As a woman, there is no greater act of
misogyny
than being forced to accept that my unique biology is meaningless, that my femininity is a cheap commodity that can be claimed by anyone who wants it, and that the
rights
to which my sex once entitled me are worthless.
But that’s exactly what gender ideology tries to do to women. It has reduced womanhood into a gross caricature — something that can be put on and taken back off by sexualized men who think lipstick and skirts are all that womanhood requires. It has stripped women of their rights to
safety
and equality, with gender activists claiming that men dressed up as women are in more need of them than we are.
And it has done all of this publicly and deliberately, perhaps with the hope that if women are pushed around enough, they’ll just accept the lot that has been left to them. Whoever said the patriarchy was dead?
There is no other way to read the events of the past several weeks.
In early March, the Biden White House
gave
an International Women of Courage award to a man, Alba Rueda, who “identifies” as a woman. The accomplishment that earned Rueda the award was his campaign to “change the name of the National Women’s Conference to the ‘Plurinational Conference of Women and Lesbian, Cross-Dresser, Transgender, Bisexual, Intersex and Non-Binary Persons’ to include diverse, dissident, and racialized identities,’” according to the White House.
Then, last week, USA Today
named
as one of its “Women of the Year” Leigh Finke, a male Minnesota state lawmaker who “identifies” as a woman. He was given the award for being the first openly transgender official to get elected to Minnesota’s legislature.
And over the weekend, ESPN decided that the best way to celebrate Women’s History Month was by promoting a feature about Lia Thomas, a male athlete who “identifies” as a woman in order to compete in women’s swimming events.
Every single person involved in these shameful displays, including the men claiming female identities that are not theirs to claim, knows that Rueda, Fink, and Thomas are not women. They can identify however they want, but the fact remains that they were, are, and always will be men.
The reason these leftist institutions are pretending otherwise is because they realize that if they can get the public to accept this egregious rewrite of reality, they can impose just about anything on them. As George Orwell put it in 1984: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.”
Just like Orwell’s fictional Party, today’s leftist ideologues are trying to force people to accept a false statement as an objective truth in order to undermine truth itself. Their goal is social control, and they will go to extreme lengths to get it.
The Left also knows that public acceptance of gender ideology will take a good deal of brainwashing and intimidation — hence, the constant elevation of men, such as Lia Thomas, to positions of prominence specifically reserved for women. Notice that no one has proposed making separate Transgender Person of the Year or International Transgender People of Courage awards. And that’s because the point is not to validate the identities of these men or affirm their existence, as activists like to claim, but to force the public to accept that sex is meaningless and that it can be redefined according to the whims of the Left.
The degradation of women is just another means to this end. Indeed, more often than not, it’s the point.
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Kaylee McGhee White is the editor of Restoring America for the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
