Left-wingers used to champion women – now they appear to have abandoned them
These days Labour is more likely to be found selfimmolating over the word ‘female’ than defending women’s rights
OThe Left’s new obsession with defending the rights of biological men over those of women is an all too familiar reverberation
ne of the hallmarks of contemporary Leftist thinking is what the poncy (hands up) call “defamiliarisation”: taking something that is instinctively obvious and flipping it. Winston Churchill a hero? Wrong: he’s a racist. 9/11 was a hideous and uncalled for act of war? Wrong: it was America’s fault. Britain is one of the most diverse and welcoming countries on Earth? Wrong: it’s a systemically racist backwater still in thrall to its genocidal imperial past.
The latest and most shocking case of this mischief is the pretence that “woman” is not actually what you thought it was, but is rather whatever you want it to be, or nothing at all.
It has nothing to do with two X chromosomes and what follows from that: being physically weaker than men on average, generally having the capacity to menstruate, grow breasts, have children, breastfeed and – as radical feminists insist – being subject to the constant threat of male violence.
Not everybody on the Left thinks that there is no such thing as a woman beyond mere identity. The lifelong feminists accused of being transphobic, branded Terfs (transexclusionary radical feminists), certainly don’t. But the general sway of the Left, formalised in its political parties, has gone that way. This is painfully ironic, for it is the very parties who used to champion women – Labour in Britain, the Democrats in the US – that have now abandoned them.
This, at least, is the implication of the way “woman” has become a slur, avoided everywhere from courts to medical school classrooms. Last week there were gasps as Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, asked by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn to define “woman”, refused to do so, saying: “I’m not a biologist.”
Truth be told, I’d struggle to define “woman” on the spot in an interesting way: the nature of womanhood has been a hot topic for thousands of years, and with our ever-expanding powers and opportunities, our physical capabilities have grown too (we’re taller and stronger than previous generations; we can actively choose to have sex but never have children). The rudiments of our biology are real and fixed, but “woman” is not a neatly fixed entity, and nor should it be.
Still, Jackson’s deadening reply was more than the flailing of someone overthinking something. It was a statement of prickly erasure, coming as it did in the wake of the Lia Thomas victory. Two weeks ago Thomas, a transgender woman swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who previously competed as a man, came first in the women’s NCAA 500-yard championships in Atlanta. This was not the moment to roll over and play dead about the existence of women.
Indeed it was nothing short of bizarre to watch Blackburn, an anti-abortion Republican, spelling out the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, that “physical differences between men and women are enduring. The two sexes are not fungible. A community made up exclusively of one sex is different from a community composed of both.” Jackson looked blank: she didn’t know the quote.
In Britain, Labour has also left women feeling abandoned, and no wonder. Instead of decrying the Lia Thomas win as a mockery of fairness in women’s athletics, Charlotte Nichols, a Labour MP and former women’s and equalities spokesman, lambasted criticism of Thomas’s participation as “lazy transphobia”, prompting Olympic medallist Sharron Davies to tweet: “Disgraceful abandonment of women’s right to equal opportunities in sport. So disappointing from an MP supposedly representing females too I presume?” Meanwhile, Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s shadow secretary for women and equalities, and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, also refused to define “female”, shying away from that little w-word that might have been helpful. Some might remember that in 2020, a group called Labour MPs for Trans Rights, led by former leadership hopeful Lisa Nandy, signed a letter calling Woman’s Place UK, which defends biological womenonly spaces, a “transphobic hate group”. It was all mad and very bad.
It is almost unbelievable that as Russian bombs decimate Ukraine and the West is under assault from those who deplore our way of life, the Anglosphere continues to self-immolate over the meaning of the word woman. Yet there we are, using precious time – on air, in courts, in Westminster – rowing about terms such as “cervix havers” and “birthing parent”.
It can be hard to remember that until very recently most people didn’t have to think too hard about what women were. They were people first and foremost, but people with key differences from men that required recognition in medicine, sport, prison, social work, the law, and anywhere where violence against women is taken seriously. By the 2000s, this was utterly basic, widespread knowledge, and the interesting stuff was always to do with how far biology dictated women’s lives, and the battle to promote and sustain fair treatment and freedom from the most egregious forms of discrimination and assault.
Nobody remotely sane had the time, or felt the need, to begin to hash out – as if women were some kind of new species – what women were. And yet there we are, forced by the woke Left to reinvent the wheel, all while pretending there is no wheel. It has been disappointing that women have been abandoned by the Left, but not all that surprising. After all, the Left has a long history of misogyny: in 1970 the women’s liberation movement burst out of the frustration of socialist women tired of being treated as third-class citizens, there mainly to serve tea, provide sexual favours and have their ideas pinched by their beardy comrades.
History doesn’t repeat, but it sure does echo, and the Left’s new obsession with defending the rights of biological men over those of women is an all too familiar reverberation.