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Equality Act = Female Erasure

Why are so many liberals -- including liberal women -- willing to surrender safe spaces?
Screen Shot 2019-03-27 at 2.58.00 PM

Remember this (NSFW!) video of a male-to-female transgender going off on a GameStop employee in a fit of rage over “misgendering” — even kicking over a display? Under a proposed federal law supported by the Democratic Party, strong biological males like that would have federally guaranteed access to women-only spaces.

Abigail Shrier, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that the Equality Act is an attack on women. The article is paywalled, but here’s a peek:

It has become rightly fashionable to ridicule the idea of “safe spaces,” places where adults can hide and sulk like children avoiding ideas they find threatening. But women need actual safe spaces—not from intellectual challenge, of course, but from physical threat of harm from men. As a biological matter, most women are physically outmatched by men. Men are stronger and faster than we are, though we’re better able to tolerate pain and tend to live longer.

House Democrats introduced a bill this month that would outlaw safe spaces for women. The Equality Act—so called because, to put it charitably, Democrats excel at branding—purports merely to extend protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to people who are gay and transgender. Insofar as it would prohibit landlords from evicting tenants and employers from firing employees based on sexual orientation, it is no doubt long overdue.

But the bill goes further, proposing to prohibit discrimination based on “gender identity.” That claim directly competes with the rights of women and girls. Any biological males who self-identify as females would, under the Equality Act, be legally entitled to enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms and protective facilities such as battered-women’s shelters. This would put women and girls at immediate physical risk.

More:

Are there sincere transgender people who ought to be accommodated with appropriate facilities? Of course. But their need, however real, doesn’t justify the immediate transfer of the hard-won rights of women and girls. No comparable sacrifice is asked of boys and men, who are unlikely to feel threatened by a biological woman in the restroom. No top male athletes are likely to lose competitions to biological women competing as men. Only women are made to sacrifice for the sake of this new “equality.” And what women and girls are being coerced to cough up isn’t an unfair privilege but a leveler they require. The bill is unlikely to become law while Republicans control the Senate or White House. But this isn’t the first time the Democrats have introduced the Equality Act, and it won’t be the last. It’s a proposal worth taking seriously because it provides a glimpse of the left’s willingness to sacrifice women and girls to those wolves in sheep’s clothing—transgender or not—who would take advantage of them.

Read it all.

If you have time, here’s a link to an hourlong panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation from earlier this year, in which women leaders from the Left talk about why the Equality Act amounts to “female erasure.”

Radical egalitarianism at its most berserk. It is stunning to think that we have reached a point in this culture in which the only thing protecting women from the total hegemony of biological males is the Republican Party. Why are so many women so eager to surrender so much?

I can understand wanting to provide transgenders with a certain amount of legal protection, but this goes way too far. If you are a biological female who supports this move, help me to understand why. Help me to understand why even if you are willing to be so tolerant, every other female — including women who have been raped — should be forced by federal law to do so?

 

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