Excellent piece and I completely agree. However, I wish somebody would tackle the inconvenient truth that it was third-wave academic feminists who started the slippery slope that led to these ridiculous stories. It was feminists who promoted the pseudoscientific idea of "gender" starting in the 70s. It was feminists who sought to deconstruct the traditional roles and behaviors of the sexes. It was feminists who completely fell for post-modernist attacks on science. It was feminists/lesbians who were a key part of the rise of Queer Theory. And most feminists today still support the inclusion of the T in LGBT. I fully support the minority of feminists ("TERFS") who are pushing back on this trans nonsense, but I hope they recognize their role in its origin.
there's another inconvenient truth about women: you can be a doctor, lawyer, PhD in an advanced career of your choice, it matters not. women are tribally, historically, genetically programmed to see other women as rivals for access to men's resources and protection. sure, read all the treacle you can stomach about the emotional depth of women's friendships, blah, blah, blah. strip away all the trappings of contemporary society and you basically have two broads who will slit each other's throats over a man.
men will take it out back, work through their aggressions and meet at the bar. women aren't called "catty" for nothing.
i read a book many years ago about the class stratifications of women on antebellum plantations. did i perhaps expect that the lady of the manor would be kinder to the slaves then the men folk? wrong! they took out their lowly status on those of even lower status. the men were just men; the women went out of their way to be bitchy.
i had an employee once who's baby sitter crapped out on her. she called the wife of the supervisor- a woman who had a live in au par- and asked if for one day, she could pay extra to add her child into the mix so that she could get to work on time. if she was expecting some sympathetic sisterhood, she was barking up the wrong tree. the message was very clear- if you had only been clever enough to land an alpha male, you wouldn't have to go begging for childcare and i'm not sharing my goodies with you!
she called me in tears and i told her to bring her child into work and that we would all look after him. the following year, i surreptitiously put someone on the payroll just to watch the child.
the author of this fine (although disturbing) essay came as close as anyone i've ever read to saying out loud why feminism fails, why women don't support other women. they are looking out for numero uno and if that means sucking up to a man who wears inflatable tits to shop class, sacrificing other women and even children, so be it. medea killed her own children to get back at their father who had wronged her. not all that much has changed since the greeks.
i realize i was generalizing a great deal but that's my experience as a woman business owner who employed mainly women and homosexual men (theater costumes, very few straight men had any interest).
recently a friend, who is a high powered business coach and even does secret stuff for NATO, was talking about how he had worked in all the places he advised to bring up women's salaries to parity with men's and that he never got any resistance from male CEOs but always from women CEOs or women in HR departments. he said they fought to keep their power by keeping other women down. i wasn't surprised.
That's a rather sad comment on human nature, but quite possibly accurate. I would add that differences in pay have many factors behind them. For example, the Globe & Mail recently reported that female physicians are paid 34% less than male peers, even in fields where women dominate numerically. What they did not add that was that Ontario pays physicians fee-for-service. That means the female docs are 34% less productive, or that they do the same work but forget to bill for a third of it! It's true they experience slower career progression because of time taken for pregnancy and child rearing, but while that might mean a lower salary if they were paid that way, it won't make any difference in a fee-for-service system. The fact of the matter will be that they choose to work in a different, and probably more sensible way, by having a better balance between work and the rest of their lives. Having been a male physician working solo in a rural area with 24/7 responsibility and unable to even leave the village (before cell phones I couldn't even leave the telephone in the house!) I fully support such a sensible approach. But will the Globe tell you any of that? Nope, it's all a male conspiracy to keep the women down!
Not just exhausting, but they didn't think it through in another way. In terms of productivity, the "investigation" shows that three male physicians do the work of four female docs. In terms of bang for buck, should that be applied to medical school admissions? Currently, we have slightly more female students than male, but for the sake of argument, let's assume they are 50:50. That means in a class of 100 students, 66% of the work would be done by the 50 male physicians that have graduated, and 33% by the female graduates. Given the 2:3 ratio of productivity, a hypothetical class of 100% male students would outperform a 50:50 class by 11%. Yes, that means we could have the work done by our docs increased by more than a tenth for no extra financial cost in terms of medical school seats. That might help to get rid of our waiting lists, although it is certainly not the main reason why we have those lists despite pouring so much money into the system.
Would I suggest that we do it? Absolutely not! It is a matter of fairness—I strongly prefer to live in a society where we can all perform whatever career of which we are capable. Furthermore, female docs have an approach to medicine that is different and valuable, which should not be lost. I came close to dying from leukemia eight years ago, and a lovely lady fixed me up. When I relapsed, a very competent immigrant doc saved me again. I have good reason to appreciate the variety among my colleagues (and I'm an immigrant doc too!) I just wish the Globe would refrain from trying to make a jejune, sophomoric point with statistics that don't even begin to back up their agenda. Especially when the data actually harm the agenda they have in mind.
This piece does a disservice to the MANY women who are fighting gender ideology, individually and through organizations such as WoLF, WDI, Lesbians United. You write as if they do not exist.
I think you are harming your cause by using "feminist" to mean only those who agree with gender ideology. There are plenty of gender-critical women who call themselves feminists, and indeed the "F" in TERF stands for feminist! Your choice of language excludes them, to no good purpose that I can see. I suggest using terms like "gender ideologues" or "trans activists" to mean the group you are (rightly) calling out.
"You don't have to be FOR women and AGAINST men to know what an equitable society looks like." That's a powerfully true statement. In fact, it was the Marxist Oppressor vs. Oppressed framing of human relationships that long ago turned me off the radfem worldview. I think it's corrosive both to individual connections and societal cohesion to filter all human interaction through the lens of power dynamics. Trans ideology, with its aim of erasing all norms by transgressing all boundaries, has co-opted the Marxist oppression narrative and thus brought along every person unwilling to let go of that toxic critique. It's the ultimate power move: convincing do-gooders that justice will prevail by redefining—and so perpetuating—injustice.
It is maddening that women keep throwing women under the bus. Reminds me of the UN study from a few years ago that showed that something like 90% of humans(including women) are biased against women. People crazy.
Great piece, thank you. We seem to have somehow smoothly transitioned from a commonly defined (though often hotly contested) conception of what constituted - "material reality" - through subsequent periods like - post-modern reality - to completely Orwellian reality - through to what we might call "surrealist-reality" - and now into the uncharted waters of our current - "woke-post-surrealist-reality." I'm not sure there are any further levels left for us to traverse in this bat-shit crazy descent into societal madness?? But hey, it's not like I haven't been wrong before about this stuff.
I find it rather frightening that my five year old grandson has no problem explaining - "what a woman is" - yet I've watched many politicians and PhD academics hem and haw and somehow not be able to quite come up with an answer to what appears to now be considered in woke circles - "a trick question." Go figure.
"Have feminist leaders denounced these teachers’ and students’ forced compliance with misogyny? No. But feminists failing to stand up for women being treated badly is an old story."
WRONG! Let's start with the basic fact that 'feminists' aren't one large block of female human beings. Feminism does not and can not possibly represent ALL women in ALL countries, ALL faiths, ALL cultures. Painting ALL feminists as having turned their backs on women in general and the women who are victimized by gender ideology specifically is grossly incorrect and unfair.
Please do your research. There are HUNDREDS of organizations globally who are fighting against insurmountable odds fighting battles on every front. The organization WOLF - https://womensliberationfront.org/ is suing governments in the US for many violations against women's rights. Standing for Women in the UK is another organization fighting to protect women's rights against gender ideology: https://www.standingforwomen.com/. The organization Fair Play for Women in the UK is fighting against gender ideology in women's sports: https://fairplayforwomen.com/. Collective Shout in Australia fighting against porn and sex trafficking: https://www.collectiveshout.org/. These are just a few feminist/women's organizations who ARE standing up for women.
So, PLEASE, don't add to the denigration of feminists as a whole. It's incredibly disheartening and makes feminist struggles so much harder - by that I mean radical feminism, not the current version of feminism that is simply serving up patriarchy with a slice of internalized misogyny.
Why not uplift and share the work of these and MANY more organizations of feminists who ARE doing this critical work despite doxxing censorship, propaganda, loss of jobs and careers, not to mention assaults and threats of rape, death. Even one of the most powerful women in the world isn't safe. J.K. Rowling has put her life, health, family and wealth at risk for over 5 years defending and protecting women in the face of gender extremists. How readily would you be speaking out if you were faced with these kinds of threats every day: https://terfisaslur.com/. A very small collection of the kind of threats made to women in various institutions. Trans ideology is really just another insidious form of patriarchy that exploits women's natural inclination to be kind and inclusive and weaponizes it against us. It is driven by predatory capitalism which seeks to turn everyone and everything into a commodity and young people are now being served up as customers for life once they go down the road to transitioning: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/01/the-billionaires-behind-the-lgbt-movement. The pharma billionaires are having a field day and laughing all the way to the bank between trans ideology and covid. They're all tied in together as a way to destroy our families and relationships.
I, myself, have experienced just how horrific is the abuse inflicted on women who DO speak up. I have been kicked off Twitter, Facebook, Medium simply for stating that we should offer therapy to young people considering becoming trans instead of surgery and drugs. I lost my best friend who got caught up in trans cult and had her breasts removed. She lost her children, husband beautiful home largely because she was raised by parents who repeatedly told her they wished she was born a boy.
Have compassion for ALL women who are doing their best in a culture that dismisses, ridicules and silences women's concerns. Hold those women AND men - in particular the people profiting from the transition process - accountable who are actively doing harm, of course, but just like blaming all women for their rapes is extremely misogynist and inappropriate, blaming feminists for trans ideology reaching this point of extreme behaviour because we aren't standing up enough, ignores the 10's of thousands of women/feminists who are struggling to be heard at all.
It seems there are far more women joining trans mania in making trans people their new "nazi" like target. Taking ridiculous individual stories and amplifying them to represent feminism when they do not. Feminists support the women in Iran. They don't endorse misogyny like the giant breasts. They also don't manipulate such stories to undermine feminism or the rights of another group of people. Maybe you need to find a better way to spend your time.
I've read Phyllis Chesler's book and I still don't agree with your simplistic summary of feminism. Women are traumatized in this culture. (As are men, for that matter.) What we're seeing in the fracturing of the feminist movement is a manifestation of that. Just as we see a fracturing of the civil rights movement with critical race theory. Do not think for one minute that feminists/feminism alone gave rise to gender theory. This podcast details just how far back gender theory along with transhumanism go: Listen to The Ugly Truth of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Transhumanism and Canadian History by Matthew Ehret on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/G9ZQ3 HINT: It has nothing to do with feminism.
Women make up half of humanity. A portion of this half of humanity began a movement to free women from rigid gender stereotypes and fought to give them a voice, in politics, in law, in the public square. Prior to the women's suffrage movement, women's lives, due to their reproductive capacity, were a hellscape of endless pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths, reproductive issues. Then, there was the raising of children, with the fathers often abandoning them and the destitution of old age where the vast majority of women had little to no property to care for themselves. The educational institutions prevented women from getting an education which continues to happen. These were the issues that the feminist movement fought over and are still fighting over today. We just never hear about it.
What we're seeing now is not feminism. It is a bastardized version of feminism - often called third wave feminism that is unrecognizable to me as a 63 year old woman. The porn industry combined with predatory capitalism reprioritized men's sexual demands and packaged it to young women as a new kind of freedom. Women have been blind-sided by the aggressive campaign to twist women's right to sexual freedom as obligatory, rather than true freedom.
So, I object to your framing ALL feminists and feminism in general as absent and ineffectual. As stated in my original post, there are, around the world millions of radical feminists who are pushing back against the narrative, despite people who constantly deride, dismiss and critique their efforts. They are singularly courageous, fierce and relentless in their defense of women's rights. Feminists are not this blob of feckless, useless, ditzy women often represented in the media. Of course, they exist. However, the radical feminists who continue to do difficult, thankless work are seldom heard because of extreme censorship, but they're fighting the good fight with dignity and persistence in spite of the ignorance of their efforts.
The only feminists allowed to be on mainstream media are the ones that serve patriarchy - the compliant, sex-obsessed, so-called 'Marxist' category of feminists, perpetual victims that everyone loves to hate. Here's the thing: radical feminists also fight for them too. Their indoctrination into internalized misogyny is an unfortunate byproduct of so much of our culture's dysfunction. It's not just feminism that has been corrupted.
Andrea Dworkin's quote comes to mind: "Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, Including all the women you don't like. Including all the women you don't want to be around, Including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are."
I agree with the criticism you are receiving as far as ignoring all the good work gender critical feminists are doing. That being said, what often makes a great article is the discussion it opens up. I 've gotten a lot out of reading the comments and your responses to them. I believe Feminism
is a work in progress and I'm proud to be part of it even when it gets messy.
Oddly, when I discovered my then husband's cross-dressing life and became a single mom, the "feminists" in my circles often recommended "taking my sexuality back" through a more casual attitude towards dating and affairs. I always responded that didn't sound liberating, actually.
It takes too much effort for me to get angry with misguided, illogical brainwash. For self-preservation, I have to put it into the drawer in my mind and close it, only speak in these columns. Looking back into my teaching years, I did help the girls to speak their minds, to be assertive.
Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)
My dear Barbara, thank you. If you wish to help peak others by recommending my book, you can add to the the goodreads.com reviews of it. I hope you are able to grow in a window box or a container on the stoop, for the satisfaction of planting. I appreciate the connections to antiquity which Judaism brings me and I do not wish for you to be angry about it. The most important message I want to promote in my writing is that we can endure great hardship and still love life.
One of the reasons why women and feminists (radfems) are so shocked at the present state of affairs is that this is the first time in their lifespans that public policy has gone against them. They have now been forced to let other people ahead of the in the queue. That doesn't feel good, does it? (Says the heterosexual white male) Previously women's prerogatives were advanced massively, of course much of this was long overdue and was deserved. However their representatives, the feminist movement bought into ideological dogmas like intersectionality, multiculturalism, gender ideology which require women to cede their interests to other, more favoured "victim classes". Their own purported protectors have sold them out.
Now you know how the working class feels toward the left who sold them down the river to globalism and mass immigration. Please don't mistake my comment as bitter revanchism - I strongly support women's fightback against gender ideology and all other "post equality" movements. Like many other commenters I agree that feminists were happy to take advantage of these movements when they gained, and are only aghast after they started losing. That is a finger of accusation to them - not women in general.
Half the population have a right to agitate for their interest. I hope the feminist movement can reform itself from this disaster. A future where it is based around furthering of women's objective interest rather than slavishly following ideological dogmas handed down from their high priestesses like Butler.
Sorry that you’re stuck with us non-ideologues. ;)
Perhaps we provide a good example for trans activists that self identifying is not a sufficient substitute for good methodology nor good arguments.
Regarding your very good article it’s quite an astute observation that Kayla Lemieux is damaging to the great progress of first wave feminism and he might be some kind of provocateur. It’s certainly hard to take his gender expression seriously as some sort of authentic self-expression. Especially with the dangers of large prosthetic breasts around power tools. A snag can easily lead to lost fingers. Unfortunately the left is so gripped by fear of being called transphobic that even common sense is pushed aside.
For what it's worth there is a story by an anonymous online poster that Kayla Lemieux (the supposed trans-identifying male industrial arts teacher with the giant prosthetic breasts) is trolling the school. The author does suggest this as a possibility in the above essay.
This is the post in quotes:
'This dude is gaming the system. An anon here yesterday was in this dude’s class. This teacher was almost fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ last year, as well as not embracing woke culture. He’d drop red pills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are. The school board hates him.
He’s now upping the ante to exploit the very clown world the school and society itself created. His long game is most likely to get fired, and then sue for discrimination. There is no other explanation. No better way to troll clown world than to become an over-the-top caricature of a woman."
But I agree with the author, on it's face whether a troll act or not, this is stereotyping at it's worst. The school administration is being shown for what they are - shallow virtue signalers beholden to an ideology/religion that is demeaning & misogynistic to actual women. They're pandering to a man playing out a fetish caricature of a woman in his classroom and it's gross.
I'm seeing an obvious double-standard here. Would a female teacher get away with coming to school with her nipples poking out like that? Of course not. There are expectations of appropriate professional dress for teachers, just as there are codes (or uniforms!) for the pupils. If this "industrial arts" (we called it metalwork) teacher wants to be treated as a woman, (s)he should expect to be taken aside by a female colleague and told off for making an inappropriate dress choice. Just as I would be if I chose to wear a pair of trousers to work with a non-functioning fly.
I'm very glad Barbara Kay made the connection between gender censors and the Islamophobia racket. Yes these are both massive syndicates of woke word police that will shut down speech under the banner of ----phobia and they both hurt women even though the purport to be feminist. There are academic circles, corporate bureaucracies and plenty of powerful NGOs that are all controlled by the intersectional activists that bully everyone with the threats of unemployment/termination, expulsion, deplatforming, libel, social ostracism etc. I don't anticipate these movements can be countered without massive social rejection of the narratives. It is hard to see that happening from "within" rather it will take conservative countermovements that purge the woke from positions of power.
I agree with most of what you are saying until you decided to claim it was misogyny. Trans people that are born men and now claim to be women are allowed much more leeway because the mainstream sees them as females. So if anything is driving this it is toxic Misandry by teachers and staff in schools that are 95% female.
NOBODY sees trans-identifying men as women... Certainly not the mainstream! The reason they receive preposterous degrees of leeway is due to everyone being afraid of being called taboo-names (xyz-phobe), and belonging to a "protected species" minority group. They have a get out of jail card to do anything they want under the current wokeist regime.
Damn I wish that were so. Unfortunately the mainstream of society HAS bought into the ridiculous notion that someone can change sex. They are supporting the activists trying to claim men can be pregnant and that trans should be able to compete in sport and use toilets belonging to the other sex. Why do you think there is so much cancel culture and media being diversified if the mainstream has not bought into it?
"Do you believe TWAW?" is the wrong question to ask if you really want to know what a person truly believes. A more revealing question would be "Would you have sex with a transwoman?". That is when someone's true feelings come out.
The reason there is so much cancel culture and aggressive suppression is PRECISELY because nobody believes it - even the proponents do not - that is why the need to tamp down their disbelief with outward performances of zealous faith. They are "protesting too much" to borrow from the Bard. They are engaging in "performative belief". It is only with mass coercion that a blatant falsehood can remain standing, in fact this fervour actually proves the base claims are bogus.
Because it is the very same leftist female educators that are normalizing and defending the trans nonsense in the first place.
And yes unfortunately the world has chased away most of the male teachers. Women being the mainstream in teaching is a very new thing. And a VERY BAD thing. When I was at school in the 70s and 80s it was about 50/50. Now men are so scared of being accused of inappropriate behaviour against students that education has become a no go for them. This means that we are feminizing our boys because they are not being taught by men and only being taught by women. How can you not think this is a problem? It has directly contributed to the trans issues we are seeing today. The connection is undeniable.
Excellent piece and I completely agree. However, I wish somebody would tackle the inconvenient truth that it was third-wave academic feminists who started the slippery slope that led to these ridiculous stories. It was feminists who promoted the pseudoscientific idea of "gender" starting in the 70s. It was feminists who sought to deconstruct the traditional roles and behaviors of the sexes. It was feminists who completely fell for post-modernist attacks on science. It was feminists/lesbians who were a key part of the rise of Queer Theory. And most feminists today still support the inclusion of the T in LGBT. I fully support the minority of feminists ("TERFS") who are pushing back on this trans nonsense, but I hope they recognize their role in its origin.
there's another inconvenient truth about women: you can be a doctor, lawyer, PhD in an advanced career of your choice, it matters not. women are tribally, historically, genetically programmed to see other women as rivals for access to men's resources and protection. sure, read all the treacle you can stomach about the emotional depth of women's friendships, blah, blah, blah. strip away all the trappings of contemporary society and you basically have two broads who will slit each other's throats over a man.
men will take it out back, work through their aggressions and meet at the bar. women aren't called "catty" for nothing.
i read a book many years ago about the class stratifications of women on antebellum plantations. did i perhaps expect that the lady of the manor would be kinder to the slaves then the men folk? wrong! they took out their lowly status on those of even lower status. the men were just men; the women went out of their way to be bitchy.
i had an employee once who's baby sitter crapped out on her. she called the wife of the supervisor- a woman who had a live in au par- and asked if for one day, she could pay extra to add her child into the mix so that she could get to work on time. if she was expecting some sympathetic sisterhood, she was barking up the wrong tree. the message was very clear- if you had only been clever enough to land an alpha male, you wouldn't have to go begging for childcare and i'm not sharing my goodies with you!
she called me in tears and i told her to bring her child into work and that we would all look after him. the following year, i surreptitiously put someone on the payroll just to watch the child.
the author of this fine (although disturbing) essay came as close as anyone i've ever read to saying out loud why feminism fails, why women don't support other women. they are looking out for numero uno and if that means sucking up to a man who wears inflatable tits to shop class, sacrificing other women and even children, so be it. medea killed her own children to get back at their father who had wronged her. not all that much has changed since the greeks.
i realize i was generalizing a great deal but that's my experience as a woman business owner who employed mainly women and homosexual men (theater costumes, very few straight men had any interest).
recently a friend, who is a high powered business coach and even does secret stuff for NATO, was talking about how he had worked in all the places he advised to bring up women's salaries to parity with men's and that he never got any resistance from male CEOs but always from women CEOs or women in HR departments. he said they fought to keep their power by keeping other women down. i wasn't surprised.
That's a rather sad comment on human nature, but quite possibly accurate. I would add that differences in pay have many factors behind them. For example, the Globe & Mail recently reported that female physicians are paid 34% less than male peers, even in fields where women dominate numerically. What they did not add that was that Ontario pays physicians fee-for-service. That means the female docs are 34% less productive, or that they do the same work but forget to bill for a third of it! It's true they experience slower career progression because of time taken for pregnancy and child rearing, but while that might mean a lower salary if they were paid that way, it won't make any difference in a fee-for-service system. The fact of the matter will be that they choose to work in a different, and probably more sensible way, by having a better balance between work and the rest of their lives. Having been a male physician working solo in a rural area with 24/7 responsibility and unable to even leave the village (before cell phones I couldn't even leave the telephone in the house!) I fully support such a sensible approach. But will the Globe tell you any of that? Nope, it's all a male conspiracy to keep the women down!
Not just exhausting, but they didn't think it through in another way. In terms of productivity, the "investigation" shows that three male physicians do the work of four female docs. In terms of bang for buck, should that be applied to medical school admissions? Currently, we have slightly more female students than male, but for the sake of argument, let's assume they are 50:50. That means in a class of 100 students, 66% of the work would be done by the 50 male physicians that have graduated, and 33% by the female graduates. Given the 2:3 ratio of productivity, a hypothetical class of 100% male students would outperform a 50:50 class by 11%. Yes, that means we could have the work done by our docs increased by more than a tenth for no extra financial cost in terms of medical school seats. That might help to get rid of our waiting lists, although it is certainly not the main reason why we have those lists despite pouring so much money into the system.
Would I suggest that we do it? Absolutely not! It is a matter of fairness—I strongly prefer to live in a society where we can all perform whatever career of which we are capable. Furthermore, female docs have an approach to medicine that is different and valuable, which should not be lost. I came close to dying from leukemia eight years ago, and a lovely lady fixed me up. When I relapsed, a very competent immigrant doc saved me again. I have good reason to appreciate the variety among my colleagues (and I'm an immigrant doc too!) I just wish the Globe would refrain from trying to make a jejune, sophomoric point with statistics that don't even begin to back up their agenda. Especially when the data actually harm the agenda they have in mind.
This piece does a disservice to the MANY women who are fighting gender ideology, individually and through organizations such as WoLF, WDI, Lesbians United. You write as if they do not exist.
Exactly! See my comment above.
I think you are harming your cause by using "feminist" to mean only those who agree with gender ideology. There are plenty of gender-critical women who call themselves feminists, and indeed the "F" in TERF stands for feminist! Your choice of language excludes them, to no good purpose that I can see. I suggest using terms like "gender ideologues" or "trans activists" to mean the group you are (rightly) calling out.
"You don't have to be FOR women and AGAINST men to know what an equitable society looks like." That's a powerfully true statement. In fact, it was the Marxist Oppressor vs. Oppressed framing of human relationships that long ago turned me off the radfem worldview. I think it's corrosive both to individual connections and societal cohesion to filter all human interaction through the lens of power dynamics. Trans ideology, with its aim of erasing all norms by transgressing all boundaries, has co-opted the Marxist oppression narrative and thus brought along every person unwilling to let go of that toxic critique. It's the ultimate power move: convincing do-gooders that justice will prevail by redefining—and so perpetuating—injustice.
Right on Barbara! So thankful for your voice!
It is maddening that women keep throwing women under the bus. Reminds me of the UN study from a few years ago that showed that something like 90% of humans(including women) are biased against women. People crazy.
Great piece, thank you. We seem to have somehow smoothly transitioned from a commonly defined (though often hotly contested) conception of what constituted - "material reality" - through subsequent periods like - post-modern reality - to completely Orwellian reality - through to what we might call "surrealist-reality" - and now into the uncharted waters of our current - "woke-post-surrealist-reality." I'm not sure there are any further levels left for us to traverse in this bat-shit crazy descent into societal madness?? But hey, it's not like I haven't been wrong before about this stuff.
I find it rather frightening that my five year old grandson has no problem explaining - "what a woman is" - yet I've watched many politicians and PhD academics hem and haw and somehow not be able to quite come up with an answer to what appears to now be considered in woke circles - "a trick question." Go figure.
"Have feminist leaders denounced these teachers’ and students’ forced compliance with misogyny? No. But feminists failing to stand up for women being treated badly is an old story."
WRONG! Let's start with the basic fact that 'feminists' aren't one large block of female human beings. Feminism does not and can not possibly represent ALL women in ALL countries, ALL faiths, ALL cultures. Painting ALL feminists as having turned their backs on women in general and the women who are victimized by gender ideology specifically is grossly incorrect and unfair.
Please do your research. There are HUNDREDS of organizations globally who are fighting against insurmountable odds fighting battles on every front. The organization WOLF - https://womensliberationfront.org/ is suing governments in the US for many violations against women's rights. Standing for Women in the UK is another organization fighting to protect women's rights against gender ideology: https://www.standingforwomen.com/. The organization Fair Play for Women in the UK is fighting against gender ideology in women's sports: https://fairplayforwomen.com/. Collective Shout in Australia fighting against porn and sex trafficking: https://www.collectiveshout.org/. These are just a few feminist/women's organizations who ARE standing up for women.
So, PLEASE, don't add to the denigration of feminists as a whole. It's incredibly disheartening and makes feminist struggles so much harder - by that I mean radical feminism, not the current version of feminism that is simply serving up patriarchy with a slice of internalized misogyny.
Why not uplift and share the work of these and MANY more organizations of feminists who ARE doing this critical work despite doxxing censorship, propaganda, loss of jobs and careers, not to mention assaults and threats of rape, death. Even one of the most powerful women in the world isn't safe. J.K. Rowling has put her life, health, family and wealth at risk for over 5 years defending and protecting women in the face of gender extremists. How readily would you be speaking out if you were faced with these kinds of threats every day: https://terfisaslur.com/. A very small collection of the kind of threats made to women in various institutions. Trans ideology is really just another insidious form of patriarchy that exploits women's natural inclination to be kind and inclusive and weaponizes it against us. It is driven by predatory capitalism which seeks to turn everyone and everything into a commodity and young people are now being served up as customers for life once they go down the road to transitioning: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/01/the-billionaires-behind-the-lgbt-movement. The pharma billionaires are having a field day and laughing all the way to the bank between trans ideology and covid. They're all tied in together as a way to destroy our families and relationships.
I, myself, have experienced just how horrific is the abuse inflicted on women who DO speak up. I have been kicked off Twitter, Facebook, Medium simply for stating that we should offer therapy to young people considering becoming trans instead of surgery and drugs. I lost my best friend who got caught up in trans cult and had her breasts removed. She lost her children, husband beautiful home largely because she was raised by parents who repeatedly told her they wished she was born a boy.
Have compassion for ALL women who are doing their best in a culture that dismisses, ridicules and silences women's concerns. Hold those women AND men - in particular the people profiting from the transition process - accountable who are actively doing harm, of course, but just like blaming all women for their rapes is extremely misogynist and inappropriate, blaming feminists for trans ideology reaching this point of extreme behaviour because we aren't standing up enough, ignores the 10's of thousands of women/feminists who are struggling to be heard at all.
It seems there are far more women joining trans mania in making trans people their new "nazi" like target. Taking ridiculous individual stories and amplifying them to represent feminism when they do not. Feminists support the women in Iran. They don't endorse misogyny like the giant breasts. They also don't manipulate such stories to undermine feminism or the rights of another group of people. Maybe you need to find a better way to spend your time.
I've read Phyllis Chesler's book and I still don't agree with your simplistic summary of feminism. Women are traumatized in this culture. (As are men, for that matter.) What we're seeing in the fracturing of the feminist movement is a manifestation of that. Just as we see a fracturing of the civil rights movement with critical race theory. Do not think for one minute that feminists/feminism alone gave rise to gender theory. This podcast details just how far back gender theory along with transhumanism go: Listen to The Ugly Truth of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Transhumanism and Canadian History by Matthew Ehret on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/G9ZQ3 HINT: It has nothing to do with feminism.
Women make up half of humanity. A portion of this half of humanity began a movement to free women from rigid gender stereotypes and fought to give them a voice, in politics, in law, in the public square. Prior to the women's suffrage movement, women's lives, due to their reproductive capacity, were a hellscape of endless pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths, reproductive issues. Then, there was the raising of children, with the fathers often abandoning them and the destitution of old age where the vast majority of women had little to no property to care for themselves. The educational institutions prevented women from getting an education which continues to happen. These were the issues that the feminist movement fought over and are still fighting over today. We just never hear about it.
What we're seeing now is not feminism. It is a bastardized version of feminism - often called third wave feminism that is unrecognizable to me as a 63 year old woman. The porn industry combined with predatory capitalism reprioritized men's sexual demands and packaged it to young women as a new kind of freedom. Women have been blind-sided by the aggressive campaign to twist women's right to sexual freedom as obligatory, rather than true freedom.
So, I object to your framing ALL feminists and feminism in general as absent and ineffectual. As stated in my original post, there are, around the world millions of radical feminists who are pushing back against the narrative, despite people who constantly deride, dismiss and critique their efforts. They are singularly courageous, fierce and relentless in their defense of women's rights. Feminists are not this blob of feckless, useless, ditzy women often represented in the media. Of course, they exist. However, the radical feminists who continue to do difficult, thankless work are seldom heard because of extreme censorship, but they're fighting the good fight with dignity and persistence in spite of the ignorance of their efforts.
The only feminists allowed to be on mainstream media are the ones that serve patriarchy - the compliant, sex-obsessed, so-called 'Marxist' category of feminists, perpetual victims that everyone loves to hate. Here's the thing: radical feminists also fight for them too. Their indoctrination into internalized misogyny is an unfortunate byproduct of so much of our culture's dysfunction. It's not just feminism that has been corrupted.
Andrea Dworkin's quote comes to mind: "Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy on behalf of women as a class, Including all the women you don't like. Including all the women you don't want to be around, Including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are."
I agree with the criticism you are receiving as far as ignoring all the good work gender critical feminists are doing. That being said, what often makes a great article is the discussion it opens up. I 've gotten a lot out of reading the comments and your responses to them. I believe Feminism
is a work in progress and I'm proud to be part of it even when it gets messy.
Oddly, when I discovered my then husband's cross-dressing life and became a single mom, the "feminists" in my circles often recommended "taking my sexuality back" through a more casual attitude towards dating and affairs. I always responded that didn't sound liberating, actually.
It takes too much effort for me to get angry with misguided, illogical brainwash. For self-preservation, I have to put it into the drawer in my mind and close it, only speak in these columns. Looking back into my teaching years, I did help the girls to speak their minds, to be assertive.
Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)
uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com (healing somatic movements recently highlighted)
My dear Barbara, thank you. If you wish to help peak others by recommending my book, you can add to the the goodreads.com reviews of it. I hope you are able to grow in a window box or a container on the stoop, for the satisfaction of planting. I appreciate the connections to antiquity which Judaism brings me and I do not wish for you to be angry about it. The most important message I want to promote in my writing is that we can endure great hardship and still love life.
Shanah Tovah. Ute
One of the reasons why women and feminists (radfems) are so shocked at the present state of affairs is that this is the first time in their lifespans that public policy has gone against them. They have now been forced to let other people ahead of the in the queue. That doesn't feel good, does it? (Says the heterosexual white male) Previously women's prerogatives were advanced massively, of course much of this was long overdue and was deserved. However their representatives, the feminist movement bought into ideological dogmas like intersectionality, multiculturalism, gender ideology which require women to cede their interests to other, more favoured "victim classes". Their own purported protectors have sold them out.
Now you know how the working class feels toward the left who sold them down the river to globalism and mass immigration. Please don't mistake my comment as bitter revanchism - I strongly support women's fightback against gender ideology and all other "post equality" movements. Like many other commenters I agree that feminists were happy to take advantage of these movements when they gained, and are only aghast after they started losing. That is a finger of accusation to them - not women in general.
Half the population have a right to agitate for their interest. I hope the feminist movement can reform itself from this disaster. A future where it is based around furthering of women's objective interest rather than slavishly following ideological dogmas handed down from their high priestesses like Butler.
Sorry that you’re stuck with us non-ideologues. ;)
Perhaps we provide a good example for trans activists that self identifying is not a sufficient substitute for good methodology nor good arguments.
Regarding your very good article it’s quite an astute observation that Kayla Lemieux is damaging to the great progress of first wave feminism and he might be some kind of provocateur. It’s certainly hard to take his gender expression seriously as some sort of authentic self-expression. Especially with the dangers of large prosthetic breasts around power tools. A snag can easily lead to lost fingers. Unfortunately the left is so gripped by fear of being called transphobic that even common sense is pushed aside.
For what it's worth there is a story by an anonymous online poster that Kayla Lemieux (the supposed trans-identifying male industrial arts teacher with the giant prosthetic breasts) is trolling the school. The author does suggest this as a possibility in the above essay.
This is the post in quotes:
'This dude is gaming the system. An anon here yesterday was in this dude’s class. This teacher was almost fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ last year, as well as not embracing woke culture. He’d drop red pills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are. The school board hates him.
He’s now upping the ante to exploit the very clown world the school and society itself created. His long game is most likely to get fired, and then sue for discrimination. There is no other explanation. No better way to troll clown world than to become an over-the-top caricature of a woman."
But I agree with the author, on it's face whether a troll act or not, this is stereotyping at it's worst. The school administration is being shown for what they are - shallow virtue signalers beholden to an ideology/religion that is demeaning & misogynistic to actual women. They're pandering to a man playing out a fetish caricature of a woman in his classroom and it's gross.
I'm seeing an obvious double-standard here. Would a female teacher get away with coming to school with her nipples poking out like that? Of course not. There are expectations of appropriate professional dress for teachers, just as there are codes (or uniforms!) for the pupils. If this "industrial arts" (we called it metalwork) teacher wants to be treated as a woman, (s)he should expect to be taken aside by a female colleague and told off for making an inappropriate dress choice. Just as I would be if I chose to wear a pair of trousers to work with a non-functioning fly.
I'm very glad Barbara Kay made the connection between gender censors and the Islamophobia racket. Yes these are both massive syndicates of woke word police that will shut down speech under the banner of ----phobia and they both hurt women even though the purport to be feminist. There are academic circles, corporate bureaucracies and plenty of powerful NGOs that are all controlled by the intersectional activists that bully everyone with the threats of unemployment/termination, expulsion, deplatforming, libel, social ostracism etc. I don't anticipate these movements can be countered without massive social rejection of the narratives. It is hard to see that happening from "within" rather it will take conservative countermovements that purge the woke from positions of power.
I agree with most of what you are saying until you decided to claim it was misogyny. Trans people that are born men and now claim to be women are allowed much more leeway because the mainstream sees them as females. So if anything is driving this it is toxic Misandry by teachers and staff in schools that are 95% female.
NOBODY sees trans-identifying men as women... Certainly not the mainstream! The reason they receive preposterous degrees of leeway is due to everyone being afraid of being called taboo-names (xyz-phobe), and belonging to a "protected species" minority group. They have a get out of jail card to do anything they want under the current wokeist regime.
Damn I wish that were so. Unfortunately the mainstream of society HAS bought into the ridiculous notion that someone can change sex. They are supporting the activists trying to claim men can be pregnant and that trans should be able to compete in sport and use toilets belonging to the other sex. Why do you think there is so much cancel culture and media being diversified if the mainstream has not bought into it?
"Do you believe TWAW?" is the wrong question to ask if you really want to know what a person truly believes. A more revealing question would be "Would you have sex with a transwoman?". That is when someone's true feelings come out.
The reason there is so much cancel culture and aggressive suppression is PRECISELY because nobody believes it - even the proponents do not - that is why the need to tamp down their disbelief with outward performances of zealous faith. They are "protesting too much" to borrow from the Bard. They are engaging in "performative belief". It is only with mass coercion that a blatant falsehood can remain standing, in fact this fervour actually proves the base claims are bogus.
Because it is the very same leftist female educators that are normalizing and defending the trans nonsense in the first place.
And yes unfortunately the world has chased away most of the male teachers. Women being the mainstream in teaching is a very new thing. And a VERY BAD thing. When I was at school in the 70s and 80s it was about 50/50. Now men are so scared of being accused of inappropriate behaviour against students that education has become a no go for them. This means that we are feminizing our boys because they are not being taught by men and only being taught by women. How can you not think this is a problem? It has directly contributed to the trans issues we are seeing today. The connection is undeniable.
Women are, generally speaking, not the solidarity sex.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm