The New York Times is getting braver
The New York Times is getting braver
October 25, 2022
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Back in July, I posted this about Pamela Paul’s New York Times’s opinion piece “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count.” At that time, I didn’t have access to a free version of the article (because I cancelled my subscription after the Times encouraged readers to envision a world without J.K. Rowling), but someone later sent me this link. It’s well worth a read. I take one issue with it: it describes proponents of “gender identity” as “far-Left.” My problem with this is that all of “gender identity” is a ruthlessly regressive and authoritarian movement fueled by a greedy industry, and is not leftist at all, notwithstanding the fact that its proponents refer to themselves as “progressive.”
Still, it’s a great piece that includes this:
Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word “transgender” combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, “TERF” has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves.
But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category don’t exist. Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.
When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes. The formula on the right we know well: Women are maternal and domestic — the feelers and the givers and the “Don’t mind mes.” The unanticipated newcomers to such retrograde typecasting are the supposed progressives on the fringe left. In accordance with a newly embraced gender theory, they now propose that girls — gay or straight — who do not self-identify as feminine are somehow not fully girls. Gender identity workbooks created by transgender advocacy groups for use in schools offer children helpful diagrams suggesting that certain styles or behaviors are “masculine” and others “feminine.”
Didn’t we ditch those straitened categories in the ’70s?
Yes, we thought we did. Sadly, the sex-abolition industry has brought it all back in the form of “gender identity.”
Paul has done it again. On October 23, she published another opinion piece in the Times called, simply, “Let’s Say Gay.” The framing is brilliant. Her point in the piece is to challenge the increasing use of the word “queer” to describe lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. It’s a good challenge. Not a single one of the lesbian, gay, or bisexual people I know is comfortable with the use of the word “queer.” Most consider it a deplorable insult and a veiled threat.
It’s also important to distinguish the words gay and lesbian. Paul quotes Julia Diana Robertson as saying this:
But it’s not only older people who bristle. “The mainstream media, and mainstream ‘L.G.B.T.Q.’ media, treat the word ‘lesbian’ like it’s the plague,” noted Julia Diana Robertson in the lesbian publication The Velvet Chronicle.
And the framing is brilliant. When lawmakers introduce bills to limit the ability of teachers to talk about “gender identity” in the classroom, plenty of people decry these bills as “Don’t Say Gay” laws. But they aren’t. Paul’s piece is an implicit rebuttal of that disingenuous framing of those laws.
I, and every lesbian, gay, and bisexual person I know, agree with Paul. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual are accurate terms that convey same-sex attraction. Let’s not be afraid to use them.
For a while, the hashtag #LesbianNotQueer was trending on Twitter.
Paul’s piece does a good job of explaining why.
If you haven’t, please consider signing the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. You can find the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International here.
Check out my book The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls, also available on Audible.