Why are women and gay men backing a movement that undermines their own rights?
The fiercest advocates of gender identity ideology are often those with the most to lose from it.
Last week saw yet another victory for women’s rights in the US. The Supreme Court upheld state bans on males participating in girls’ sports. Predictably, the ruling was split along party lines, with the six Republican appointees supporting single-sex sports and the three Democrat appointees voting against.
Riley Gaines has been quick to note the perversity of so-called ‘progressives’ working against women. ‘Justice Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor ruled against women having equal protection under the law,’ she posted on X. ‘Liberal women, yet again, prove to be the biggest hurdle women face.’
It is a feature of today’s culture wars that so many individuals are gulled into working against their own interests. Time and again, polls reveal that the staunchest advocates for gender identity ideology are women, even though it is a fundamentally anti-woman movement. Likewise, many gay men are found to be supportive of genderism, in spite of the fact that it represents the most serious threat to gay rights in living memory.
So what is going on here? I am reminded of Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). The book opens with an arresting epigraph: ‘When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us’. The novel concerns the barbarity of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as practised in certain African tribal societies, which is why Walker dedicated the book ‘with tenderness and respect to the blameless vulva’.
We often speak of FGM as though it were an example of the patriarchy destroying women’s sexuality, making it impossible for girls, as they grow up, to experience sexual pleasure so that they will remain faithful to their husbands. While there is some truth to this analysis, Walker forces us to confront a harsher reality. One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the depiction of the older women in the tribe as being mostly responsible for the perpetuation of the practice. Little girls are mutilated at the behest of their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters. Often the men know little at all.
The novel was the inspiration for Tori Amos’s Cornflake Girl, surely the only song about female genital mutilation ever to break the top ten. But Amos’s song is really about that broader principle of betrayal among women. Today, the song resonates for a different reason. The ‘cornflake girls’ – those who turn on other women – are now mostly to be found on the self-styled ‘progressive’ side of politics, upholding an ideology that has seen the erosion of women’s single-sex spaces and services.
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