Maledom gets in the way of women's rights and respect

Adele wants recognition as maledom takes control of award system

Adele's remarks last month about loving being a woman were attacked—inevitably—by those who do not accept the reality of life.

In accepting an award for Album of the Year at the Brit Awards 2022 in London, and regretting the decision to remove male and female categories, she said: 

“I understand why the name of this award has changed, but I really love being a woman and being a female artist. I do! I’m really, really proud of us. I really, really am.”

For that simple statement she was roundly condemned by transgender activists as a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which is the term of abuse used against women who, in this era of speech control by the woke elite, are brave enough to claim the right to respect for those who acknowledge the binary nature of the sexes.

American newspaper columnist Maureen Callahan makes a good point:

There’s been a push of late to make arts awards gender-neutral. The Brit Awards may have been the only high-profile event to make the leap, but there are calls to erase “Best Actress” at the Oscars and “Best Female Vocal” at the Grammys — part of an overall movement to make gender irrelevant.

For a Gen X-er like me, the pride taken by women in rock — from the 1990s riot grrrl movement to Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, Lauryn Hill, Liz Phair and a generation of women pushing sexual, political and economic boundaries — is not that long ago.

And it’s not like feminism has won. Women still make less money than men. [...] Still we are underrepresented in tech, politics, finance, film, and, according to a 2021 McKinsey report, all sectors of management.

Women have fought for a lot. We’re still fighting. We get to be proud of how far we’ve come.

As should Adele, a vanishingly small kind of global music superstar.

Consider what Courtney Love told Dazed & Confused magazine in 2016:

“There’s maybe 30 [female stars] if you count pop stars,” she said. “Think about that — on the planet. Rock stars, I don’t know — I’ve never really sat down and counted female rock stars. There’s a few, there’s 10, 15 . . . but throw a TV out on the balcony, the same stuff that Keith Richards did, the same stuff that Jim Morrison did, the same things that Bono did — that we all forgot about — yeah, I think I get judged by a double standard a lot, but that’s just the way it is.”

Adele is a grown woman singing about her experiences as a woman. Why should she be expected to defuse or deny what, essentially, is her superpower?

For all the crap she caught on Twitter, others came to her defense — a sign that we are possibly, maybe, beginning to emerge from an understandable state of overcorrection.

“Thank you @Adele,” tweeted author and refugee advocate Onjali Rauf. “For speaking the 2 words being vilified. Woman. Female.”

The way women speaking out about their own situation is policed by a faction in society that has managed to extend the critical race theory agenda into a new world of "transgender rights" was made clear by the experience of a British regional police commissioner. 

The Daily Mail reports the affair with these details:

A male-dominated panel of councillors found Lisa Townsend had not been ‘dignified or respectful’ to trans people when she supported best-selling author [JK Rowling]’s view that biologically male rapists were not female.

Mrs Townsend, who has received anonymous death threats, said last night: ‘These three men who complained, and a panel full of men who investigated it, have decided they must police a woman’s language about an issue of great concern to many women. 

‘That is the issue of the safety and rights of women to go to female-only spaces such as domestic abuse shelters. I will not stop speaking out about these issues.’

Rowling’s original tweet last December highlighted a policy introduced by Scottish police allowing male rapists to self-identify as women. 

Quoting from George Orwell’s 1984, the author wrote: ‘War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.’

Townsend retweeted this, writing: ‘It’s not a “niche” issue, it’s not hysterical for women to be taking to the streets about it. We will not accept this gaslighting from men who keep telling us they are women, or from those who enable them. #IStandWithJKRowling.' 

Townsend said later: ‘The panel is saying "you should not speak about this, but if you do, we’ll police the language".’

The panel’s ruling came last Tuesday – International Women’s Day. 

To pick up on a word that Townsend uses, and one that we see used a lot these days is "gaslighting". One description of its meaning is this:

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that often occurs in abusive relationships. It is a covert type of emotional abuse where the bully or abuser misleads the target, creating a false narrative and making them question their judgments and reality.

The aggressive but befuddled narrative used by those trying to polish their woke credentials has been highlighted by the tangle British Labour Party leaders get into as they try to keep trans activists on side by evading questions on their definition of "woman". In the latest case:

Yvette Cooper yesterday became the second Labour frontbencher to decline to define what a woman is.

The Shadow Home Secretary refused three times to offer a definition, saying she was not going to go down a 'rabbit hole'. 

It came a day after her colleague Anneliese Dodds, Labour's equalities spokesman, said the meaning of the word depended on 'context'.

Dodds's failure to provide a definition earned the ridicule of JK Rowling, who said she needed a dictionary and a backbone. 

BBC host Emma Barnett asked what Labour's definition of a woman was and she replied: 'There are different definitions legally around what a woman actually is.'

When asked again, Dodds replied: 'It does depend what the context is surely.

'There are people who have decided that they have to make that transition. It's been a very difficult process for many of those people. Understandably, because they live as a woman, they want to be defined as a woman.' 

Labour has often been called out for running scared of activists who know how to turn their self-interested campaign into a matter of personal rights, into the recognition of a minority, or being on the "right side of history". That there is a "culture war" in these dying days of the liberal society, where intolerance screams from the ranks of those who have "weaponized" homosexuality, splitting that community by an unwillingness to consider anything less than capitulation who want sexuality defined on their terms alone, those terms being the extreme forms of self-invention and unreality.

A typical case is that of a Los Angeles woman who transitioned to identify as a man, objecting to nurses calling her a "mom" or using "ma'am" when she gave birth to a son. She wanted the nurses to call her the "dad". See that story here. 

And there is the case of Freddy McConnell in the UK who identifies as a man and who went to the highest court in the land arguing against being stated as mother on her child's birth certificate. The Supreme Court would not accept a challenge to the Appeals Court ruling, which said that motherhood is defined as being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person who does so was considered a man or a woman in law.

This ruling upheld the High Court judge's decision that the status of "mother" was afforded to a person who carries and gives birth to a baby. While McConnell's gender was recognised by law as male, his parental status of "mother" derives from the biological role of giving birth.

In the appeal court, Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett came down in favour of the right of a child born to a transgender parent to know the biological reality of its birth, rather than the parent’s right to be recognised on the birth certificate in their legal gender.

Burnett said that laws passed by parliament had not “decoupled the concept of mother from gender”. He said any interference with McConnell’s rights to family life, caused by birth registration documents describing him as a mother when he lives as his child’s father, could be justified.

The judge said the Children Act 1989 provided that a mother has automatic parental responsibility for a child from the moment of birth, adding: "No-one else has that automatic parental responsibility, including the father."

He said: "From the moment of birth someone must have parental responsibility for a newly-born child, for example, to authorise medical treatment and more generally to become responsible for its care."

McConnell said the ruling upheld the “traditional system that does not account for modern families”.

However, it is essential for society to pay the utmost attention to biological reality, to the protection of the family as the foundation of a healthy society, and to critical scrutiny of fashionable "social justice" issues, These are essential if we are to come through this era of moral breakdown that has flowed from the "sexual revolution", through gay marriage, to the general abandonment of both God-given and natural behavioural norms, and the focus on personal desire rather than service to the community.

The behaviour of those who are unthinkingly sympathetic to the LGBT movement has been characterised this way:

To a left-wing observer, discussing social justice issues incessantly from a progressive perspective signifies moral commitment to justice.

However, talking about these issues from a dissenting point of view is evidence of insane obsession with the topic. For example:

Progressive: "Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay." Conservative: "Gay?" Progressive: "Why are you so obsessed with homosexuality, you bigoted lunatic?!"

💢 See also Trans and Reality Refresher Course 

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