Gender Critical Feminism - God’s Good Creation

June 9, 2022

Feminist Says Mainstream Liberals Have No Idea

Kara Dansky authored The Abolition of Sex, which I have read, and was an ACLU public defender for 15 years. She is also a gender critical feminist who warns; “Mainstream liberals have no idea what the consequences” will be of putting the following line in a proposed Congressional bill called the Equality Act:

“sex (including gender identity).”

Self described liberal journalist, Matt Taibbi interviews Dansky in his latest Substack piece.

Meet the Censored: Kara Dansky

The feminist author of The Abolition of Sex has become the ultimate example of a new propaganda phenomenon, which denounces leftists as right-wing when they say unpopular things

Here are a few quotes.

Matt Taibbi: There’s an interesting passage in The Abolition of Sex where you talk about how feminists are used to getting this treatment from the right, not so used to getting it from the left. What’s happening there?

Kara Dansky: I think a lot of people are very confused, and I think that’s completely understandable because our media has confused them. I think people really don’t know what’s going on. There’s a bill I don’t think we’ve talked about, called the Equality Act… It was originally introduced in 2015 by Senator Merkley. If you read about it in mainstream papers, it’ll say that it’s meant to protect LGBTQ people, but what it does is it completely redefines the word sex to include so-called gender identity. It does that explicitly. It says “sex (including gender identity).”

Mainstream liberals have no idea what the consequences of that are. For example, in California today, there is a public accommodation state law that defines sex in the most ridiculous, garbled, meaningless way, but one thing it does is it includes gender identity. It was on that basis that a man was permitted to enter the women’s section of the nude spa and expose himself, basically. The Equality Act would do what California already does in public accommodations all over the country. Any man can enter any space that is supposed to be designated for women whenever he wants to, on the basis of his so-called gender identity.

Matt Taibbi: Critics will say, “So what?” What’s the real consequence? Why shouldn’t we just get over it and change our thinking, as was done with other movements?

Kara Dansky: We’re literally dealing with a situation today where female prisoners are being housed in prisons with male rapists and murderers. That is actually happening. That’s not theoretical. I really think that that needs to be a national scandal, and I don’t understand... When a local Seattle station picks up a story in March of 2021 about male prisoners and rapists being housed in the women’s prison, and not a single national outlet picks it up, I just think that’s astonishing. That’s very real. It’s literally happening today, right now.

Matt Taibbi: Here’s the disconnect for me. There’s so much attention and sensitivity to the issue of violence against women in all other arenas — except this one. Do you have an explanation for that?

Kara Dansky: It is astonishing. Well, I don’t really get to ask that question to people on the left or media. When I ask that question to conservatives, they’re blown away. They agree with the question, and they don’t understand it either. But you’re right. If a man exposes himself on a bus, he will be charged with a crime, rightfully so. The victim of that crime is going to say, “This is an example of Me Too.” But if a man exposes himself in the naked section of a women’s spa, under California law, he gets to be validated as stunning and brave.

The reason you’re having a disconnect is that it doesn’t make sense. Often, I forget. I reached the point a long time ago that I just had to accept that this doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense in terms of logic, and it doesn’t make sense in terms of politics. That’s just the situation we’re dealing with.

Read the whole thing.

+++

June 7, 2022June 7, 2022

Feminist Facing Up to Three Years in Prison Over Tweets

Christina Ellingsen Is Under Investigation In Norway

In a Tweet she questioned the belief that men (biological males) could be lesbians. Police are investigating because in January 2021 Norway introduced “gender identity” into their hate crime policy. And now women are being persecuted for stating biological facts.

Full Story here.

"I am under police investigation for campaigning for women’s rights, because to certain groups, the fact that women and girls are female and that men cannot be women, girls, mothers or lesbians, is considered hateful,” Ellingsen told Reduxx.

"Women are not protected against hate speech in Norway, but men who claim to be both lesbian and a woman, are protected both on the grounds of gender identity and on the grounds of sexual orientation,” Ellingsen said.

"The fact that police are legally able to investigate and persecute women who engage in women’s rights is concerning. This is new territory in Norway, so the outcome of the investigation is important, both if the case is dismissed and if it leads to trial.”

In 2021, a Norwegian man was sentenced to 21 days in prison and a fine of 15,000NRK after being found guilty of “insulting” and “misgendering” a trans-identified male on Facebook.

Is this the world we want to live in?

+++

June 1, 2022June 2, 2022

Coddling Generation Safety Blankey? Or Affirming Shared Truths?

Having been on the receiving end of student protests in the UK, philosopher Kathleen Stock in an important piece says the following about today’s all too often ”offended” Gen Z.

There’s a now-standard story about the psyche of the student that protests about speech, popularised by Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, and advanced by Frank Furedi before them. This story says: the parents of these students probably overprotected them in childhood and adolescence, smoothing their way through school and praising them to the hilt, whilst playing up the spectre of multiple physical hazards and risks outside the home. With fewer opportunities for independent interaction with peers, and with the internet as their main proxy for real-life experience, the students haven’t learnt the kind of resilience and confidence that would allow them to absorb the feelings of anxiety produced by hearing robust challenges to their views. Instead, they expect the adults around them to take care of their needs and to protect them from unpleasant experiences. They arrive at university as passive consumers in search of parental substitutes, revelling in their own sense of victimhood, and not as autonomous and effective self-movers. This, in other words, is Generation Z framed as Generation Safety Blanket.

I’ve also read Lukianoff and Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind in the past year. $9.99 on Kindle is a steal!

A timely investigation into the new “safety culture” on campus and the dangers it poses to free speech, mental health, education, and ultimately democracy.

The generation now coming of age has been taught three Great Untruths: their feelings are always right; they should avoid pain and discomfort; and they should look for faults in others and not themselves. These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility.

The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations.

The subtitle is “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation For Failure.” But Stock isn’t sure they got it completely right. She has some other ideas about the dysfunctions of today’s youth.

All the talk today is about “safeguarding” “safe spaces” etc. And the desire to reduce “harm.” What about undeniable Truth? Is that available to us today? Not completely, but truly (verily, verily). Are some things, if not all things, certainly knowable by the community? And would that reduce, not increase harm?

Some say yes. Others say no.

As a Christian I would point to, for example, the creation of a bi-natured cosmos, Heaven and Earth, Male and Female, Soul and Body (I’m an equality dualist! Not a Platonic Dualist. Read more about that here.)

Stock would not follow me along those lines. But she would say:

The old idea of the University as a vibrant and cohesive community of individuals, forced into productive relation with one another in the shared pursuit of truth, is very old hat. For a start, nobody really believes in truth anymore.

Well. Some of us do. Including Stock.

She offers sound advice to isolated individuals (primarily social media denizens) and warns those who have “become far too cocky about (their) own moral judgements.” The reason for this precise warning is because “body and soul” interactions matter. There is no substitute for real body and soul community. For “shared communal activities with others face-to-face.” This will “not only help you to develop a full range of moral capacities, but also (give) you a sense of proportion.”

Because LIFE is not exactly as YOU experience it.

Civil interactions with those with whom you might disagree are a must in a civil society. Otherwise, we are reduced to power struggles, most often framed by today’s Critical Theorists as a struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Or cynical political activists more concerned with “winning” than true Justice for All, rich and poor. For them, there are no real Truths, just power relationships between groups. And if you are moral, in the sense they define morality, you will align yourself with marginalized groups (real or imagined) or with your political party and “win.” By any means necessary, if it comes to that.

Of course the classic Christian response (not Stock’s) is to remind everyone that all of us, white, black, brown, etc…rich and poor, male or female are broken people who frequently miss the mark of becoming truly human, which is to say human like Jesus. Our job as Christians is to humbly point toward a pathway of real recovery, body and soul. Only found “in Christ.” For rich and poor. Male and Female.

Stock reminds us that our own moral judgements need to be tested “in the crucible of daily human relations” where we can get “good feedback.”

For Christians, that must mean community dialogue with Scripture, the Church Universal and our Historic Traditions.

But far too often today’s social justice warriors are not interested in dialogue and feedback, certainly not with the past. Add to that the fact that so many kids today are fed an unending series of “catastrophic” possibilities UNLESS they get involved in rescuing the planet, or standing up for someone else’s “identity” they are told great harm will result.

So….

They shout. They cancel. They shutdown. Those cocky young “speech-sanitizers.”

Disrespectfully sure of themselves, they cancel their opponents. Ironically, all for the sake of “inclusion.”

By not wanting to cause perceived harm to expressive individuals (like themselves) or to the planet, they silence “immoral” dissent. For the pursuit of real and sometimes unavoidably messy communal interaction, which may assist in uncovering difficult to uncover truths, and tempering their own sharp edges, they don’t seem to care. They feel hurt themselves, or they virtue signal by “hurting” for others. Because they “know” enough to know that those who disagree must be oppressors, or on the side of oppression and therefore must be silenced.

The alternative of being open to disagreement, and allowing those who speak the Truth as they understand Truth, a Truth which may sometimes hurt. A Truth that may be critical of individual choices….simply cannot be allowed. Besides. For them, there is only “my truth and your truth.” And they have organized to see that their truth wins. They are vigorously for the “victims” after all. So they must be right.

Any deviations must be silenced by the speech-sanitizers clutching their “harmless” safety blankeys.

With this logic expressive individualists may only be “affirmed.” All 88 genders (at last count). At all costs. Unfortunately, as I’ve documented on this blog, those costs will be many.

Because Too much caring, not enough sharing is not truly caring at all.

Read the whole thing.