For a long time, I have been student of women’s rights. As a historian, I authored two books on the history of the suffrage campaign. The first, Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote, argued that the uber wealthy women of New York — Astors, Belmonts, Mackays, Vanderbilts — were the media celebrities of their day, covered for their clothes, decor, and opinions. The book chronicled how their endorsement of Votes for Women — a cause that had been in the doldrums for 70 years — created enormous buzz and electricity, propelling the campaign across the finish line. Much like Oprah embracing any cause today.
The second book was a sweeping look at the suffrage campaign, not from when most such histories begin in 1848, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s call for electoral rights at a Women’s Convention, but in 1776, when Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband John, warning him and other members of the Continental Congress to “remember the ladies” or they might “foment a revolution.” And Yet They Persisted ended not in 1920, when women nationally won the vote, but in the 1960s, when southern blacks rose up against Jim Crow segregation, demanding their rights to vote.
I was in college when, in 1972, feminists in Congress, led by Hawaii’s Patsy Mink, convinced Congress to enact Title IX, for the first time giving female athletes the right to their own leagues, their own scholarships, their own competitions. As I wrote in an earlier post on this subject, then 300,000 girls in the US participated in sports. Now 3.5 million do. More than the numbers, the access to sports programs gave girls and women the character and camaraderie that participation in athletics had long conferred on boys and men. They learned team sportsmanship, and individual grit.
Now the Biden administration is proposing that the rights conferred on girls in Title IX be extended to biological males identifying as females, on the field and in the showers, with the “right” to their own pronouns. As the Babylon Bee satirized: “Biden Says When It Comes to College Women’s Sports, ‘May the Best Man Win.’”
The tally of male athletes who with their physical advantages pummel female athletes grows. Payton McNabb, a former North Carolina high-school volleyball player who suffers long-term physical and mental injuries caused by a biological male during a match in 2022, testified to Congress, urging action. Democrats rejected her claims. “It is a tiny portion of people across the country that identify as trans,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-WA., “and not a single one of them is doing anything to harm you or your family.” Added Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-NY, “Men do not compete in women sports.”
Some brave women — Maria Navratilova, Riley Gaines, J.K. Rowling — are speaking up for female athletes. The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) announced earlier this month that it would ban biological males from taking part in female sports, putting further pressure on the NCAA, which says its policy is under review. The Olympics, slated for Paris this summer, might become a turning point.
But the feminists have gone silent. Why? Because gender identity is the cause of the moment. The transgender movement has convinced the Far Left that, as they put it, “trans rights are human rights,” and deserve protection too. I sometimes wonder if today’s activists, having missed the righteous Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, now want to elevate all of their adopted causes to social justice imperatives.
So Jewish students march for Hamas, bashing Israel for defending itself from annihilation, shouting anti-Semitic slogans that any student of WW2 history is shocked to hear again. Calling for an intifada “from the river to the sea” is in essence a sequel of Hitler’s Final Solution, the annihilation of the Jewish people. They embrace vile ideology because their real cause is to destroy the world as we know it.
Feminists no longer support women’s rights because they are too busy supporting abortion rights without limits, up to and even after birth. Our culture sanctions attacks on children — child sex trafficking at our open border, drag queen shows in our schools, indoctrination in our textbooks — because they are being groomed to destabilize the family. When Bolsheviks stormed into power in Russia, the first thing they did was close the churches and politicize childhood. Now Hollywood actress Charlize Theron primes her adopted son to be a girl, because “I want her to thrive.”
Some see this drive to erase gender as moral anarchy, or even sanctioned pedophilia aimed at children. “Every perversion known to mankind is being embraced and gradually legalized,” wrote The American Thinker. “The idea that morality is created by each individual as he makes decisions throughout each day is a step beyond anarchy.”
Once religion taught us morals, beginning with the Ten Commandments. Now it’s anything goes, guided by self. As Bill Maher said recently, “When activism merges with narcissism, it becomes less about the cause and more about the ego.”
Gender ideology would not be possible without censorship. Too many people see the obvious — that there are men, and there are women. That these my-way-or-the-highway activists seek to censor anyone with opposing views is manifest in the call by Australian politicians for Elon Musk to be jailed. His crime: he refused to take down from X a video of a 16-year-old Muslim man stabbing a bishop who had criticized Islam. Musk took the video down on Australian screens — as ordered by courts there — but not worldwide. The pols called him all kinds of names for that. “They don’t want to ban hate speech,” said Musk. “They want to ban speech they hate.”
If you think celebration of Hamas and embrace of transgenderism are unrelated, check this out. In Amherst, Mass., a Jewish humanities professor from the University of Arizona, dressed as a drag queen, led a group of young children at Drag Queen story hour in a chant to “free Palestine.” Calling himself “Lil Miss Hot Mess,” the Drag Queen used a familiar children’s rhyme to lead the children.
“If you are a drag queen and you know it and you really want to show it,” with the children taught to follow with—“free Palestine.”
I hope as a nation we will stand up soon and say that the cult of transgenderism — not the very few adults who pine to switch genders but the many kids being brainwashed into adopting the lifestyle — is really an assault not just on God but on women.
When will our nation — pioneers of women’s rights, the first in the world to recognize Israel’s sovereignty, the proud authors of a world-famous First Amendment — when we will stand up and say that all have a right to free speech, even if it does not align with the ideology of the moment? Oh, and Israel has a right to exist, full stop.
There is always the trend in our physical lives to be swept up in chaos. Nothing could be more chaotic than to make ourselves gods by declaring realities that are untrue, made worse by demanding others to acknowledge the lies. Destroying the truth of being a real woman or an innocent child are fundamental attacks on the potential of beautiful lives and healthy societies - further enabling tyranny.
Another excellent article, Johanna!