Why Bashing Feminism for Trans Insanity is a Misfire

As a 13-year-old girl I was diagnosed with malignant hemangiopericytoma, an exceedingly rare, slow-growing cancer that was not widely studied. 

But, doctors assured me, if you had to get cancer, this was the kind to get. In the unlikely event that it metastasized, it would likely migrate to the lungs or bones, which would worsen the prognosis. Had I been born ten years earlier, my leg might have been amputated. I deeply understand why it’s important to halt not only cancer’s growth, but anything and everything else that is, at its core, toxic. And for a good portion of my life, I put feminism, which I also considered as mostly embarrassing, in that category.

I grew up in conservative Christianity, which, 9 times out of 10, means we voted Republican. My parents weren’t particularly political, but we believed that it was a sin to kill babies, and that mattered more than anything else. Since killing babies was evil, obviously the people championing infanticide were also evil. The people championing that were feminists, so that means feminism was evil. That was it. That was the depth of the analysis. I didn’t need to complicate it further. Feminism and baby killing were basically synonymous.

Therefore, it didn’t bother me all that much when people around me made inflammatory comments about feminism being “cancer”. Cancer was bad, and baby killing was bad. Both needed to be stopped. It was that simplistically reasoned. The thinking was that shallow and that same shallowness pervades much of the political right. Baby killing is bad, and that’s that.

Yet when I learned about “radical feminism,” as opposed to liberal feminism, which is truly a disaster, things began to change. As it turned out, despite their ardent support of abortion, radical feminists vocally oppose a number of the same things I do as conservative Christian: pornography, surrogacy, prostitution, and the erasure of women due to transgender ideology. The more I worked alongside some of these women, the more I realized that the language they were speaking was actually my native tongue.

These women cared about all the things I had silently suffered my entire existence as a female: sexual abuse, domestic violence, rigid gender roles that forced them to shrink into boxes that didn’t jive with their personalities. Thus began my deep dive into the history of feminism and my awareness that the movement as a whole is about a whole lot more than abortion. Many continue to be unaware of how hellacious life was for so many women before feminism entered the picture. But the point that needs to be made here is this: Regardless of how badly astray the movement has gone in recent years, and it has indeed gone astray, original feminism was largely a necessary response to men behaving badly and abusing their power.

Before feminism, battered women had no means of escaping their abusers. We couldn’t pursue higher education, vote on the laws that govern us, wear pants, or pursue healing in a rape crisis shelter. Why? Because of a hot-button word that makes many conservatives stop listening and shut down the second they encounter it: patriarchy. Men had decided from on high that God had given all the power and all the valid opinions exclusively to them to be exercised on behalf of womankind without our input or consent.

And it was not going well. An increase in alcohol consumption during this time in history yielded a sharp increase in the volume of domestic violence, from which women had very little recourse. Such women were literally trapped in homes at the mercy of violent, drunken monsters. They were not legally recognized as citizens. First wave feminism was necessary!

Yet if you listen to any number of popular conservative or Christian influencers, all the world’s ills, from abortion to transgenderism, can be traced directly back to first wave feminism as if that’s the entirety of the conversation and as though feminism were the root of the problem rather than a response to abusive men.

From Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire to The Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry to even writer Samuel Sey, the mantra is essentially the same: Feminism is cancer – all of it, from inception — even the suffrage part. Their wholesale rejection of and disdain for feminism has rendered them seemingly incapable of acknowledging the brave and tireless efforts of many of the radical feminists who've labored long and hard toward similar goals in the trans wars and at great personal cost. Rather than applauding the moral courage required for these women to stand against their own tribe, these men insist on using their positions of influence to tear these women down, demanding compliance with the chauvinistic ideology that contributed to the mess in the first place.

Amid the insanity of the trans contagion, right-wingers seem tempted to lay blame at the feet of feminism without unpacking just what it is and what it means. Walsh and others are clearly operating from a different premise here, but it's mistaken to paint feminism with as broad a brush as they are given some of the important gains it accomplished.

Feminism, definitionally, is advocacy for the fair treatment of women, no more, no less. I am no more willing to cede the definition of this word to the extremists who abuse it than I am to cede the definition of the word “woman” to men in dresses. 

Words must continue to mean things, and if we throw out this baby with its corresponding bathwater in favor of the rigid gender cages Walsh and company prescribe as the solutions, we are only recycling the very formula that created the problem.

Earlier this week, The Blaze’s Jason Whitlock wrote a dreadful response to the Barbie movie with a thesis that echoed the sentiments of many of these men: The solution to the mess of feminism is the heavy hand of the patriarchy.

Such views are rather blame-shifty a la Genesis 3:12: “The woman you gave me did give me the fruit, and I did eat.” Notice the complete absence of awareness of the centuries-long abuses of women: the diminishing of our voices, the sidelining of our gifts, the objectification of our bodies, the commodification of our wombs, the chronic contempt for our strength.

To be fair, substantive arguments do exist about how second wave feminism contributed to an unfortunate breakdown in how we understand human beings as male and female and the eventual large-scale embrace of trans ideology and they are worth considering. Those who argue along those lines have a serious point when they note how feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was famous for her defense of women "on the basis of sex," wound up in one of the final moves of her career diminishing the female sex by voting in favor of enshrining “transgender status” into civil rights law in the Bostock v. Clayton County decision at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020. Maybe there was indeed a toxic root and trajectory there. 

To go back even further in history, it’s also fair to ask whether or not the existentialist philosophy of John Paul Sartre, of whom another feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir was a contemporary, ultimately damaged women as a class. In a December 2012 address, right before transgenderism saturated seemingly every square inch of the Western world, Pope Benedict XVI addressed many social ills as he honed in on what being human really means, citing de Beauvoir’s famous line “one is not a woman, but becomes so” as the source of “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. Knowing many feminists, they would probably reply that de Beauvoir was speaking of the process of female socialization, not their ontological existence as a sex. 

All this to say, we could be having a genuinely interesting and intelligent discussion about these issues but the rightwing male talking heads now bashing feminism all day long are not the slightest bit interested in sifting through those substantive nuances; they are battering rams against the shout-your-abortion feminists, who they see as one and the same as all feminists. It’s such lazy thinking and it's wrong. 

And where does Jesus feature in any of this? I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again from my continued resolve in my staunchly pro-life position: Abortion either breaks a woman’s heart, or it hardens it. It is my sincere and deeply held belief that women will never be truly liberated until we are free from the scourge of abortion. But the shout-your-abortion feminists Walsh likes to loathe are still created in the Imago Dei. They still deserve to be treated with the love of Christ even as we resist their advocacy of death. As Christians, we must insist upon doing both and I don’t see near enough of that godly ethos from Christian males who are fortunate enough to have large platforms. 

In fact, my feed is often full of Christian male voices denouncing feminism while platforming pastors who have presided over monstrous abuses of women and children. They spout diminutive jabs at women and make clarion calls to repeal the 19th amendment,  It’s full of admonitions to make elitist Christian pioneer cosplay (which most families can’t even afford) the new norm.

We can’t end the abortion scourge by taking pot shots at feminism. You solve the problem of abortion by learning to value women as much as you value babies. The answer to feminist overreach is not patriarchal oppression. The answer to both extremes is the freedom that is found in Christ. There was no gender hierarchy in Eden, and there will be no gender hierarchy in Heaven. The curse of the Fall is not meant to be worn as some sort of badge of holiness or prescription for created order.

Men and women, patriarchy and feminism, both spawned the culture war beast. Men and women must work together as equals to fix it. The real cancer in this equation is the enmity between the sexes that is used to keep us slinging mud at each other instead of working together to stomp on the devil’s ugly head.