SUNSHINE MARY: How transgenderism might inadvertently divide and conquer feminism.
Liberal feminists’ support of transgenderism forces them to hold two opposing beliefs simultaneously:
1. that gender is a social construct; therefore any inferiority that is detected in women is the result of sexism, and legal and social policies should be enacted, including spending lots of tax-payer money, to right these inequities,
but also…
2. that gender is a biological reality and thus transgendered people should be supported in their quest to look and behave like extreme versions of what traditionalists (i.e. normal people) believe about gender – that it is a biological reality, that there are only really two (male and female) and your sex heavily influences your behavior and preferences.
So far they’ve been okay with the cognitive dissonance that transgenderism causes. The problem for them is that other more normal people are beginning to notice that there is something entirely illogical about their beliefs.
This same problem arose when a woman tried to enroll her son in a Coloradan Girl Scout troop. At first, she was told that he couldn’t join because “he has boy parts.” (An aside: Note the absence of a father in the article. Only a mother and grandmother are mentioned.) Later, Girl Scouts of Colorado stated officially that any child could join who “lives life as a girl.” The statement thus recognizes “gender” norms (since living life as a girl presumably differs from living life as a boy) even as the international organization with which the scouts are associated seeks the deconstruction of such norms (see also here).