Before
anyone worried about a 300 lb bearded man sharing dressing rooms,
saunas, and sports teams with the fairer sex, the war on single sex
spaces was being waged by feminists.
During
the 1970s, feminists demanded access to all-male clubs and insisted
that female sports reporters had the right to interview half-naked male
athletes. The consensual single-sex male space had all but disappeared
in the new century except as a distant memory. The triumph of feminism
further atomized male spaces and communities while leaving female ones
intact.
By the next decade, books like Hannah Rosin’s ‘The End of
Men (and the Rise of Women)’ forecast a world in which masculinity had
been reduced to an evolutionary dead end. Such hollow triumphalism still
persists in some feminist circles, but, as any biologist could have
explained, the end of men foreshadowed the end of women.
Men and women cannot in the long run exist without each other either biologically or societally.
The
feminist movement is using the same tactics against women that it did
against men. Feminism was not a preference for women over men, as its
useful idiots thought, but a profound hostility to the family and the
biological duality on which it was based. When feminism campaigned
around the idea that women were no different than men, too few
understood at the time that what it really meant was that neither men
nor women existed as unique beings.
Once the end had come for men, it would also come for women.
The
opposition of some feminists to the transgender movement may be
courageous, but it’s also hypocritical and self-serving. Did feminists
really think that male single-sex spaces would be dismantled while
female single-sex spaces would be left intact? The feminist movement,
like every other leftist identity politics cause, consisted of
chauvinists and leftists. The chauvinists believe in the supremacy of
the group while the leftists believe in abolishing the groups.
Much
as the black nationalists of the civil rights movement broke off from
the liberal consensus when it diverged from their racial supremacism,
some feminists have broken off into TERFs whose hostility to men has
only sharpened when confronted with the transgender movement.
The
Left weaponizes out-groups against in-groups, not because it loves the
out-group, but because its hatred of the in-group makes it a useful
lever for destroying all the groups. It does not believe in any group.
It finds, defines and sometimes creates disadvantaged groups, leads
their causes and then abandons them. It does not believe in races,
genders, nations, sexualities or any of the distinctions that it
weaponizes only to dismantle them.
The paradox of identity
politics is that it is wielded to eliminate races, genders, sexualities
and nations. After every new civil rights struggle has been won, the new
struggle dismantles the old. The transgender movement is only the
latest iteration of a familiar phenomenon that supersedes each
redefinition with a new redefinition that takes away the newly won
achievements.
A new oppressed group always comes along to expose
the old oppressed group as oppressors. And the cycle of oppression,
struggle and liberation begins again.
Single sex spaces for men
were attacked for representing male privilege. Now single sex spaces for
women are attacked on the same grounds. The universalization of gender
classes women with men as ‘cis’ oppressors of the transgenders. And,
when the time comes, the transgenders will be denounced as the
oppressors of the non-binaries or the asexuals.
Why settle for crossing gender when you can mix and match or abolish them entirely?
In
the identity politics paradigm, only some can be the heroes, but
everyone, from Holocaust survivors to the grandchildren of freed slaves,
will be made into villains.
The Left’s goal is to destroy the
categories whose divisions it exploits. Universalization, its underlying
mandate, eliminates not only the divisions of the moment, but all
divisions. The male club, the female dressing room and all the
sanctuaries that separate the sexes, have to go.
The resistance
to the transgender movement has been far too rooted in feminist
chauvinism and hostility toward men. Its assertions of victimhood are
falling on deaf ears because a new class of victims has emerged. A truly
meaningful resistance requires remembering what it is that makes men
and women different, and what the ‘gender binary’ really offers to all
of us.
Unless we reunite the way that the Left divided us, we
will be splintered by the infinite divisions and subdivisions of
identity politics. The natural divisions of sex are not only healthy,
they are meaningful, and they show us that men and women are incomplete
without the other. When these divisions are shattered, instead of
upheld, new divisions will form without end.
The feminist mantra
that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle still haunts a
‘gender critical’ movement that is entrenched in its hostility to men
and loves women only as victims. A negative vision of women as victims
inspires only resentment and is doomed to fail. The idea that women can
be men has proven to be equally disastrous as a generation of teenage
girls aspires to become men by cutting off body parts and mutilating
themselves into masculinity.
Women and men can only survive the
Left’s assault by standing together, not pulling apart. A feminism based
on hostility to men and masculinist movements based on hostility to
women just accelerate the breakup of the family and civilization. The
only path forward is not Gloria Steinem or Andrew Tate, it’s not women
hating men or men hating women, but the reunion of the sexes.
Men
and women are different. The dynamic complementary relationships that
form within romantic bonds, families, workplaces and intellectual
dialogues from those differences make humanity what it is. Cultures,
like Islam, that repress and sideline women, are hopelessly impoverished
and incapable of constructing a civilization based on anything other
than rape and murder. And an ‘End of Men’ culture is too busy wallowing
in feelings and empathy to make the hard decisions it needs to move
forward. Its streets are overrun with criminals, its borders with
invaders and its geopolitical map with rival powers. Its infrastructure
is collapsing and its institutions are running on inertia. Civilization
needs both men and women.
Women and men humanize each other, give
each other purpose and meaning, and introduce ways of thinking and
acting to one another that do not come naturally to the other. Secure
men and women also respect each other’s differences and the need to
retreat into single sex spaces for dignity, modesty, companionship and
the surroundings of people who are like them.
Single sex spaces
are an important element of sex differences. They allow men and women to
retreat to places where they temporarily do not need to accommodate a
very different sex and can socialize on the familiar and natural terms
of their biological natures. To permanently abide in single sex spaces
is fundamentally unhealthy, but to reject them entirely is destructive.
Beyond
the physical differences that make athletic competition across the
sexes into an absurdity in many arenas, men and women need a balance of
being in the company of those they naturally understand and those whom
they have to challenge themselves to understand.
To be who we
are, we need single sex spaces, and to be more than we are, we join with
the opposite sex. Feminism and the transgender movement, in line with
the leftist universalizing tendency, deny the ways we draw strength from
similarities and contrasts. The constant insistence on diversity above
all else is a nihilistic destructive impulse that destroys all.
We
must know who we are in order to bridge differences. Similarity and
diversity are both important. Without diversity, we do not grow, and
without similarity, we are torn apart.
Women and men draw
strength from who they are, the iconic models of their sex, the cowboys
and princesses, the soldiers and nurses, to become husbands and wives,
fathers and mothers, to become the best of their selves so that they can
offer that ideal to each other in a true partnership that is the basis
of a marriage, of a society and of a civilization.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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