The battle between “transgender” and feminist activists has been heating up in recent years. The former want access to women’s sports and spaces to the chagrin of feminists defending their own special places. Yet generally unnoticed is that this war has been sparked by an underlying philosophy that, in a way, both groups share.
This issue is epitomized by two recent stories. The first is a Newsweek piece titled “Gender Dogma Threatens to Pulverize Women’s Rights,” which laments how women are being “erased” via policies that recognize men claiming to be women as in fact female. The second is an MSN.com-hosted feature entitled “The Lego survey that showed gender stereotypes are still alive and well,” which tells us that the Danish toy company “wants to say goodbye to [sex] stereotypes.” On the surface, the two stories appear to have little in common.
But what if the assumption used to attack sex “stereotyping” is the precise one enabling the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, a.k.a. “transgender”) movement?
The irony of the Lego announcement is that, in an effort to attract more girls (most Lego users are lads), the company conducted focus-group research with children and “found that girls and boys played with Legos differently from one another,” reported the liberal Atlantic in 2016. (The result was the “Lego Friends” line, which essentially amounts to “girly” Legos.)
But why do these and other male/female differences exist? Is it nature or nurture (or both)? Are there inherent sex differences that cause the “stereotyping,” or is it stereotyping that causes the sexes’ different behavior?
Of course, it could also be a combination, wherein biologically dictated behavioral sex differences are exaggerated by stereotyping (which, do note, is a negative description for the process of sex-specific child-rearing — SSC). Nonetheless, it’s clear what Lego’s recent anti-SSC announcement reflects: “gender” neutrality (GN) theory.
This is nothing new. Gaining currency in the 1960s and especially in the ’70s and ’80s, GN’s proposition is simple: The sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences and, therefore, raising boys and girls identically will result in their having identical interests and capacities. Under this theory, boys’ greater representation or performance in given areas (e.g., STEM) is only the result of societal conditioning that stigmatizes girls.
GN absolutely was an obligatory scientific position for decades, and opposing it too robustly, just as with today’s wokeness, absolutely could get you “canceled.” I and others of my generation were inundated with it growing up, and here are some examples of how seriously it was taken:
- Camille Paglia, an avowed lesbian and feminist (but a more common-sense-oriented one), mentioned years ago how other feminists would angrily corner her on college campuses in the ’70s and swear that hormones didn’t even exist — and that even if they did, they couldn’t possibly influence behavior.
- Psychologist and GN proponent John Money told a Canadian couple whose son’s private parts had been irreparably damaged during a botched circumcision that they should raise the boy as a girl; Money claimed the child would never know the difference and would live happily as a female. (It didn’t end well.)
- Even extending to athletics, feminists insisted that women would equal men in sports if given the same opportunities for a sufficiently long time. In fact, two researchers predicted that women’s running records would surpass men’s by the late ’90s. (In reality, the intersex performance gap in running actually widened in the ’90s.)
Why is this relevant here? Well, remember that the feminists pushed GN for decades, insisting that the sexes were identical except for the superficial physical differences. Yet this has a corollary:
If you change the superficial physical differences, you can become the opposite sex. If you’re a man, just maybe don a dress, grow your hair long and, perhaps, have “bottom surgery.”
This is essentially the MUSS activists’ position — and the feminists absolutely laid the groundwork for it. A leads to B.
Of course, feminists once found GN convenient (and often still do) because they wanted women to be allowed to do everything men did. And they realized that if women were fundamentally the same, it would make sense to treat them fundamentally the same. They thus had to convince people of the GN proposition.
Yet there was a contradiction. Based on GN, on an equality/identity argument, feminists
- wanted women in the Virginia Military Institute and Citadel;
- wanted women in police and fire departments;
- wanted women to be able to join Augusta National and other previously all-male clubs; and
- wanted girls to be able to compete in Little League and to be on other boys’ sports teams (even wrestling).
But they didn’t want boys and men on girls’ and women’s sports teams. Females could invade male spaces, but not vice versa. This was the standard, too — for a while.
Then along came the MUSS crew, calling them on their decades of equality claims. Along came the MUSS crew, justified by the same spirit, the one maintaining that actual, beyond-skin-deep sex differences either don’t exist or can be wished away.
The kicker is that while many feminists are complaining about MUSS interlopers, as in the Newsweek story, others are still banging on about about sex “stereotyping,” animated by a GN spirit, as in the Lego story. So Newsweek complains that we’re “silently witnessing the erasure” of women. But is it surprising that the female sex would be erased when, for decades, the feminists worked to erase (in people’s minds) their sex’s non-superficial distinctions?
Activists who long endeavored to convince people men and women are just interchangeable cogs are now shocked that people are acting as if men and women are just interchangeable cogs. And both sides here, the feminists and MUSS crew, while maintaining that all cogs are equal, are really just fighting over which cogs will be treated as more equal than others. The best outcome for society is if both sides lose.
