Not Hampstead or Pacific Heights
Suzanne Moore on International Women’s Day:
As a feminist, though, I would indeed like the world to be a better place for women – and by the world, I don’t mean north London or a campus in California; I mean Herat, Tigray, Guatemala. For all the arguments about equality for women amount to nothing if we lose an international perspective. Feminism is global, or it is simply an exercise in consumer power dressed up as politics. That is exactly what happened to Western feminism in the 1990s, when everything from brunching to boob jobs was “empowering”.
Seriously. You don’t see women in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia or Nigeria running around exclaiming about their trans sisters – they have other stuff to worry about. One (but only one) of the enraging things about the trans ideology is the luxury of it, the optionality, the choosy-choiceness, the expensive plush shiny consumerism of it.
The pandemic worsened every existing inequality, but before Covid women’s rights were already in reverse. Women are in lower paid jobs often because of trying to juggle kids and work. Childcare costs are prohibitive. Women were more likely to be furloughed and took on the lion’s share of home-schooling. The gender pay gap has increased, from 14.9 per cent in 2020 to 15.4 per cent.
In short, without a continual fight, no headway is made. The biggest surprise to me, though, has been that the backlash against feminism has come not from the Right, but from the Left. The whole inflated debate around trans issues is so often not about the small number of people who are gender dysphoric, and need care and dignity; it is about the rights of women to keep what we already have. It has produced an avalanche of repulsive misogyny.
Much of which issues from women, like Laurie Penny for instance.
Forgive me, then, if I do not celebrate International Women’s Day when so many political parties are kowtowing to this woman-hating religion. Forgive me if I think “non-binary” is just another way of creating a new binary, and saying “I am special” and you are not in my tribe. Forgive me if I think that, in so much of the virtue-signalling we will witness today, it will likely be that there is little “international” about any of this.
Yes, it’s trans international.
I think that the trans-type men who wish they could be women would say that those Afghans etc need to give their priorities a reset, to bring then more into line with those of the western trans-type men who wish they could be women.
I think that the trans-type men who wish they could be women would recommend that anyone so enraged should just lie back and enjoy the joyful joy so abundant amongst the trans-type men who wish they could be women, wherever they can find such; and particularly when teenagers swallow puberty blockers or have their genitalia hacked off by surgeons, amateurs or whoever eager for the business, and/or to set up shop in it..
Omar,
In my experience, I think you have it almost exactly backward; the trans-type men and their many vanguard bullies seem to honestly believe that, but for the imperial depredations of the perfidious West, the enlightened natives of Afghanistan and Africa and the Americas would have remained kaleidoscope paradises of racial and gender diversity. It was evil xtian ypipo who imposed the gender binary and the racial class hierarchy upon everyone.
This line of reasoning sets white people and Christians as the main characters of history, and all these primarily-white activists are taking up the mantle of a 21st-century White Man’s Burden. We’ll see how that works out for them.
DD:
Time, in its majestic fullness, will tell.