In 2006, Tarana Burke responded to the news of a woman being sexually assaulted by her employer by saying #MeToo. A movement was born, with countless women coming forward to share their own stories and offer support to others who had experienced the same thing. We were all informed that it was important to “believe all women.” (Unless the woman in question was accusing someone named Biden.) But now, former collegiate swimmer Paula Scanlan has published an opinion piece in The Telegraph explaining how a growing number of women – almost entirely on the political left, ironically – have thrown the #MeToo movement under the bus. They are allowing women to be effectively erased. And they’ve done it in the name of the swelling transgender movement. (Townhall)
The politics of womanhood has become increasingly bizarre in the aftermath of the #MeToo revolution. In 2020, the otherwise left-leaning British author JK Rowling fired the tweet heard around the world when she mildly criticized the excesses of the transgender rights movement. Like me, Rowling is a victim of sexual violence, and felt that the admission of male bodies into women-only spaces could pose a risk…
It was not long ago that Americans across the political spectrum, including many left-leaning women involved in the #MeToo movement, recognised that male bodies pose an inherent risk to women’s safety. While we should all balk at broad-stroke mischaracterisations of trans-identifying people as all being potentially violent, we should keep in mind that the inherent biological characteristics and functions of male bodies pose a risk.
I’m uncomfortable with the characterization of the “inherent biological characteristics and functions of male bodies” as automatically posing “a risk” to women. As with any other weapon, the owner has a responsibility to know when to keep it in the holster. Swinging too far in that direction borders on saying that the mere existence of males is a threat to women, which would essentially rule out the continuation of the species.
But that doesn’t excuse those who choose to freely unholster their weapons in inappropriate circumstances. So how does this relate to the social contagion of transgender madness that is sweeping through society? The analogy should be obvious to anyone – particularly women – who are approaching the question honestly.
There was a time when, if you were a man and you walked into a women’s locker room (or anywhere else, really) and stripped naked in front of a woman who did not invite you to do so, you would correctly be locked up in a cell and kept away from decent human beings. If you did so in front of a child you would be identified as a monster. Isn’t that a form of sexual assault? If you do this as a straight, non-trans male and later claim to “identify” as a woman to avoid a trial, should you be allowed to go free? These are some of the fundamental questions that go unaddressed and unacknowledged by so-called feminists in the entire trans madness debate.
It might be helpful for everyone to stop and consider that the ideologues on the left have spent so much time lecturing everyone about respecting the “rights” and feelings of men who “identify” as women, that they have abandoned any defense of the rights and feelings of actual women. If you are a woman and you are in what has traditionally been defined as a space reserved for women (a locker room, shower, or public bathroom for example) and a man walks in and exposes his genitals in front of you, are you not entitled to feel offended or even threatened? Do your own feelings and concerns for your personal safety no longer matter? Are you expected to conduct some sort of ad hoc survey and determine what gender the intruding male “identifies” as? Why is it somehow verboten under those circumstances to simply say ‘I feel unsafe and this is unacceptable?’
We’ve debated this topic at great length here, but I believe Paula Scanlan has hit on one aspect of it that I had previously failed to consider. (Likely because I’ve never been a woman and don’t share those lived experiences.) This debate shouldn’t be focused on the rights and feelings of a tiny but extremely vocal minority of people who either believe or claim to believe that they can change biological reality simply by switching their pronouns, despite having convinced an army of people on the left to follow them down this path toward madness. This should be a conversation about the rights, feelings, privacy, and safety of all actual women. So where is the #MeToo movement today? Why have they gone AWOL in this increasingly out-of-control situation? The women of the world deserve answers.
Read the full article here