The "All Lives Matter" of the Gender Debate

Whenever the topic of racism arises, there are two phrases you will never hear me say: I won’t say “black lives matter.” This is not because I disagree with the value of black lives; it’s because I equate the slogan with a Marxist dumpster fire of an organization that is aggressively hostile to women and that, ultimately makes an already bad problem worse. I may say something like “Value black lives,” or “protect black lives” if we’re talking about race-based violence, but “black lives matter” is not my preferred motto.

On the flipside, you will also not hear me saying “All lives matter” or “It’s a sin problem, not a skin problem.” And again, this is not because I have a problem with the sentiment of all lives mattering. Of course they all matter. Is racism a sin problem? One hundred percent yes.

But while both statements are ultimately true, I find that they are often used to justify a widespread refusal to actually name or tackle the very specific problem of racism.

It's like going to the doctor and getting a vague diagnosis of cancer. If the doctor won't tell you what type of cancer you have or where the tumor is located, how can you possibly be expected to figure out how to effectively treat it? You can't just nuke your entire body and call it good. You need to target the problem areas.

“All lives matter” refuses to do this. It’s an attempt to circumvent the really tedious, humbling work of listening, caring, repenting, and wound binding that would bring true healing. There are people alive today who know what it’s like to be forced to use “the colored” water fountains. We are not as far removed from the scourge of racism as we like to believe we are. We need to be able to say this.

Now to be clear, I do think a lot of the proposed “solutions” to racism are pretty heinous and will end pretty badly. If the goal is retribution rather than restoration, we’re not going to end up anywhere near the place Dr. King envisioned. That’s an issue. Still, the point remains that we can never fix the problems we refuse to specifically name.

I see a lot of parallels here when it comes to the great gender debate that wages between the patriarchal theobros and those who oppose them, only this time instead of differences in race being the issue of contention, it’s differences in biological sex.

Theobros weaponize biological sex on a daily basis and to the detriment of women. The argument goes something like this (I’ll paraphrase with a degree of intended hyperbole for effect): “The reason God made men’s bodies different than women’s bodies is because He designed men for different roles than women. Here’s a list of 5300 non-biblical conclusions we’ve drawn from these biological distinctions in a way that always gives men all the power and reduces women to passive, submissive, gentle, and largely voiceless breeders.”

Am I being snarky? Yeah. But that’s what it boils down to. I’ve personally had one of the heavy hitting theobros tell me that my intellect was of “questionable value” in this world because my primary purpose is to pop out kids.

The biological differences between the sexes are perpetually abused to grant men power and to subjugate women. No one in the theobros’ spheres of influence ever seems to question the quantum leap between the acknowledgement of women’s smaller musculature and the conclusion that this means we womenfolk should therefore be prohibited from owning credit cards or casting a vote in an election. These guys run perpetually amok with their chauvinistic hogwash framed as surrender to God’s original design.

So it’s not too terribly hard to understand why the women suffocated by these misogynistic cultural expectations would work overtime to downplay the distinctions between the sexes. I saw this pretty prominently yesterday on a Twitter feed initiated by a brilliant woman named Dr. Laura Robinson, and in many ways, she conducted something of a masterclass in denouncing the nonsense of the theobros in this arena. There were parts of the thread that made we want to stand and applaud.

But the applause was short-lived as I sniffed what was coming next from a mile away. There, nestled in the subthreads was the first hint of trans support, which is the inevitable conclusion of blurring the overtly distinguishing lines between the sexes. Sure enough again this morning, more tweets from Dr. Robinson poo pooing opposition to trans ideology and categorizing legitimate concerns as essentially politically motivated pearl clutching. It was super disappointing but not entirely surprising.

Maybe a more poignant example of this type of sex denialism happened earlier this week when swimmer Riley Gaines posed the following question to a respected Ph.D. level anthropologist. She asked him, “If you were to dig up two humans a hundred years from now, both man and woman, strictly off the bones, could you do it?”

The obvious answer is yes, but that’s not the answer he gave. He said, “No.” And the entire room erupted with laughter and the degree of scorn his obvious dishonesty had earned. Because everyone knew he was lying. Everyone knew the differences were obvious to the naked eye of even an untrained nobody.

And we see this type of nonsense playing out over and over again in the context of the transjacking of women’s sports. You can stick a 6’7’’ grown man on a college women’s basketball team (Yes, this actually happened), and instead of crying foul at the obvious injustice of this, we get a ton of whataboutism. “Well some women are that tall, too.” As though height were the only inequality in play when you’re dealing with the male bodied privilege of increased musculature, bone density, O2 capacity, and a litany of other advantages people want to ignore en route to a few virtue signal points.

I mean, the reality is this: Men and women are dramatically different from one another. Since the dawn of time, women have been oppressed on the basis of our sex and, in turn, have fought tirelessly to secure incredibly necessary (and sometimes even life-saving) sex-based protections. We are abused by men because men are physically stronger than us as a class, and we are unable to overpower them. You don’t have to like it. I personally hate it. But it’s objectively true. Title IX exists because of the differences in our bodies.

So to say, “Hey, there really aren’t many differences. We’re pretty much the same” isn’t half the solution people seem to think it is. The fact of the matter is that we ARE different, and we are different by design. Obviously procreation is a major part of the reason our bodies are designed differently, and it’s a beautiful thing, but pretending like God signed off on half the rigid gender stereotypes the theobros like to frame as “biblical” is absurd.

Just as many conservatives try to eliminate racism by pretending like racial categories are irrelevant and passé, many progressives try to eliminate sexism by pretending like sex categories are irrelevant and passé. Both approaches keep actual justice at bay.

We can acknowledge biological differences while opposing those who weaponize those differences to keep women small. But saying we’re all the same is like saying “All lives matter.” It robs us of the ability to name a specific kind of harm experienced by a specific group of people at the hands of those with more power. I’m not eager to cede that ground.