On Sunday, The New York Times dropped a bombshell, reporting that the Trump administration was considering draft rules to reverse Obama’s move redefining “sex” as “gender identity” in federal law. Radical feminists eviscerated the report on Monday, even as liberal activist groups and transgender activists took to the streets to protest the tentative rule change.
“The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) is a radical feminist organization that stands to liberate women and girls from patriarchy,” WoLF lawyer and spokeswoman Kara Dansky told PJ Media on Monday. “You can’t fight for the rights of women and girls if you can’t define that category directly.”
“Women have been oppressed and discriminated against for thousands of years on the basis of our biology,” not their gender identity, Dansky declared. “Everybody knew what a woman was when they wouldn’t let us vote.”
The radical feminists at WoLF actually sued the Obama administration over its legal redefinition of “sex” to include “gender identity” in federal civil rights law. This move “effectively strips women and girls of their legal protections by eliminating the ability to legally distinguish between males and females,” WoLF explained. The group dropped the suit following news that the Trump administration would not follow the same rules.
“The NYT piece misleads its readers by suggesting that it is possible to change sex, and it uses the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ interchangeably,” Dansky told PJ Media. Echoing the Obama administration, The New York Times adopted the language of transgender ideology, which makes it more difficult to protect women.
Dansky also attacked the Times story for suggesting “that it’s only conservatives who object to the erosion of female-only spaces and the rights and privacy of women — we are a radical feminist organization that fights for the rights and privacy of women, including our right to complete reproductive sovereignty; we are hardly a conservative organization.”
Miriam Ben-Shalom, the first open lesbian to be reinstated to the U.S. Army after being dismissed for her sexuality, also criticized the Times story, defending Trump’s proposed change.
“I simply am not able to understand how it has come to be that we do not ‘know the difference between SEX (which is biological) and GENDER, which is an artificial construct of a society which deals with the behaviors of that society — based on the SEX of the members of that society,'” Ben-Shalom, who has also described herself as a radical feminist, told PJ Media on Monday.
She attacked the transgender ideology as “fake science.”
Ben-Shalom condemned the transgender movement for using intersex persons who suffer from “genital or genetic anomalies” as an excuse to deny the biological gender binary of humanity. “Intersex people do not like being used this way and the fake science being bandied about by transgender-identifying people and their allies is ludicrous, unreasonable, and unsuitable,” she declared.
The lesbian veteran vocally opposed discrimination, but she also insisted that “males identifying as trans are NOT women — they are simply a different type of man (no matter what they say, they remain genetically XY) — and women identifying as trans are NOT men (they remain genetically XX) — they usually are lesbians who have been brainwashed into thinking they are men.”
Ben-Shalom has previously condemned transgender ideology as “erasing women,” arguing that females should not be forced to deal with males in women’s spaces and that too often, lesbians are told they are “transgender” and therefore convinced to take dangerous drugs and damage their bodies through irreversible surgeries.
(The safety of women and girls is no small matter. In 2016, a 5-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a 5-year-old boy in a girl’s restroom — the “gender-nonconforming” boy was let in due to the school district’s transgender policy.)
“And do not get me started about how transgender-identifying humans and their allies are going after CHILDREN,” Ben-Shalom told PJ Media. “I find it dangerous at the very least, that a psychological/psychiatric condition is dictating to all of society which words are to be used, which medical treatments and surgeries that must be considered ‘appropriate.'”
“Transgender ‘identity is the ONLY such condition where ‘self-identification’ is accepted and is based on feelings alone!” she warned. “It is the ONLY condition where surgically removing body parts is considered a treatment or ‘cure.’ There is no other condition.”
“It is dismaying to me to see women being erased and censored by trans and their allies,” Ben-Shalom declared. “It is angering to see the human rights of women and children, the most basic of which is privacy, being shunted aside by cocks in frocks. It is outrageous that these people are dictating to parents how they ought to deal with their children. And it is plain wrong to insist that we all should accept the delusions of these people as being ‘normal’ and regular.”
The lesbian veteran insisted that she is “not a fan of Mr. Trump,” but she added, “Should Mr. Trump make SEX the only acceptable term in medicine and law and eliminate the baseless term ‘gender identity’ as being a medical and legal criterion, that would be a considerable and just thing to do.”
Furthermore, she declared that such a change “would be a huge win for women.”
Trump’s proposed policy would protect the “rights and privileges they have worked so hard for — such as Title IX, sex-segregated spaces, and scholarships for females. Let people who identify as trans live as they will, but do not force the rest of us to buy this snake oil which sells women and children down the river.”
These arguments echo those of a lesbian group that caused a stir at the London Pride Parade by marching behind a sign reading “Transactivism Erases Lesbians.”
Transactivism erases lesbians? Eh? Hey ladies, you might want to stretch before that reach. pic.twitter.com/jNifs7iOqN
— Sooz Kempner (@SoozUK) July 8, 2018
Dansky, the WoLF spokeswoman, also warned that transgender ideology erases women, and lesbians in particular.
“Women who don’t conform to gender-based stereotypes because of their sexual orientation are being told that they are actually male and they are being told that if they don’t engage in romantic or sexual relationships with ‘men who identify as lesbians,’ then they are transphobic,” the radical feminist said.
This undermines lesbian rights in key ways. “Lesbians specifically are people who do not wish to have romantic or sexual relationships with people with male genitalia,” Dansky noted. Ironically, transgender ideology pushes a kind of “rape culture” on lesbians.
“All of gender identity ideology effectively erases women and lesbians in particular,” the WoLF spokeswoman insisted.
In addition to lesbians being subjected to “conversion therapy” to become transgender and women being forced to admit men into women’s spaces, Dansky listed other ill effects: males being permitted to compete in women’s sports, crime statistics becoming skewed against women as male perpetrators are recorded as being female, and male prisoners being housed in women’s prisons.
“The implementation of gender identity ideology across society has far-reaching implications that we have not yet begun to consider,” Dansky warned. “We need to take a hard look at how this ideology is impacting women and girls.”
The fact that radical feminists like Miriam Ben-Shalom and Kara Dansky would join conservatives in denouncing transgender ideology as a threat to women and girls should give others on the Left pause. Rather than indulging another anti-Trump outrage binge, The New York Times should consider that opposition to transgender ideology is bipartisan, and based on real concern for the well-being of women and girls.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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