Dispatch #85 White Lesbian Age 68 Considers Waging & Winning the Battle for Women's Human Rights
- Kathleen A. Maloy
- Mar 30, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 13
March 31st 2021
72 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President
1023 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin
In three years, we will see a woman running for US President. How will the country be able to believe/see/accept that a woman can and should be the national leader? Wide-ranging and intensive public discourse and action must occur to replace old narratives with new stories that establish women as fully human, and that create and imprint a new vision for women as leaders.
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We must always call out the camouflage created by public discourse that disguises and promotes the War on Women. Designed as the essential enforcement tool for patriarchal misogyny, the women’s bodies are the coveted battleground for power in the US – the so-called culture wars. In the struggle to keep their hegemony, proponents of the white supremacist patriarchy have traditionally weaponized women’s bodies and body parts.
Consider the recent coverage of the full-throated national campaign against transgender girls in sports. In his March 29 New York Times article titled “Why Transgender Girls Are Suddenly the GOP’s Culture-War Focus,” Jeremy W Peters reports on the growing number of a growing number of states where Republicans are diving into a culture war clash that ‘seems to have come out of nowhere’ and that features advocates ostensibly concerned about protecting girls and their participation in sports. www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/us/politics/transgender-girls-sports.html
In their January 29 Washington Post article titled “Transgender girls are at the center of America’s culture wars, yet again,” Emily Wax-Thibodeaux and Samantha Schmidt offer a more incisive discussion noting that Democratic opponents of these bills and some political experts charge that the legislative efforts amount to a political power play to rally the conservative base around an issue they see as threatening traditional gender roles.
For generations, anti-trans messaging in the United States has largely focused on transgender women rather than transgender men, said Julia Serano, an activist and the author of the book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.
Serano argues that the disparity is rooted in sexism and misogyny, and the idea that “there’s a certain amount of societal respect for wanting to be a man.” Even when it comes to cisgender children, she said, “people are a lot more disturbed, concerned by feminine boys than they are by masculine girls.” www.washingtonpost.com/national/transgender-girls-are-at-the-center-of-americas-culture-wars-yet-again/2021/01/29/869133d6-602c-11eb-afbe-9a11a127d146_story.html
In her March 24 New York Times article titled “So You Want to ‘Save Women’s Sports’?” Lindsay Crouse considers that more than 20 states are introducing bills to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports…yeah, if only people really cared about female athletes.
But all this new passion has made me wonder, what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, “We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay”? What if these new activists embraced women’s sports/invested in female athletes, instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?
The debate around transgender rights in sports feels sometimes like fighting over bunk beds on the Titanic. In almost every case, as soon as money and power are involved, women’s sports take a back seat to men’s. You can even see it in our language: We call them “women’s sports,” whereas men’s sports can just be “sports.”
The science is still catching up to this conversation. So, for now, we are navigating policies largely based on values. That is why we get bills that exclude while citing an arbitrary interpretation of “fairness.” Perhaps the bills’ names are apt. As many female athletes know, the game has never been truly fair. www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/opinion/trans-athletes-womens-sports.html
Uh-huh, actions proposed to protect girls/women by restricting and excluding, regulating female behavior, and defining unacceptable female traits must be called out. The gendered-misogynist premise of these actions must be exposed and discredited.
On March 3rd an off-duty police officer abducted and killed Sarah Everard while she was walking home at 9:30 pm on a busy south London street. As questions arose about why Everard was walking alone at night, Baroness Jenny Jones proposed legislation in the House of Lords imposing a 6 PM curfew for men. Shock and outrage at this restriction dominated the public discourse.
In her March 13 Guardian article titled “Angry about male curfew proposal? Think about all of the ways women have to adapt to male violence,” Arwa Mahdawi considers the effect of calling out the norm:
The policing – both formal and informal – of female bodies is so normalized that, as Jones noted, we often don’t “bat an eyelid” at it any more. Unless, of course, those same standards are applied to men……We’re used to women’s freedoms and women’s bodies being up for debate, you see. We’re used to women being told to modify our behaviour as a reaction to male violence…. Women’s bodies are public property in a way that men’s bodies aren’t. Our rights are up for debate in a way that men’s rights aren’t. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/13/men-curfew-sarah-everard-women-adapt-violence
Shelves of products for managing vaginal odors in the ‘feminine needs’ aisle illustrate the countless and routine ways women’s body parts are regulated, controlled, and shamed – women’s bodies are dehumanized and degraded.
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