How dare women push back
Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan frowns in the direction of Republican Nancy Mace, because of Mace’s failure to pretend that a man who calls himself Sarah McBride is a woman. Women are supposed to embrace everyone! It’s in the paperwork! It comes with the territory! Women are not allowed to disbelieve men who claim to be women, because that’s Not Kind.
I would much rather share a ladies’ room or a locker room with Sarah McBride than with Nancy Mace.
McBride, of course, was just elected to Congress and, in January, will be the highest-ranking elected official in America who is transgender. The 34-year-old comes to the US House of Representatives after serving in the Delaware legislature; before that, she was the national press secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.
And, by the way, to be clear, as Sullivan so carefully isn’t, McBride is a man. He’s one of those men who expects everyone to pretend he’s a woman. He also expects flattery and deference for being trans. He wants to have it both ways, as men who claim to be women always do.
Mace, a member of Congress from South Carolina since 2021, has been on an ugly campaign in recent weeks clearly intended to belittle and marginalize McBride – and to get on TV as much as possible doing so. She has filed a resolution, and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, has given it his nod of approval, that would somehow force trans people to keep out of the congressional bathrooms that reflect their gender identity.
But workplace bathrooms aren’t there to reflect people’s idenninies, they’re there so that people can relieve themselves and clean up while at work.
On Wednesday, McBride reacted with dignity to all the performative insults and abuse. She simply responded that she would follow the rules and that she’s in Congress to represent her Delaware district; I’m sure she’ll eventually find ways to continue her admirable advocacy.
Cool about the dignity, but what about the dignity of the women who bump into him in the congressional bathrooms? Why is his dignity more important than theirs? What is actually so very dignified about pretending to be the sex you’re not?
“As a trans person myself, I’m really worried about where this is headed,” wrote Parker Molloy, who writes incisively about politics and media in her newsletter the Present Age. “I spend each day worrying about whether or not the healthcare that keeps me alive will remain legal, whether I’m going to face new restrictions on where I’m allowed to exist in public, what would happen to me if (god forbid) I wound up in prison for some reason, and whether or not my identity documents like my passport will be retroactively made invalid.”
Interesting. Now think about what women worry about. Think about the new and peculiar worries women have to deal with thanks to the juggernaut of trans ideology.
But he won’t, of course, any more than McBride will. They don’t care. The stars of this movie are the men in lipstick, not the women just trying to get away from them.
Okay, how about sharing a prison cell with the likes of a Karen White, or Barbie Kardashian? Or maybe being strip-searched by a male police officer in lipstick and a skirt? Thanks to empty-headed, useful idiots like you, it’s part of a whole package deal, along with sharing toilet facilities, hospital wars, and boxing rings. Support one and you support them all, because once you throw away the norms, rules, and laws governing women’s single sex spaces to let any man in, you no longer have any grounds upon which to draw a line and say “No”. You’re a fucking journalist; you can’t not know what is happening, the incidents to which I’m referring in my above selection of nightmares are happening now. To women. But women who are not you. But congratulations on preserving your political purity, you smug, self-satisfied asshole.You are a traitor to your sex.
Women don’t have to worry about that, though. Because we know. Women are already dying because of health care, once legal, that has been removed. It is health care that actually saves lives, with evidence to demonstrate the truth of that proposition.
Way too much air space is taken up with the whines of these narcissistic delusional men. There are much more important things than whether a man who believes he is a woman gets to use the women’s room. The answer to that should be a short, sharp no, then move on. Unfortunately, there are too many people who have been captured by this ideology; we have to spend endless hours fighting for our rights, those rights hard won by our mothers, our grandmothers, and in some cases, us, but which we now have to fight all over again, when there are so many, many, many other things that are more important than men who feel bad using the men’s room. These include, but are not limited to, climate change, species extinctions, the huge divide between rich and poor, the need for a good single payer health plan, the need to make sure vaccinations are not curtailed for the amusement of RFK Jr. and DJT, the need to make sure Medicare/Social Security remain intact in the face of Musk’s assault on the government…I could go on…and on…and on…and on. But no…these delusional males must be the center of attention at all times. Nothing else is more important, and if we don’t realize that, we should be willing to stand there and be punched or hit with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire.
Why, yes, I am a tad pissed. How did you ever guess?
Oh do shut up and fuck off. You sound ridiculous. Is someone threatening to yank your IV, or cut your oxygen while you lay helpless in a hospital bed? Are the staff refusing to give you a blood transfusion? Are they going to pull the plug on your life support without your consent? No? Good. You’ll be happy to know that depriving you of these medical procedures and devices that can keep you alive is already against the law! I think it’s called something like “attempted murder” or some such thing. Clarity and truth are effective innoculations against transperbole.
As for what I assume you’re actually catastrophising about, “Gender affirming care,” it doesn’t keep anyone alive. If you think it does in your case, then your problems are psychological, and you do need help. But good luck with that; treating them is now called “conversion therapy”, which, in many places, is already illegal.
And if this is a taste of Molloy’s “incisiveness”, I’m guessing that for Margaret Sullivan, “incisive”, like “woman”, has been redefined beyond all recognition and sense. I can’t imagine I’d get much useful, informative, or honest out of The Present Age. I’ll pass. But not before a bit more decoding, which does have a bit of entertainment value, though this bit of code is painfully obvious, and easy to break. Any prospect of sympathy evaporates in the full light of what he’s actually saying.
Or, to translate “…whether I’m now going to be prohibited from entering women’s single-sex spaces, like I normally would be…” I sure hope so. You shouldn’t have been allowed into them in the first place.
End up in a men’s prison? That would be where you belong. You are a man. If you felt unsafe, you could be put into a secure, protective section already in place. No need to intrude upon a women’s prison.
No, it was invalidated by turning the “M” into an “F”, destroying their usefulness as valid identity documents. Changing it back would be a correction, the closing of a loophole that should never have been opened in the first place. Face it; you’re a man, and nobody is required to believe otherwise. Making them do so is not a “right”. Stop claiming it is.