The power to shut women up
The NY Times allows Pamela Paul to say the forbidden: the left hates women just as much as the right does.
There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Women’s rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.
But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”
And if you object to the unwieldy terms and the disappearance of women, you are threatened and bullied and excluded up one side and down the other.
Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”
It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.
With a calculated insult. It’s not ideal, is it. Good that the Times has finally allowed a woman to say so.
Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.
And an emphatic reminder that we don’t matter, we’re just women, we’re bitches and cunts and Karens, we’re sluts and whores and slags.
Those on the right who are threatened by women’s equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of women’s issues in the public sphere.
…
If only women’s voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up.
We’re on our own.
I read that this morning, and was quite surprised. The New York Tims has been in the tank for trans so long it’s acquired a nickname.
Let us hope it helps peak a few more.
And wedges the door open for more of the same.
Is that the nickname? New York TiMs? (= Trans-Identified Males)
“The NY Times allows Pamela Paul to say the forbidden: the left hates women just as much as the right does.”
Predicted response: ‘how can we trans activists be anti-woman, when we are the only ones advocating for trans women?’ Probably with a nice helping of ‘suck on girl dick, terfy Karen’ and so on.
#1 Papito
Probably a typo, but I think New York Tims works just as well as New York Trans.
Not a typo, just me being too clever by half yet again.
The Democrats are very worried about the November elections, and have realised a lot of American women don’t actually care what “Teen Vogue” or “Refinery29” think.
Hence the welcome presence of Paul’s thoughtful article.
“…reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes” – Diluting the concept of what a woman is for nefarious purposes. Namely, to include inferior males.
But Twitter doesn’t. Suspended.
Because of that article?????
I saw a screenshot of someone on Twitter asking, roughly, ‘what is the NYT doing printing “biological women” for “cis women”? Don’t they have a style guide?’ Way to miss the point.
A lot here seems to be blamed, unfairly I often believe, on men hating women and supposedly cheering on transwomen knowing full well they’re really men but happy that they’re oppressing women.
So then how do we explain this particular erasure of women? It’s being driven by women (transmen) who don’t want to be called “women”. Some liberal men go along with this, but most of the people really leaning into it are women: Women’s organizations scrubbing their websites of the term “women”, female doctors with “just a reminder that women aren’t the only ones who need menstruation products” tweets, female politicians giving their regards to “birthing persons” on Mothers’ Day.
But it’s not really women. It’s also not men. It’s a subset of progressives virtue-signaling how “accepting” they are. Liberals with minds so open that their brains are falling out.
Skeletor, it is perfectly possible for women to hate women, and it’s possible many, perhaps most, “trans” men do. But that’s not the real point. Most of the hatred against women isn’t being drive by transmen, it’s being driven by transwomen. The transmen only come into it when they have an issue they can’t frame around transwomen, such as erasing women in pregnancy and other women’s issues. Transwomen don’t get pregnant, because they are men. They need transmen as a foil to hate women.
But yes, there is way too much being driven by women, both “trans” men and women. Women being misogynist is an old story, and shouldn’t surprise anyone anymore, but it still does.
Skeletor – how do you explain that it’s women who are erased? That we don’t have these conversations about men’s issues being disguised as people’s issues?
I don’t of course disagree that plenty of women enforce this bullshit. I had women friends doing it to me back in that fun summer of 2015. But the question is not just who is enforcing this but which sex is the one being told to disappear.
It’s futile answering you of course, it’s just another drive-by.
Ophelia@9:
I don’t know but I understand the posting and the banning happened in close proximity.
That would be a whole new step, if they are connected. Twitter gets to control what we say on Twitter, but punishing us for writing articles in major newspapers? That just seems…excessive.
Ah here it is – stumbled on the explanation while reading some tweets of that Ian Leslie fella.
“She wrote saying she was leaving Twitter, closed her account and someone then “squatted” her handle presumably pretending to be her. This person has now been suspended. All very confusing!”
https://twitter.com/kimwillsher1/status/1543691227580727296