwomen with vested interests, to angelically self-correct is negligent and naive. Especially if women are falling over themselves to undermine what the most sensible among them are saying!
A few clear-headed women have been swimming against the tide; apparently many other women haven't been, clear-headed or swimming.
Here's one of the few transwomen, Corinna Cohn from Indianapolis, speaking bravely, sensibly on this theme.
But good sense includes women challenging themselves on language that hurts women. Hundreds of women journalists and commentators who have written otherwise insightful articles, spoken on TV and podcasts calling out this travesty of trans intrusion have been undermining their cause by referring to transwomen as women, repeatedly using 'she', 'her', 'hers' instead of 'him' and 'his'.
If they privately claim that 'trans women are not women', why publicly undermine women by using language that should - by rights - apply only to women?
One otherwise sensible Substack piece by Suzi Weiss dated 21 February 2022, titled Watching Lia Thomas win referring to Thomas uses the words 'she' and 'her' around 20 times.........each.
One of Weiss's paragraphs captures this best: "When she swam on the men’s team, Thomas never made it to the NCAA Championship. Now, Thomas is seeded number one in the league and is poised to give Katie Ledecky a run for her money next month at the NCAA championships."
"When SHE swam on the men's team......."?!
Men who haven't spoken up yet, believing they have no bone in this fight must lobby alongside women (and vote) for separate categories that allow transwomen in sports, but forbid competing against or among women. That few, if any, transwomen would want to compete among themselves, is another matter.
Women who've been undercutting other women all along, to put it mildly, must urgently reconsider.
Often, it's women who publicly call out men who're trying to stand up against trans indoctrination.
Annette Bening has long prided herself on having a transgender son. She said being such a parent has made her so "much more interesting" so much "more wise".
The Geena Davis Institute, powered for over two decades by a woman, Geena Davis, and her women colleagues, friends and supporters believes that because there are fewer transgenders in real-life they need more representation on screen. That's a self-declared mandate to normalize what isn't real. There's no evidence to suggest that 31% of people report knowing someone who's trans; the real figure may be less than 5% or lower. Not only is a figure o 31% quoted as authoritative, it is offered as an excuse to raise the figure through greater representation in the media, suggesting that representation is more important than reality.
Six panelists helped USA Today handpick a handful of winners out of thousands of nominees of women achievers from across the US; one panelist was a man, the other five were women! Of 12 National Honorees for Women of the Year they still picked one who, frankly, isn't a woman.
If you think pre-teen children coming out as trans are doing so, primarily, because of their fathers, think again. It is, largely, mothers who have that oversized influence at that stage. It is mothers who must consider the abuse they're subjecting their children to. Sure, fathers and mothers have a joint responsibility to protect their children from indoctrination. But at the very least, it's mothers (who as women themselves, were once girls) who should — and must — prevail over perversity. They, more intimately than men, ought to know what girls and women stand to lose.
Women's efforts to better equality for women, and generally between the sexes, shouldn't be at the expense of men's rights. But who imagined that these women's efforts would be at the expense of women's rights.
Note: this post has been updated to include ongoing support from women for transwomen, even at the cost of women.
Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer writing on culture and society.
Twitter: @RudolphFernandz
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