Progressives care more about semantics than
emancipation
If 2022 has been the year of the “woman”, it is a tale with two
different final chapters: one hopeful, one less so. The first is set in a
distant country, where an archaic, theocratic regime threatens to be toppled by
women throwing down their hijabs and
demanding their emancipation. The second plays out in a more familiar setting
but in an unfamiliar language; a Western nation where the word “woman” itself
no longer has any meaning, its definition rewritten
to include “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have
been said to have a different sex at birth”.
This is the paradox of the past 12 months: the existence of women is
being questioned in the very place where female emancipation has come furthest,
while in places where women remain shackled to medieval notions of honour and
chastity, true feminism is at its strongest.
Why should we worry about dictionary definitions, when everyone knows
what a woman is anyway? This may seem like a fair question. Yet simply
dismissing the erasure of a word as a “culture war issue” misunderstands the
forces that drive it. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay noted in their 2020
book Cynical Theories, language is now viewed as a tool of
oppression, and thus must be altered in the name of so-called “liberation”.
These arguments over the word “woman”, then, have wider repercussions: they are
fronts in a greater war that will determine how language itself is used.
Those who would divorce “woman” from its biological implications often
present their ideas as innocuous. They are, we are told, simply champions of
“inclusion”. But their ideology is hardly uncontroversial, and surrendering to
it is not harmless. The past year has seen reports of transgender
women attacking women in female-only spaces and unfairly winning trophies
in women’s sports. The spirit
of these failures was perhaps best-distilled in the words of Supreme Court
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in March was unable to define what
being a woman entailed during her Senate confirmation hearing. “I’m not a
biologist,” she said, as if one needed to be a professional scientist to know
basic biological facts.
A word of clarification. I am immensely sympathetic to the plight of
transgender people and believe they ought to have the same moral and legal
rights as everyone else. To be against militant trans activists’ gender
ideology is not to be transphobic. Rather, it is simply to agree, as Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie succinctly put it, that “trans women
are trans women”. Adichie was savaged for this and other statements evincing
wrongthink, but acknowledging that trans women are distinct from women, that
there are potential conflicts between their rights, and that gender ideology
opens the door to abusive men masquerading as women, should not be
controversial. Standing up for the rights of transgender people should not mean
pretending sex does not exist altogether.
Indulging in this fantasy can have perverse, and dangerous,
repercussions — both at home and abroad. Here in the West, it culminates in a
myopic worldview which holds that a bestselling author (and
domestic abuse survivor) should be trolled for funding a women-only service for
victims of sexual abuse. Elsewhere in the world, the erosion of our
understanding of what it means to be a “woman” has more immediate consequences.
Consider what has taken place in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan in just the
past two months. In Kenya, while women in America debated what we should call a
person born with a cervix, FGM has taken a new
and insidious form. In Iran, the female-led protests that followed the death of
Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested for breaking
mandatory dress code laws, have been met with an equally inhumane response.
Reports abound of Iran’s security services raping protestors and shooting at the faces and genitals of
female protesters. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban government reintroduced
Sharia Law, meaning women are now barred from walking outside without a male
relative and must cover up with a burqa or hijab when outside the home. Earlier
this month, a woman was publicly flogged for
entering a shop without a male guardian. Last week, the Taliban banned women
from studying at university
Is it really a coincidence that, in the same year the West forgot what
it means to be a woman, we decided it was acceptable to turn our backs on women
in those countries? The above is what happens when a society stops caring what
it means to be a woman; when a centuries-old fight for emancipation becomes
relegated to semantics. Of course, this takes a different form in Kenya, Iran
and Afghanistan. But there still seem to me to be similarities between today’s
gender activists and theocratic subjugators. Both believe, on the basis of a
contentious ideology, that they have a monopoly on truth. And both, in a sense,
are champions of the subjective over the objective: in one case, particular
religious beliefs are said to tell us how society should be run — and in the
other, mere feelings are said to abolish material reality.
This is why gender ideology advocates are a threat not just to women but
to Western ideals, too. Western culture prides itself on the achievements of
the Enlightenment and science — in other words, on objectivity. It was on an
objective basis that previous generations of feminists staked their claim:
their plight was based on an appeal to reason. Now, so-called “progressives” —
another term that has been redefined into meaninglessness — stake their claim on
subjective feelings and happily ignore or dismiss its material effects.
The effects of this are slowly taking shape. In the Seventies, the
anti-Shah Iranians threw in their lot with the ayatollahs in the delusional
hope that the ayatollahs would share power after the revolution. They learned
very quickly that fanatics cannot be trusted or restrained. Similarly, many
Western feminists ended up allying themselves with progressivism, and now far
too many women have felt the terrible consequences of that alliance. If the
spirit of true feminism is to be reclaimed, we need more JK Rowlings and fewer
Ketanji Brown Jacksons.
It is not just feminism and the rights of women that are at stake here:
so, too, are the best ideals of the West itself. If 2022 is the year of
the “woman”, let’s hope 2023 will be the year when we can delete those
quotation marks.
The year the West erased women - UnHerd
