A group of women gathering to talk about women’s issues is now a threat to transgender people’s very existence.
At least, that’s according to the woke activists demanding that the Seattle Public Library cancel a scheduled February talk hosted by the Women’s Liberation Front. The talk focuses on transgender advocacy and ideology, which has come to frame political debates over women’s sports, bathroom access, lesbian dating preferences, insurance coverage for elective plastic surgery, and whether children should be exposed to drastic chemical alteration.
The Gender Critical Justice League is circulating a petition that states that the Women’s Liberation Front “… has booked an event at the Seattle Public Library with the express purpose of arguing against the right of transgender people to live as their true selves,” and that they are “… using the library, a public venue, to spread hate against transgender people.”
Yes, seriously: All this outrage over a group of women, in a library, talking.
A talk like this fills transgender advocacy groups with dread because it is in these spaces that women can make their politically incorrect, yet scientifically accurate, argument that “woman” is not a feeling, but a biological reality. There is a fracture among feminists over this issue: Women who are in favor of acknowledging biologically male transgender people as women have been blinded by misplaced compassion. Meanwhile, those of us sticking with biological reality are labeled “transphobic,” accused of hate speech, and apparently, should be banned from libraries, too.
Which brings us back to the Women’s Liberation Front, a fearless, vocal body in the debate over transgenderism. According to the Seattle Times, “[the group] has frequently been referred to by others as a hate group or trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) group.” This kind of labeling, of course, is just a prelude to de-platforming.
Increasing it seems that when biological men say they are women, actual women lose the right to speak.
The Seattle Public Library is only the latest library to face protests for letting gender-critical feminists speak. The Vancouver Public Library and the Toronto Public Library have both been mobbed, with the Vancouver library being denied its traditional place in the Vancouver Pride Parade.
Meanwhile, libraries in the United States have been at the forefront of the debate over transgenderism and education, with the controversial Drag Queen Story Hour, originating in San Francisco, making its mark in numerous communities. This odd, alternative story hour has been protested by conservative groups who are opposed to the sexualization of reading to children. The Women’s Liberation Front is now hosting a talk on “Fighting the New Misogyny: A Feminist Critique of Gender Identity,” not for children, but for grown women who want to discuss this threat to women’s autonomy.
The justification for wanting to deny adult women a gathering space is that the murder of transgender people is supposedly an epidemic and that transgender individuals who are denied affirmation are, in the activists’ telling, at high risk of suicide. The numbers, however, that are used to justify the “epidemic” of trans murder are taken primarily from Brazil and Central America, not the U.S.
And however tragic it may be, the threat of suicide cannot be used as a reason to give in to unreasonable demands. While suicide is a problem in the U.S., the research activists use to show a purported correlation between suicide and a lack of transgender affirmation for youth is incredibly suspect. Essentially, our own compassion is being used against us women in the debate over transgenderism.
Most women bow to transgender activists because they don’t want to hurt people, not because they actually think men can become women. “The claim that ‘trans women are women,’ in some way, only works if women can be shamed, punished, or guilted into going along with it,” says Natasha Chart, board chair of the Women’s Liberation Front.
She continued, “This is why they went after women first, and hardest, and why we still get the most hassle for speaking up. We’re the thing they say they are, speaking the forbidden truth. Only men can be ‘trans women.’ It directly challenges their cultural authority to define womanhood as something a man can feel, and then declare himself to be, by fiat.”
Chart’s group is bringing together noted speakers Meghan Murphy, Saba Malik, and Kara Dansky to “give a critical analysis of gender identity and make powerful arguments for sex-based women’s rights.” This is a conversation worth having.
Transgender ideology is gaining ground across the public and cultural landscape. For healthy debate to flourish, women who are opposed to the abolition of women-only spaces and the idea of gender as a spectrum need to be heard, not silenced.
Libby Emmons (@li88yinc) is a writer and mother living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a senior contributor for The Federalist and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
