Feminists Beware of Identity Ideology

Let me begin this commentary on a positive note. Fundamentally, I acknowledge feminists’ assessment that American society has in the past operated essentially as a patriarchy in which men dominate and to an extent repress females. Taking it one step further, I find suppression of woman specifically abhorrent among those global cultures whose religious norms or code of behaviors place womenkind in subservient, docile, self-effacing and cowering roles. This being said, my perception of debates, exchange of views, general dialogs about women’s rights inevitably or out of political necessity turn into partisan diatribes. It seldom fails that these invectives often lead some to fall into the trap of defining women and women’s issues solely in terms of procreation.

More recently a newer threat to addressing women’s rightful needs has come to the national forefront via Mainstream Media outlets, social websites, discourse and treatise. Rather than just reducing women’s needs and priorities to issues pertaining to their biological and reproductive capabilities, this radical dogma now threatens to erase biological women from the dialog altogether. The rapidly changing and ever-expanding ideology of supposed gender identity threatens to undermine women’s pecuniary, communal, and political progress in revolutionary ways. How so? Is not the term gender identity now being propagated by many progressives, politicians, secularists, and LBGTQ community activists to express an individual’s self-perception as male, female, both, neither, or something along that line or shall we say, spectrum? Has not the word gender in legal documents historically been understood to mean genetic sex or XX/XY genotype?  In addition, have not laws and policies been implemented to achieve gender equality specifically for females regardless of age? This being as it is, policies that treat people based upon their gender identity undermine decades of efforts to remedy historical and societal inequalities that disproportionally affect women and girls by benefiting any male who self identifies as a woman is contentious, problematic, and questionable. Gender identity ideology, and the scheme it demands, pose threats to Women’s Rights.

Individuals who identify as transgender, or anything else should be treated with dignity and respect and are entitled to the same human rights and protections as anyone else. However, these human rights and legal protections such as the rights to life, expression, and assembly, and freedom from infliction of pain and inhumane treatment apply to all human beings by virtue of our humanity, not because of group identification in any class identity subset. 

When America and many other Western governments and Intergovernmental Organization bureaucrats assert special rights for particular favored identity groups through new readings of decrees, laws, and treaties, they undermine the universality of human rights and the legitimacy of the human rights movement.

We as U.S. citizens must insist that Federal and State bureaucracies to include the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches and various other entities stay within the Constitutional authority granted them to safeguard fundamental rights for all men, women, and children. If not, we can only imagine what’s next.  U.S., doctors giving 13-year-old girls mastectomies, throwing 14-year-old girls into menopause, and surgically castrating 16-year-old boys. I misspoke. It’s already happening.