If 'woman' has no meaning, then other legal protections for women could be jeopardized
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I spend most of my days defending the right of women to associate with other women, be that in a sorority, sports, abuse shelters and so on. And yes, when I find myself explaining to intelligent people that "men" do not qualify as "women" under a sorority’s 150-year-old membership policy, I wonder whether the world has lost its mind.
I may be 36 weeks pregnant with my second daughter over here, but "woman" is a fairly basic concept, right? And yet, if a brand so basic to the American way of life as Bud Light says men are women, then it’s perhaps unsurprising to see the federal government, the NCAA, Target and a Supreme Court justice (to name a few) say the same.
Although the American people overwhelmingly understand that biological womanhood exists and matters, it often seems the loudest voices betray this reality. Where, I’m often asked, are the feminists? Why is the National Organization for Women insisting that biological males deserve to play women’s sports?
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Do not despair! This small cadre of idealogues doesn’t speak for all feminists.
The Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority is being sued after a chapter admitted a biological male. (Facebook/Kappa Kappa Gamma University of Wyoming)
Take the case of Westenbroek v. Kappa Kappa Gamma, where Wyoming sorority sisters, represented by Independent Women’s Law Center, have sued Kappa Kappa Gamma after the chapter was forced to admit (through a pressure campaign orchestrated by Kappa headquarters) a fully intact biological male in violation of Kappa’s bylaws. The case is now before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which means interested parties had an opportunity to weigh in.
And weigh in they did.
National feminist groups, Women’s Declaration International (WDI) and Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), not to mention hundreds of Kappa alumnae, sided with the young women seeking single-sex association. Their messages should resonate with all of us.
First, they argue that equating "sex" with fuzzy notions of "gender" — i.e. turning "woman" into some non-biological mindset — is deeply regressive. As WDI writes, "Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an ‘essence’ of gender, a psychology and pattern of behavior, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities."
WoLF notes we call this expectation "transgenderism" today, but historically, this same idea was used to justify executing women who failed to produce male heirs and denying women property rights. After all, asks WDI, "How can a man or boy ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ that he is a woman and express that feeling by wearing dresses, earrings, and makeup, except by having lived in a society where that is demanded and expected of women?"
The women’s groups go on to argue that societal and legal commitment to sex as binary and biological has greatly benefited women, not only from the perspective of freeing women from strict compliance with "gendered" expectations (thank goodness for manly athletic shoes, I say) but in establishing sex-based protections.
That is, laws forbidding sex discrimination have let women into college on the same terms as men (under Title IX) and allowed women to keep their jobs after getting pregnant (under Title VII).
But as WoLF argues, "Regulations and provisions that address sex, or men and women, are based on the presumption that objective differences exist between the sexes, and those differences matter."
By dismantling any objective differences between the sexes, none of Kappa’s single-sex policies, from preventing men from spending the night to promoting and supporting women’s leadership, have meaning or purpose. More than that, as explained by WoLF, if the words "woman" and "female" have no clear meaning, one could question the entire basis by which the government has enacted statutory and regulatory protections for us.
That’s a bad thing, as these women explain next.
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As hundreds of Kappa alumnae argue in their brief, "Elimination of women-only spaces is profoundly detrimental to women’s safety, well-being, and personal development." Women, for example, are much less likely to speak up in co-ed environments. And women are more than twice as likely to take on a leadership role in single-sex environments than in co-ed environments.
But that’s not all. Each of the women’s groups explains that single-sex environments are critical for safety too. Men are, on the whole, far more likely than women to commit violent crime. This reality doesn’t dissipate just because a male identifies as something different.
National feminist groups, Women’s Declaration International (WDI) and Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), not to mention hundreds of Kappa alumnae, sided with the young women seeking single-sex association. Their messages should resonate with all of us.
In fact, men who identify as women are equally or more likely to commit crime than the male population at large. In a long-range Swedish study, of two groups of trans-identified men, one was just as likely as the male population to commit crime and the other was more likely.
Don’t be fooled by the corporate and political strivers hoping their incomprehensible sex-confused messaging will benefit their own careers and personal lives. They don’t buy it themselves, and they haven’t considered the consequences.
The women who have given this a moment’s thought are standing up to say that redefining "woman" to include man is the effective erasure of women as a separate class worthy of dignity and respect. And we won’t stop. The truth deserves to be heard, and if it is, the truth will win.
May Mailman is the director of Independent Women’s Law Center (iwlc.org).
