If people such as Douglas Murray and Brendan O'Neill hadn't spend so long in finally understanding that there is male privilege and that has been a huge factor in the success of the TRAs, I wonder if we'd be in the mess where women's rights need to be rescued to such a degree.
BO'N is a good writer and his contrast between Ginsburg and Jackson is striking as is the comparison of the times and what it's done to the discussion of abortion.
To Ginsburg, it was society’s deprivation of control to women, its restriction of a woman’s right to enjoy mastery over her biological self, that was dehumanising. It made a woman ‘less than a fully adult human’. Now it is the defence of a woman’s right to abortion that is apparently dehumanising.
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This is the context in which the threatened overturning of Roe v Wade is taking place. Anyone who says this context doesn’t matter, that all we are witnessing is a finessing and improvement of language to make it more inclusive, is lying to themselves. The context in which the Roe v Wade judgement was made in 1973 was one in which the women’s liberation movement was making waves. Placards demanded women’s rights and women’s power to choose. Women’s organisations demanded the right of women to work, to stand for office, to enjoy equal treatment. Activists demanded improved women’s health, to facilitate women’s liberty. In stark contrast, the context in which Roe v Wade now quakes under that first-draft judgement of the Supreme Court is one in which you can be called a bigot just for saying ‘women’s health’. In which talking about women and their sex-based rights has been rebranded as a species of bigotry. In which any woman who insists that women are real and therefore deserve their own sex-based rights and spaces risks being called a bitch, a TERF or a whore and being cancelled from polite society.
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[Even] though there has been a furious reaction from many liberals and leftists to that leaked anti-Roe v Wade draft judgement, this concern is unquestionably diluted by many of these people’s acceptance of the idea that sex is all in the brain, and that womanhood is a feeling, and that talking about biology is bigotry.
This is an excellent response to those who conflate the struggle for abortion rights and trans rights (NB: it's always important to recall the differences between the UK and US but the point holds here).
Following the Roe v Wade revelations, some in the woke set have argued that the fight for trans rights and the fight for abortion rights are the same struggle. This is completely untrue. The right to choose allows actual women to govern their lives. The right to identify as whatever sex you desire primarily allows actual men to pose as women and to insult any woman who dares to question his identity. Abortion rights expand women’s freedom. What passes for ‘trans rights’ these days too often restricts women’s freedom by punishing them for thoughtcrimes, for the bigotry of talking about sex-based rights, for their exercise of the freedom of association. Abortion rights fortify a woman’s government of her own body and life. Contemporary trans activism interferes with women’s sovereignty by co-opting the idea of womanhood, invading women’s spaces, and seeking to erase the very word ‘woman’. Even from abortion clinics. These are not the same thing. They are polar moral opposites, in fact.
I like Mary Harrington's thoughts on progressivism (nicely elaborated in her Triggernometry interview and an Unherd piece).
We need societal discussion that address the current concerns about liberty and the many threats to it that arise because we conform to the chilling effect of what happens to people (especially women in this arena of identity politics) who object to the erosion of our rights and freedoms.