In the last decade, progressives have targeted several issues and propelled them into the marketplace with ferocity and verve. The most commonplace and dangerous issue the Left is promoting without regard to science or even language, is gender. The Left is on a mission to promote gender when it’s convenient and altogether eradicate gender when it’s not. Both are dangerous and need to stop.
There are several recent examples of this. The New York Times opinion section published a piece wherein the author wrote, “I’m a lesbian. My fiancee is a trans woman. We’re trying to have a baby the old-fashioned way. It’s complicated.” Despite the desperate plea and obvious attempt to obscure language, what’s actually happening is that a woman and man are attempting to conceive but have themselves complicated the matter by “identifying” as a different gender. The hijacking of straightforward language is both purposeful and harmful — it obfuscates the real goal of the LGBTQ lobby and confuses an issue that actually remains quite clear.
Last week, the California State Assembly passed Bill 2943, which on the surface appears to make the selling or advertising of gay conversion therapy a violation of the state’s consumer fraud laws. However, there is enough language in the bill about “goods” and “services” that, if passed, may violate the free speech and free exercise clauses of people who would generally oppose same-sex marriage, identifying people as “transgender,” or even recommend some type of therapy to change.
Finally, gender quotas in the workplace are as popular as ever, even though more and more research shows they fail. Recently, BBC announced they had implemented a new plan to encourage gender quotas for their BBC guests and couldn’t be more excited about it. This effort wasn’t based on a particular need for men or women to bolster the organization, but societal pressure. Ros Atkins writes:
Projects like this one, that suggest or even enforce gender quotas on their companies, are no doubt attempting to “help” a world that lacks women in the workforce. But these same companies seem to forget something really important: Many women choose not to be in the workforce at various levels for different reasons and succumbing to this societal pressure means the person who is the most qualified may fail to get the job or the TV hit, as the case may be. This is not only the opposite of the ideals feminists purported to support, but doesn’t help men, women, or the workplace in the long run.
On one end of the gender spectrum, the Left is attempting to manipulate or even eradicate gender altogether. On the other end, the Left is celebrating one gender, female, simply for being female, whether the woman has merited such recognition or not.
The problem with the current gender debate lays in the purposeful, perpetual insistence to deny basic biology and basic science. When biology is denied or subverted and then the language about it is invented (for example, leftists would say that sex is biological but gender is a social construct), a dynamic duo is created that’s intellectually dishonest and paves the way for destruction.
In an interview with Reason’s Nick Gillepsie, Camille Paglia said that a knowledge of the ancient empires shows it’s not only common for mankind to want to manipulate or destroy gender, but that nothing good comes of it:
Indeed, even Paglia, who identifies as transgender, says gender is biological and roles serve a purpose. Basic historical and cultural knowledge shows this. From the Nomadic period and the Stone Age, to the agrarian era and up until just before the second wave of feminism took off, sexes were divided naturally and such division of the sexes and the labor they did wasn’t as sexist as it was useful. If you disagree, show me a group of men who are willing to birth babies and I’ll show you a company of women willing to die for their country in a beaches-of-Normandy kind of setting.
There are reasons for these distinctions of gender, and it’s far less polarized than progressives make it out to be. In fact, in this interview she did with Jordan Peterson, Paglia argued that just as women have gifts, men do too — it’s just that males’ gifts so happens to do radical things like build Western Civilization as we know it with ideas like clean water, sustainable energy, and power grids. And if or when a terrorist group like ISIS ever conspires to wipe such modern day miracles out, it will be the brave, bold, technical, men — with whom women want to battle for every dollar in the workspace — who rebuild it again.
All of this represents the progressive war on gender — using it when it’s convenient, denying it when it’s not — and it needs to stop.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
