Many folks on the radical Left attempt to locate misogyny in every sphere of life, whether it exists there or not, in service of the prevailing cultural narrative which asserts that Western society is patriarchal – meaning that society is ruled by men who control the institutions and the culture in a way that undermines and oppresses the rights and dignity of women.
This view results in all men being identified as perpetrators of sexism, which becomes not about men’s individual choices and actions towards women but about participating in a culture that holds women back. In this view, if you’re not striving against the culture itself, you are, by definition, sexist. In a modern Western context, advocates of this worldview locate sexism in the nebulous realm of “culture” because it simply doesn’t exist in our laws, which view men and women as equal.
This is not to say that cultures can’t be sexist – they can, but our culture is now so obsessed with gender equality that we have to locate sexism, as is also the case with racism, in “microaggressions” and unconscious bias. As a result, conservatives can make the mistake of asserting that misogyny doesn’t exist in our culture.
However, the transgender movement’s assault on the rights of women proves that this is a mistake.
Recently, Laurel Hubbard (formerly Gavin) qualified to compete in the women’s weightlifting competition at the upcoming Tokyo Olympic Games, becoming the first “openly transgender” athlete to compete at the games. Hubbard is 43 years old with a mediocre record in men’s contests and a brilliant record in women’s contests since beginning to identify as a woman in 2013. He is unusually old for a “female” Olympic weightlifter and in his previous competitions, he has far exceeded the normal range for female competitors.
Several years ago, Fallon Fox, a male MMA fighter who identifies as a woman, cracked the skull of female opponent Erika Newsome, in what became Newsome’s last professional fight. In another fight, she gave opponent Tamikka Brents a concussion and seven broken orbital bones. Brents later said that she had no idea that Fox was a biological male before stepping into the ring with him, and when the discussing her loss to Fox she reflected:
“I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right… I still disagree with Fox fighting. Any other job or career I say have a go at it, but when it comes to combat sport, I think it just isn’t fair.”
There are numerous recent examples of mediocre male athletes “transitioning”, only to dominate their respective scenes in women’s sports afterwards.
It seems tedious to labour the obvious. Nobody can change their gender. Nobody ever has changed their gender. Anyone who has gone through puberty as a male and has developed the skeletal and muscular structures of a man has an obvious physical advantage against female athletes in any sport. All the evidence you need of that is the gold medals being won by men in women’s sports. Despite what transgender apologists might argue, it’s clear that these men have an unfair advantage and are making a mockery of the global push to elevate female athletes.
Other female athletes besides Brents have spoken out against this phenomenon, and have also claimed that some women who are feeling concerned about it are being pressured to keep silent.
Like Fox fighting a woman, the transgender apologists have bullied and harassed the culture into submission. Even if one grants that a person can change their gender, it’s still absurd to think that such a person should be able to compete against biological females if they were born a biological male. I suspect that most people intuitively believe this, but are either unaware of the way that women’s sports are being destroyed or are afraid to speak the obvious truth because of the backlash they might face.
These men who insert themselves into women’s sports are not brave, nor are they heroes. They are losers who have seized the cultural moment in order to feel dominant and attain the victories that they were not good enough to attain in a fair setting, and they are doing so at the expense of real women. If that isn’t hateful towards women, what is?
It isn’t just in the domain of sport that women are being attacked by the transgender movement either. Over the past several years there have been incidents of male prisoners being transferred to women’s prisons after identifying as transgender who went on to sexually assault women.
As long as our culture continues to embrace the transgender movement, cultural misogyny will remain alive and well.
The inconsistency in our culture when it comes to these issues is baffling. On the one hand, we bend over backwards, to the point of discriminating against men, to ensure that women are elevated to prominent positions, while on the other we allow men to dominate women’s sports, sidelining the female athletes who had to work for their accomplishments, and expect women to live with dangerous men in prison – just because they say they’re women.
If we care about gender equality, we’ll fight against the insidious misogyny of the transgender movement.
Gender is an objective and beautiful concept envisioned in creation by God (Gen. 1:27). The transgender movement represents an assault on God’s vision for human existence, which requires that men and women be different to one another in complementary ways for the purpose of raising families.
The transgender movement is an assault on God’s authority, on creation, on women who ought to be protected by men and not exploited by them, and on the family. We have to face the possibility of being called transphobes, just as the early Christians were called atheists for not supporting the pagan religion, and call it what it is – evil.
