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   Meghan Murphy is one of Canada’s leading Feminists.  This quote is from her article – “Thanks to trans activism, 2017 saw a return to old-school, sexist dismissals of women and women’s rights.”  Definitely worth your time to go and peruse the entire article.  What I would like to focus on is how well this quote highlights one aspect of the feminist struggle against the various incarnations of patriarchy and men’s rights activism.

Feminists (those who struggle for the emancipation of women from patriarchy) are being attacked for merely naming the problem that they face.  Gender is a problem, it is a toxic hierarchy that hurts both women and men.  The liberal mainstream won’t have any of it though (quelle suprise~!~).  Instead, the notion of gender identity is being enshrined in law and shoehorned into society which of course is good for men, but bad for women.  Women brave enough to challenge the ideology of ‘gender identity’ are are routinely misconstrued, harassed, and marginalized.  Why?

Questioning the dominant patriarchal narrative – and yes the transactivist narrative is inherently patriarchal – is challenging male dominance in society, and  will always be vilified and marginalized.

The good news is that the dictates of reality defying ‘gender-identity’ platform, even if just superficially examined, are unpalatable to not only to the so-called ‘mainstream sensibilities’, but also to those who value rational arguments based on material reality and fact.

Feminists have known this pretty much since the beginning and the radical vanguard are now slowly being joined by those who appreciate the strength of radical feminist arguments and analysis.

Let us hope this trend continues and intensifies, because Patriarchy 2.0 is in dire need of a serious blaming.

 

“The notion that “gender identity” exists at all flies in the face of feminist analysis, which says being born female is what forces women into an oppressed class of people, regardless of whether or not they identify with that position. But this point, as well as the concerns women have expressed around the impact of writing something as vague and as regressive as “gender identity” into legislation, including questions around whether males should be permitted in female prisons, change rooms, and transition houses, go unacknowledged and unaddressed by trans activists and queer theorists like Barker. Instead, she paints challenges to this ideology as nothing more than a hateful, unfounded, irrational attack on trans-identified individuals, writing:

“A moral panic is the process of arousing social concern over an issue. Moral panics often involve scapegoating a particular group as the ‘evil’ responsible for a range of societal ills.”

Indeed, Barker sounds no different than the anti-feminists over at Spiked, who claim the #MeToo campaign is a “harassment panic” that demonizes men unfairly. She claims trans-identified people are vilified by challenges to and questions about transgenderism, trans activism, and policies that allow men to enter into women-only spaces, simply based on self-identification, intentionally declining to acknowledge that what women fear is not an abstract trans-identified person, but men, specifically. No one has argued, as Barker claims, that trans-identified people are specifically dangerous or violent. What has been argued is that males are a threat to females, regardless of how they identify. If this fact is indeed considered a “moral panic” in the eyes of people like Jones and Barker, then they are better suited for the alt-right crowd than they are among progressives.

Barker says that this kind of “moral panic” (commonly known as “feminism”) exists to “enable us to attack a specific group for problems we’re all implicated in”… As though we have no idea who is doing all the raping and beating in this world and as though women are equally as culpable…”