10 Comments
Mar 20, 2023Liked by Kaeley Triller Harms

You may have listed 100 women here. What's that old saying about the voice of one man (Matt Walsh) being as loud as 100 women?

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Walsh is not exactly walking on water. He has usefully drawn attention to some rot associated with trans/gender ideology, but peddling some questionable arguments and premises of his own -- notably that sex & gender are the same. As I've argued here in another comment, not a particularly tenable or useful argument:

https://kaeleytrillerharms.substack.com/p/stop-asking-where-are-the-feminists/comment/13836413

BTW, not terribly impressed with The Distance that they deleted a comment of mine and closed commenting on this post of yours:

https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/shupe-dogging-in-the-videodrome

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Mar 20, 2023Liked by Kaeley Triller Harms

I'm proud to say I've appeared as a trans widow who published a memoir (there are less than half dozen of us) and was interviewed on Mother Erasure at WDI youtube channel. Kaeley and all the others are on my list of women to be thankful for.

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Mar 20, 2023Liked by Kaeley Triller Harms

Bravo for this article. Your passion is evident and your strength is “from above.”

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Mar 20, 2023Liked by Kaeley Triller Harms

So many heroes to choose from!

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An unexplored topic to add on is how "bathroom rights" were taken wholesale from disability activists. People with bowel cancer or a catheter (or, like me, an ostomy bag) are often stuck at home because of the lack of public, accessible bathrooms. Nobody cares.

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"Where are YOU?"

Here .... 😉🙂

But a pretty thorough and comprehensive listing of the many women and women's groups who have been front and center battling the rather toxic consequences of transgender ideology. Sad that, as the tweets you linked to suggest, too many men are outright dickheads -- and rather clueless that, as Canadian suffragette Nellie McClung once put it, "no nation rises higher than its women":

https://isabelmetcalfe.ca/enduring-spirit-of-the-famous-5/

How does that famous poem by pastor Martin Niemöller go? Something about,

"First they came for the women, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a woman"? .... 🤔🙄

In any case, to directly answer your question, and not to steal anyone's any woman's thunder, there have, in fact, been no shortage of men there at the barricades with the women, myself included. For example, see my several posts from some 4 years ago on Medium, the first of which is now updated and on my own Substack:

https://medium.com/@steersmann/the-imperative-of-categories-874154213e42 (Sept 2018)

https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/the-imperative-of-categories

https://medium.com/@steersmann/reality-and-illusion-being-vs-identifying-as-77f9618b17c7 (May 2019)

Not that I'm angling for any "cookies" thereby, but I think the points I elucidated there -- few if any that were unique to me -- speak to some "systemic flaws" in the whole women's movement to turn that transloonie tide. Ones just as prevalent and "problematic" now as they were then -- and have been for several decades since transgenderism first became a "thing".

Virtually impossible to summarize even my two essays in a couple of paragraphs, even more so all of that history. However, it seems there is a great deal of ideological claptrap in much of feminism, most of it related to feminism's promotion of the concept of gender which the transloonies have more or less "weaponized" to the detriment of society in general, and of women in particular. For example, see this essay by Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender

But somewhat more broadly, and partly because you mentioned Kara Dansky, I see she recently republished an essay of hers that had been first published in The Federalist several years ago. She has some good points, and some very questionable ones, but this passage more or less accurately summarizes the problem:

“It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is in crisis about the meanings of the words 'sex' and 'gender'. We are all victims of this crisis, but the primary victims are women and girls."

https://karadansky.substack.com/p/democrats-like-me-are-furious-with

However, given that any dozen feminists are likely to have several dozen conflicting views on what is meant by "gender", one might reasonably argue that, to a not inconsiderable extent, feminists and women in general have contributed greatly to that dog's breakfast, and are thereby the authors of their own misfortunes. Which is not at all to the benefit of either women or of society.

But none of that is to say that I think the concept of "gender" is worthless -- some feminists have more or less reasonably defined it to be synonymous with feminine and masculine personalities and personality types:

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/feminism-gender/#GenFemMasPer

As has the late Justice Scalia:

"The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf

But all of that may in fact be the way off the horns of a rather painful and enervating dilemma. As evolutionary biologist Colin Wright put it, though "confusion" is a major understatement:

"Most confusion about 'gender' results from people not defining it. Many definitions are in circulation:

1. Synonym for sex (male/female)

2. A subjective feeling in relation to one's sex

3. Societal sex-based roles/expectations

4. Sex-related behavior

5. Personality traits"

https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1234040036091236352

Item (1) seems the go-to position of most people on the Right, item (2) probably encompasses what is meant by "gender identity", and items 3, 4, & 5 might reasonably qualify as the basis for putting "gender" on something like a scientific footing. As I've argued in my Welcome post.

But the bottom line has to be that as long as we all have conflicting and contradictory definitions for both sex and gender, the latter in particular, so long will we be unable to resolve underlying issues.

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Great list, I would add researcher Dr. Debra Soh, a neuroscientist who specializes in gender, sex, and sexual orientation. https://www.drdebrasoh.com/

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As much as we all appreciate these women working hard on this issue, the fact stands: none of these policies would exist without the female vote. The overwhelming demographic that has put all this woke stuff in place is *women*. This is what men mean when say "where are the feminists". I assure you the women voting for woke policy see themselves as "feminists". All the ones I know who do, do.

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I Love this!!

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