Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 10 May 2022 – gender:hacked
I wouldn’t normally waste my time responding to Chase Strangio—one of Twitter’s most shameless traffickers in dishonest hyperbole and outright bullshit—except that this bizarro line of thinking—if we can call it thinking—is rife among woke progressives and represents a fundamental misunderstanding between trans-Kool-Aid chuggers like Chase and gender-critical feminists like me.
So let’s talk about pretending: who is being asked to pretend, about what, and why? And where does all this pretending lead?
We’re supposed to pretend everything we know about sex is wrong: that legislatures never knew just who they targeted when they denied women the vote. That pimps and johns never knew whose bodies they sold. That the reproductive potential of child brides is pure guesswork. That the burdens of human reproduction settle, if not evenly, then at least mysteriously across the population.
It’s an interesting conceit, in a revisionist-history ‘what if the Mongols had taken Vienna?’ kind of way. It’s also, as everybody knows—no matter their claims to holy ignorance—bullshit.
When everything is going well, some people can afford to pretend. But as with every game of make-believe, there’s a limit. Eventually, wishful thinking runs up against a hard fact. Roe going down and what that means for female people, regardless of how they identify, is a hard fact.
We can argue about whether it makes sense to reorganize society on the basis of individuals’ personal identification with gender stereotypes, but whether we recognize sex or not, whether we name it or not, whether we like it or not, sex will continue to matter. Half the human race bears the burden of human reproduction. That means that these people—even if the language that keeps these people together dissolves in an acid bath of ideology—share experiences, needs, and interests. We used to call these people ‘women’ and the feminist movement used to center these very issues. Now mainstream ‘feminism’ has become a mixed-sex movement that prioritizes male identity claims over female realities, while self-identified feminists attempt to defend women’s most basic rights to determine the shape of our own lives by reducing us to “birthing bodies,” to reproductive functions and services. As if treating women like walking wombs isn’t what got us here in the first place…