Feminism Needs Better Messengers

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In the news today, an elite leftist feminist is mad about something!

In other news, the sun rose in the East.

But yeah, tennis legend Martina Navratilova is mad that Republicans have stepped up to defend women’s sports far more so than Democrats. “Shame on all the elected Democrats who keep silent on this,” she said, regarding the invasion of women’s sports by cosplaying male bullies.

But Navratilova hasn’t been paying attention.

The Democrats don’t “keep silent” on this. Rather, they openly support the trans movement’s attempts to erase women, both on and off the sports field. Last year, every single House Democrat voted against a bill that would prohibit men from women’s sports. Likewise, President Biden has steadfastly supported men in women’s sports. On both federal and state levels, Democrats routinely vote unanimously to allow male sexual predators into female bathrooms and locker rooms. Democrats in Nashville mourned the trans school shooter rather than the children she murdered. Had Navratilova been paying attention, she would know this.

She also would have expected this. “I am the left,” she exclaimed. But for the past couple of decades, the Left hasn’t been about free speech, free love, or keeping abortion safe, legal, and rare. For the past couple of decades, the Left has been intersectional identity politics sprinkled with insurrection and pederasty. As long as Navratilova was afforded a rung on the hierarchal ladder of oppression that let her look down on straight white male conservatives, she had no qualms with this political realignment. But the minute it was her being looked down on by trans females and rapists from the rung above her, now all of a sudden, it’s a problem.

“My people are turning on me. They’re turning on us, women, who speak up for women’s sex-based rights,” she continued. Again, she is incorrect. The Left didn’t “turn” on anyone. This is who they are. This is who they’ve always been. This was their stated goal from the very beginning. Navratilova was simply too invested in her own identity as a leftist champion of equality to see the long game. Methinks that Navratilova is going to stay mad until she can admit to herself that she was wrong about her assumptions regarding the motives and purpose of the Left.

Then there’s J.K. Rowling, another leftist critic of foreseeable leftist policy. Her focus is not on women’s sports, but on protecting women’s safe spaces, and preventing children from being pushed into transitioning by their treacherous “parents” and by predatory “doctors.” Noble aims to be sure, and I realize she’s popular with conservatives for her buck-the-trend behavior. But a deeper delve into her stances and rhetoric shows that she, too, is unaware of the root cause of these issues.

The trans activism, she thinks, is just some sort of bizarre off-ramp the Left found itself drifting down, and she’s trying to correct the steering wheel. Like Navratilova, she takes it as common knowledge that the Left is pure and sincere and good, and that the Right is evil and stupid and bigoted. Read through Rowling’s statements on the threat from transgender females to actual females. Pay attention to her wording.

In an interview with The Free Press’ podcast, she seems more upset that transactivists’ tactics inadvertently help the “far right” than she is upset that women are being abused and raped by transgendered individuals. She refers to men…all men…as the “oppressor class” of women. She refers to the violence done by transgender women (biological men) to actual women as “the violence of men.” Not of men claiming to be women. Just of “men” in general.

Last year in New Zealand, women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull was shouted down, assaulted, and forced offstage by trans activists upset about her ideas on the negative effects of gender ideology on women. Rowling took to Twitter to condemn, in her words, the “men’s rights activists” who shut Keen-Minshull down.

It takes a lot of intentional obfuscation and outright deception to try to frame these trans rights activists as “men’s rights” activists. Rowling seems to either have a deep-seated hatred towards all men, or else she is trying her best not to upset her leftist allies by wording her arguments to maintain Straight White Male as the eternal villain. Maybe she’s not as brave as we make her out to be.

Rowling herself is a victim of a physically abusive first husband, an emotionally abusive misogynist father, and of a sexual assault in her early 20s. It’s understandable that she might have an issue with “men” in the broader sense, seeing as she was betrayed by the men in her life whom she should have been able to trust more than anyone else.

But if she wants to reverse the trans-fueled trend against the legal protections for women, she needs to stop conflating the despicable actions of these three men with the billions of noble men who would agree with her wholeheartedly not only on these trans issues, but on the respectful, loving, and dignified manner in which all men should treat all women. Men aren’t the enemy. The enemy is that very specific and minuscule subgroup of biological males hiding behind gender identity politics, along with the snot-nosed pampered little limousine activists like Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, whose careers they owe entirely to Rowling, and who threw her under the bus the first chance they got in order to publicly flaunt their woke accolades.

In 2023, biological female Audrey Hale, who identified as male, entered a private religious school and murdered six children. Is this trans violence any less bad because the aggressor was a biological female? Or because the victims were Christian children rather than elitist leftists?

Last month, a judge in California ruled that a father from Texas cannot prevent his ex-wife from putting their 12-year-old son through chemical and surgical castration. The mother has been attempting to transition their son since he was at least seven years old (and who has never expressed interest in doing so). Which is worse, the father from Texas being forced by law to stand by and allow his son to be permanently mutilated, or losing a tennis match to a cheater?

Feminists like Navratilova and Rowling seem unable to decouple their thinking from the bigotries of their ideology. They want to maintain their status as champions of equality for the Left without facing the internal contradictions of identity politics. But whatever phantasmagorical world they inhabit in which The Oppressor must always be a carbon copy replica of Frances McDormand’s husband in “Mississippi Burning” simply doesn’t exist, no matter how much such a reality would square neatly with their preconceived notions.

When you hopped on the Leftist bandwagon, where did you think it would lead? Where did you think it would eventually stop, if anywhere? They don’t stop; they go until they’ve torn down every cultural, legal, and ethical barrier impeding their path to absolute power. Did you think they’d make an exception for you? How did you not see this coming? Did you not read your history? Don’t you liberals still spout the “first they came for the socialists” Niemoller quote whenever you’re combatting alleged authoritarianism?

To us on the conservative side, feminism is about protecting equal rights for women. No ifs, ands, or buts. No asterisks. No special privileges for one sex over the other. No qualifiers or disqualifiers based on race, intellect, ability, sexual preference, or political leanings.

But to your former “allies” on the Left, feminism was never anything other than a tool to be brandished when it was politically expedient to do so, to be redefined to the point of meaninglessness, and to finally be discarded when it was no longer exploitable in their pursuit of power.

The stances being taken by Navratilova and Rowling won’t protect women so long as they’re framed in the false oppressor/oppressed dichotomy of the Left. The whole “all men are pigs” schtick helps Taylor Swift sell concert tickets, but it doesn’t work for people genuinely concerned about women’s rights. It’s also a political loser, as the Kamala campaign just proved. If Navratilova, Rowling, and their ilk want true equality, they need to take a serious look in the mirror and come to terms with their own prejudices.