Mick Hartley

Further to the Democrat problem with gender (previous post) – an issue they seem determined to ignore, despite its relevance to their position today sitting on their hands while Trump destroys  the economy and America's reputation – here's Matt Osborn, via Kara Dansky's Terf Report:

Democrats have a serious problem understanding the opposition they face on issues related to ‘gender identity.’ Their mental model of the phenomenon is broken because it ascribes all opposition to the Republican Party and evil designs drawn up in prayer-filled backrooms. This caricature is false and misleading. It does not help Democrats to understand the real world, or to win elections.

Every opponent of the state taking children away from families in the name of their ‘gender identity’ is explained away as a bigot. Every opponent of male bodies in female sports is dismissed as a right wing reactionary. Women who object to naked male bodies in their restrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, gym showers, and prisons: these women are all exactly the same as white supremacists, to Democrats.

But in reality, the opposition to ‘gender identity’ originated on the left. Kara Dansky and I have the receipts. We were warning Democrats all this time. They know we exist, but we were not supposed to exist, so Democrats still pretend we don’t exist. Until they acknowledge us, and face up to the reckoning over ‘gender identity,’ Democrats will remain out of power, no matter how bad the Republicans get.

Worth a read.

Dansky identifies the pernicious role of Queer Theory, Gayle Rubin, and Judith Butler in the normalization among elites of the luxury belief that female bodies are somehow socially constructed. In the ivory tower of the academy, “women are not oppressed by men on the basis of sex, but on the basis of the existence of the binary category of sex,” Dansky writes. “This is fundamentally anti-feminist.”

Dansky “knew women voting Trump in 2020 because of this issue,” Dansky writes in The Abolition of Sex. And “unless Democrats change course immediately and publicly hold themselves accountable for what they have done to women and girls as a sex class, I have no plans to vote for them in 2024. And I am not alone,” she wrote in 2023.

She speaks for many opponents of ‘gender identity’ who began on the left, who mostly still hold out hope for party reform, but remain disappointed with the party. Dansky grew up believing “that the Democrats were the party that cared about the working class, feminism, free speech, gay rights, and civil rights generally.”

Today the Democrats pretend to not know what a woman even is. Democrats cannot be the party of women and also pretend that they don’t know what a woman is. Working class voters have no time for such contradictions.