Feminism Seems Intent on Signing Its Own Suicide Note
Giddier than a child on Christmas morning, American progressives have been obnoxiously active in celebrating a handful of menial victories this past week.
From the supposedly damning testimony of convicted perjurer Michael Cohen before the House Oversight Committee to the House’s passage of a universal background check bill that would do tremendous damage to private firearm sale, the American left is getting comfortable again.
Another win for the progressive movement came out of Connecticut this past weekend when two transgender females, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, achieved 1st and 2nd place in the girl’s 55-meter dash with record-breaking finishes at the state’s high school indoor track and field championship.
Transgender athlete tries to rationalize victory.https://t.co/j4zQr0L3aC#transgender #Athletes
— Update America (@Update__America) February 26, 2019
Like trained seals, progressives took to the airwaves and their social media feeds to applaud and take aim at anyone with the gall to suggest that the increasing number of victories of trans-women over biological women may prove this direct competition to be a questionable idea.
Hardly surprising considering establishment media headlines like ABC News’ “Transgender teens outrun track and field competitors but critics close behind” were par for the course when the very same concerns arose last spring as Miller and Yearwood medaled in the girl’s 100-meter at the State Open Finals.
Just as they were when professional trans athlete Rachel McKinnon was crowned a women’s cycling World Champion last Fall. Or when trans female Mack Beggs won two consecutive women’s high school wrestling championships. Or when a top-ranked NCAA track and field athlete switched from male-identified to female-identified in the middle of his collegiate career and kept competing.
Or when… You get the point.
One Bad Social Experiment
Progressives are employing their typical empathy traps and cries of bigotry to force Americans, in nearly every facet of their lives, into participating in a series of experiments to test their latest baffling hypothesis: Gender is a social construct detached from biological sex. Men can be women and women can be men.
Make no mistake, the experiment is a gigantic disaster.
And it is being carried out almost entirely at the expense of women — a group American leftists frequently claim to support, empower and protect. All the while they use the other side of their mouths to advocate for biological men’s God-given right to use the women’s restroom and compete against already under-supported female athletes.
Far more concerning is the fact that progressives are receiving record buy-in on their transgender platform issues from biologically female citizens and activists — particularly women identifying with “intersectional feminism.”
What on Earth is Intersectionality?
If you pay attention to recent trends in politics, chances are you have seen signs at rallies like the Women’s March claiming that “The Future is Intersectional.”
Intersectionality, the creation of Kimberlé Crenshaw, is a sociological theory that augments the left’s oppressor-oppressed class-conflict model, as laid out by figures like Noam Chomsky, by focusing on the way victims of “oppression” struggle in America based on their membership in more than one victim group.
Crenshaw, a professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School and an African-American female that came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, began her formulations on intersectional theory as she attempted to bridge the gap between her efforts to “demarginalize” both women and blacks early in her career.
As defined by the Oxford Dictionary, intersectionality is “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”
The theory believes it to be manifest that white, cisgender males are the least oppressed class in American society — which must mean they are the oppressors — while people like homosexuals, women and those of non-Caucasian ethnicity are oppressed.
Thus, it stands to reason that if you hold membership in more than one oppressed group, you must be exponentially more disadvantaged.
Intersectional advocates ask that society’s marginalized communities recognize one another not for their differences, but for the idea that they are all victimized. Minority groups should meet at the intersection of their identities — where they are all marginalized — and come together to advocate as one large group.
Initially, the idea was to get first, and second-wave feminists, who were predominantly white and upper-class, to recognize that women of color were more disadvantaged than them and that they could achieve more by joining together as a larger force with one thing in common: their victimhood as females.
Feminism Goes the Way of Ophelia
Aside from the clunky academic jargon it employs, the theory is not devoid of merit. Obviously, at the time it was beneficial and right for women of all races to come together for their own common good.
Unfortunately, however, this theory has been carried out well past its logical ends — to the point of absolute insanity.
As Ben Shapiro said in a Prager University video last June, intersectionality is the reason one may now see feminists and homosexual activists at pro-Palestinian rallies or things of that nature.
“They’re so united by their victim status that it doesn’t matter that Islamists throw gays off buildings or murder female family members who defy their father’s wishes,” Shapiro said.
In its success, the left has made these “structurally disadvantaged” groups — particularly women — so hyper-focused on their collective victimhood that they are willing to throw in their lot with groups whose cause is not only antagonistic but downright antithetical to their own in order to fight some indefinable and impalpable “oppressor.”
Their effort to weaponize modern feminism has resulted in women linking themselves at the hip with Islamic or transgender activists regardless of the fact that these groups do nothing but incidentally, or in some cases purposefully, set back the cause of women. So pervasive is this new ideology that biologically female feminists even fear being ostracized by their fellow feminists should they dare speak out against the conception that biological men can suddenly be women.
Feminism has entirely lost its identity. In fact, it seems modern feminism is intent on going the way of William Shakespeare’s Ophelia.
But Ophelia had every intention of killing herself, where feminists seem to think they may just be going for a quick swim. And so long as the modern women’s movement signs on with the intersectional left, it may as well be signing its own suicide note.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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