In Brief: The New Misogyny
The claim that anyone can be a woman is a denigration of all women.
Anything a woman can do, a man pretending to be a woman can do better. That’s the lesson the “transgender” movement is trying to hammer into everyone’s minds these days. Christine Rosen, for one, has had enough.
A new form of misogyny is taking hold in contemporary culture. It comes in the guise of a liberationist philosophy, a transformational movement dedicated to open-mindedness. Its advocates believe they are ushering in a world in which one can be whomever one chooses to be. And in doing so, they are treating womanhood itself—the defining feature of half of humankind—as though it is a disposable commodity.
Under the dictates of this new dispensation, anyone, regardless of physiology, must be allowed to lay claim to the biological realities of the female body. Anyone should have the right to call themselves a woman.
The misogynistic nature of this revolution has escaped proper scrutiny precisely because it is understood as progressive—as literally better than everything that has come before. And it casts everything that has come before as suspect: All forms of social organization and every idea that denies this movement’s claims have been deemed retrogressive and actively harmful to the forward march of greater rights for all.
This is an audacious form of woman-hatred, especially since it comes in the guise of opening up womanhood, of extending its benefits to all. But by doing so, it becomes nothing less than an assault on what it means to be a woman.
Men dressed as women are being given prominent positions in government and touted as the “first woman” to hold said position. Males claiming to be females are dominating women’s sports. And so on and so on.
Classic misogyny claimed that men were better than women merely by dint of being born male. The new misogyny insists that being female isn’t an essential biological fact but a mutable identity, something anyone can be. It gives men permission to say to women: We can be women, too.
This flies in the face of all history and experience of Homo sapiens. Biological differences between the sexes are real; indeed, those differences make it possible for us to exist. Literally. But today’s radical egalitarians do not like the consequences and choices that flow from that fact and are currently attempting to erase it from our collective cultural experience.
So much for science. Rosen elaborates at length on this new struggle for women after having thought that they had finally achieved equal rights. The modern “transgender” movement is profoundly troubling in many ways, but its detrimental effect on women is among the most pernicious.
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