The Patriot Post® · Feminism Is the Mother of Transgenderism
All evidence over the past two centuries leads to the conclusion that feminism has been a tragic misstep and an ugly wound in the history of Western civilizational thought. One of the most destructive consequences of feminism has been the still-unfolding and exponentially-worsening transgenderism crisis. This horrific ideology — now plaguing numerous Western nations and destroying the lives of countless men, women, and children — is a direct descendant of feminism, and it is fueled and fed by the feminism pervading every aspect of society.
Feminism Nascent
It can truly be said that feminism is the “mother” of both the Sexual Revolution and the LGBT movement, which are intimately intertwined. Since its inception in the late 18th century, feminism has held the necessity of “sexual liberation” and “free love” as one of its core and even essential doctrines. The chief progenitor of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, advocated and practiced sexual promiscuity, as did her eventual husband William Godwin, a forefather of modern anarchist movements, who believed that monogamy and faithful marriage were devices meant to subjugate and oppress women. Wollstonecraft shared this view.
Wollstonecraft’s vision of feminism injected the atheistic, libertine, anti-hierarchical philosophy behind the French Revolution (which she lauded in her book “Vindication of The Rights of Men,” an antagonistic response to conservative Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on The Revolution in France”) into the most basic and fundamental building block of society — the family. Where the French revolutionaries beheaded the king, Wollstonecraft sought to spiritually behead the king of the family, the father. Where the French revolutionaries held that every man could be his own king, Wollstonecraft held that every woman could be her own man.
This philosophy was, after her death, adopted by Wollstonecraft’s son-in-law, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley, who had been expelled from Oxford for his 1811 tract “The Necessity of Atheism,” adapted and blended the thought of his parents-in-law — Godwin’s anarchistic atheism and Wollstonecraft’s Luciferian feminism — and infused the philosophy into his own poems. His writing inverted the traditional understanding of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise for falling prey to the temptations of the Serpent. In Shelley’s imagination, the Fall was not a tragic plummet into disorder but rather a reordering of creation, with the animal (the Serpent) reigning supreme, woman dominating over man, and God completely left out of the picture. In another work, Shelley creates a character named Cynthna, who is described as “the earthly messenger of Satan the liberator.” In “Revolt of Islam,” Cynthna asks, “Can man be free if woman be a slave?” In service to her demonic master, she proceeds to “disenchant” women of all affection for marriage, motherhood, and family.
The inherently atheistic foundation of feminism laid by Wollstonecraft and Shelley, replete with the seeds of the Sexual Revolution, festered and percolated for over a century before finally surging to the forefront of culture at the dawn of the 20th century.
Feminism Ascendant
Although the term “culture wars” was first popularized by Pat Buchanan in 1992, the thing itself to which the name refers had been around for at least two centuries prior. As the First World War drew closer, the Western World was rocked by two closely-connected political movements: communism and women’s suffrage. Like its atheistic forebearer of French Revolutionary Republicanism, communism sought to abolish hierarchy — and go even further to destroy class distinctions and even the family. Particularly as the women’s suffrage movement united suffragettes from across a broad swath of classes, communism crept into the movement.
Women’s suffrage served as a political channel for the anti-family feminist ideology, fracturing the family politically, confirming the individual (and deposing the family) as the most basic unit of society, and spreading antagonism against what is today called “gender roles.” Up until then, it was largely understood that men were designed to serve as providers and protectors, while women were made to serve as mothers and nurturers. Through the women’s suffrage movement, feminism eroded these divinely-instituted ideals. Of course, some suffragettes simply fought for basic respect for women and their legal rights and protections, which had been gradually suppressed in some cases with the rise of democracy and the individualistic-focused society it formed. But feminism’s weaponization of the women’s suffrage movement had long-lasting effects on the Western world.
Over the succeeding decades, feminism and communism formed an even closer bond, especially in the wake of the First World War, when women had become prominent fixtures in the workforce while millions of men were fighting and dying in the near-global conflict. Communism encouraged feminism, recognizing its potential for keeping women in the workplace, serving the state’s economic interests, and creating even more jobs for the state to populate in the form of nurseries, daycares, and government schools. The first half of the 20th century saw Wollstonecraft’s and Shelley’s notion of men and women as equal coming to fruition.
This notion of equality must be carefully parsed from the notion of dignity: Christianity, of course, holds that all men and all women are created with equal dignity and are loved equally by God. However, Christians know — both through God’s word in Sacred Scripture and through the experience of God’s creation — that men and women are not created equal, as in “interchangeable” or “one and the same.” Their equality is in dignity and love, not in capability and biology. Feminism ignored and outright rejected the Christian understanding of equality in dignity, and instead declared, with diabolical hubris, that man and woman are actually interchangeable, one and the same. Anything a man can do, a woman can do. The “and vice versa” would come later.
Feminism Dominant
In the wake of Second World War, as both East and West became increasingly materialistic in their oddly-opposing ways, feminism became a more and more dominant ideology in civilization, reaching a watershed moment in the 1960s. The Sexual Revolution and the “free love” movement were direct results of feminism, enabled by the burgeoning contraceptive industry. For the first time, men and women of all classes and incomes could (in theory) have sex as promiscuously as they liked without having to accept the responsibility of a child. This was, from a diabolical point of view, feminism’s master-stroke. The family was finally defeated: the act which had, for millennia, brought about new life and sustained the human race — which had, for centuries, been held as sacred and bound by the covenant of marriage — was now completely divorced from its chief aim and result, cheapened and degraded from the source of new life to a mere communal pleasure.
Of course, where contraception failed, less delicate and even more barbaric methods were devised and promulgated to alleviate “free lovers” from the burden of a child. Abortion was erroneously declared a constitutional right in the U.S. just a few short years after the sexual revolution’s advent and has since been adopted and defended across the globe.
Having played its trump card and offering the masses animalistic sexual pleasure without the joys and duties of parenthood, feminism seemed somewhat irrelevant. In the 1970s and 80s, it adopted a nastier, more vicious façade to achieve its few remaining goals. It wasn’t enough to simply cut off the family at its source, the family extant had to be demolished, too. Women were encouraged into the workforce at rates previously unimaginable, told to focus on their careers to the detriment of their children.
In the 70s and 80s, feminism became that which it abhorred, a mother, giving birth to the LGBT movement. Of course, initially, it was mostly just the “G” movement, with a few “Ls” interspersed, and maybe the odd “B.” Homosexuality was nothing new to the world, the practice had been around for ages in various ways in various cultures. But now it had cultural standing: If men and women really were interchangeable and if sex was no longer primarily a procreative act but a pleasurable one, then what point was there in constraining sex to opposite-sex couples? Why couldn’t two men “have sex,” or two women?
A later development in the history of feminism was the perpetuation of the myth of “toxic masculinity.” That which is toxic is not masculinity, but an absence or rejection of authentic masculinity. But traditional masculinity, which had served as the backbone and engine of Western civilization since even before the birth of Christ, became a reviled social stigma. A natural and wholesome inclination became suppressed as a sort of psychological disease.
Transgenderism’s Lineage
Just as homosexuality relied on feminism’s ideological precedent and social cachet to gain a cultural foothold, so too did feminism’s younger son — or daughter — or whatever. If men and women were really one and the same, interchangeable in practically every regard, then why could a man not become a woman, or a woman become a man? If the only real difference between men and women was a matter of perceived personality, then why could the biological accidents of the body not be rearranged to correspond to the “reality” of feelings?
Transgenderism was birthed from the feminist philosophy, following her precedents to their natural conclusions. Many self-professed feminists protest against transgenderism’s onslaught, claiming that the ideology is erasing women, without realizing that the very movement that they espouse and propagate is based on erasing the distinctions between men and women. Given feminism’s premise that men and women are equal one to another in essence, bodily distinctions and biological differences become mere accidents to be subjected to and conquered by “science” at the whim of one’s feelings and emotional instability.
Moreover, feminism has bred the very discontent and societal rot which is fueling transgenderism’s alacrity. Young women are no longer content with their sex, having been told for generations now that they can be men, should be men, and can do whatever men do, yet consistently finding that they in fact cannot. Disappointed with this reality, young women seek to rectify this seeming wrong by “becoming” men. Young men have been told for generations that their sex is dangerous and “toxic,” that they need to be gentler, softer, and, in practically every respect, more like women. With such pressures placed upon them, trying to “be” women seems a reasonable escape for young men. And thus countless young women and young men are drugged, butchered, and mutilated, all based on a lie.
It is the lie of feminism that men and women are equal, one and the same, interchangeable. Its atheistic, Luciferian disregard for the order instituted by God — written in human biology, lived out in the form of the family, explicated in the sacrament of marriage — has led to rampant degeneracy — from the contraceptive Sexual Revolution to the “normalization” of homosexuality — and horrors prior generations could have never imagined — such as abortion and the surgical mutilation of children’s genitals, all under the fraudulent guise of “health care.” Feminism has decimated Western civilization.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.