By Joshua Arnold

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) was “considered an LGBT ‘ally,’” observed Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice, but “her latest move has supporters of the movement now labeling her as ‘anti-trans.’” Mace filed a resolution last week to protect women’s restrooms in the U.S. Capitol from male intrusion after a man identifying as a woman won election to the U.S. Congress. “How in the world did we even get to this point?” Hice wanted to know. One contributing factor is feminism, Dr. Carrie Gress answered on “Washington Watch,” the very ideology Mace declared was her reason for preserving women-only spaces.

A professor at Pontifex University, Gress’s answer was no uninformed, knee-jerk response. Instead, it was the summation of extensive research she conducted for her latest book, “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Destroyed Us.” “I was really startled to discover in my research that first-wave feminism actually had a lot more to do with this problem than we realized,” related Gress, “because first-wavers really thought that the problem was Christianity, the family, and motherhood.”

This did not happen immediately. It takes more than a snap of the fingers to move from women desiring the right to vote to social affirmation of gender dysphoria. Rather, Gress argued that the cultural and philosophical impulses that enable transgenderism have “been growing for about 200 years.”

“We’ve thought of feminism as something that’s been very good for women. But — and unfortunately — feminism has really promoted this idea of women being independent from husbands and from children and really making work the goal and the ideal for women’s lives,” added Gress.

Our current social mischief is not the result of feminism acting alone, she continued. “In the 1900s, you started seeing a connection with communism. So, you take these radical ideas of the early feminists, and then you add communism, which is really focused on work and the worker and certainly not on fertility, not on the family, not on Christianity.”

Gress singled out second-wave feminist Betty Friedan as an example of “a closet communist,” who “was absolutely focused on trying to get women out of the home and doing productive work.” Friedan was “probably the best example of changing the narrative,” she explained. “She actually called the home a comfortable concentration camp and really encouraged women in any way possible to get out and do productive work.”

Gress is not the only recent scholar to recognize the effect of Marxist thought on male and female relationships toward work. In his superb 2020 book “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” Grove City College professor Carl Trueman cited Marx’s claim that, due to technological advancements that reduced the strength required for manual labor, “differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class.”

“Since then, technology has assumed a key role in the more radical context of making plausible the separation of biological sex and the concept of gender,” Trueman observed. “Marx was thinking only in terms of the relationship of the sexes to the means of production. But thanks to surgery and hormones and modern medical breakthroughs, we can now plausibly separate gender from sex and even revise the relationship of the sexes to the means of reproduction.”

Trueman also proceeded to demonstrate how second-wave feminists, building upon Marxist (and Freudian) ideas, labored to further “eliminate gender differences beyond the area of the workplace.” He cited feminist author Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote in 1949, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” Beauvoir strongly endorsed new technologies such as birth control that she believed could decouple womanhood from childbearing.

“Rather than seeing reproduction as the fulfillment — or at least a fulfillment — of what it means to be a woman, de Beauvoir sees it instead as a potential obstacle to the identity of any individual woman,” Trueman reasoned. “The body is something to be overcome; its authority is to be rejected; biology is to be transcended by the use of technology.”

“We’ve been groomed — and I think that’s actually the right word — for the last 50 years, to being told that we’re going to be happiest if we act like men — and not good men. So, this has really pushed women to think of themselves in these male contexts,” exclaimed Gress. “What we’ve lost, really, is this sense of motherhood. And we can see that in the birth rates today. We can see that, certainly, in the abortion issue.”

“When you open up this idea that sex doesn’t mean anything, monogamy doesn’t mean anything, children are obstacles to us, then you really just create these people who are genderless, that are disconnected from their fertility. And, therefore, it’s very easy to create new genders,” Gress protested.

Trueman made a similar logical connection, “If human nature is not something we are given but something we do or something we determine for ourselves via our free decisions and actions, why should we tie gender identity to an objective physiological basis?”

Gress identified one further reason why the intersection of feminism and communism contributed to the rapid spread of transgender ideology. “Feminism really latched on to the Marxist idea that there’s an oppressor and the oppressed,” she said. But “instead of making it … class warfare like Marx, the feminists were able to leverage that [to classify] male and female. So, men are automatically oppressors; women are the … victims.”

“When the LGBT movement started to get a foothold,” Gress continued, “they started articulating their cause as that of victimhood, along the same way that women had. … That’s how we got to the LGBT [movement] being this sort of privileged minority.”

Thus, the current debate over sex-specific restrooms in the U.S. Capitol stems from feminism’s longstanding rejection of gender and family norms, filtered through a Marxist worldview of group oppression.

Yet, despite its disruptive cultural influence, neither feminist nor transgender philosophy can rewrite God’s created order: male and female, lovingly united in family units that produce and raise offspring. This order has stood from the beginning of creation, and it has withstood every attempt to overthrow it.

There is evidence of this even in the U.S. Capitol bathroom debate. After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) decided that single-sex facilities were reserved for members of that biological sex, trans-identifying Rep.-elect Sarah McBride (D-Del.) indicated he would comply, stating, “The party that was focused on trans people, was the Republican party. … I did not run on my identity.”

McBride’s reaction tacitly admits the truth: he is still a male. A real woman would react quite differently. If a real woman were ordered to use the men’s restroom in her workplace for the next two years, she would rightly feel offended, outraged, bullied, perhaps even frightened. Such a decision would negatively affect her personal safety and her reputation, not to mention singling her out from other women. She would protest such a decision vigorously, enlist others to help plead her cause, and even bring a discrimination lawsuit if necessary.

McBride did none of those things. He accepted Johnson’s decision because, notwithstanding decades of dominance by feminist and Marxist thought, notwithstanding our culture’s profound repudiation of Christian values, notwithstanding the incredible technological feats of modern science, our society has failed to scratch out God’s indelible creation order, etched into our very DNA, as male and female.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.