It's fine when women invade men’s spaces but not so good when trans men invade women's spaces?

The familiar Leftist double standards

Janice Fiamengo

There has been a good deal of talk lately about women’s spaces being invaded by biologically male persons identifying as women. Some women’s campaigners claim that the trans phenomenon constitutes an attack on womanhood itself, an attempt to ‘erase’ women and replace them with men who perform womanhood. Some even call it a new form of patriarchy.

But well before women had their single-sex spaces threatened, something similar had already happened to men. Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behaviour that turned many workplaces into feminised fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to. The very idea of an exclusively male workspace or club – especially if it was a space for socialising (not so much if it was a sewer, oil field, or shop floor in which men did unpleasant, dangerous work) – came to be seen as dangerous. In light of the recent furor over single-sex spaces for women, it is useful to consider the source of some men’s justifiable apathy and resentment.

At my new academic job in the late 1990s, a woman who had been the first female historian hired into her department used to tell a story she’d had passed on to her from a male colleague. After the decision had been made to hire her, one of the historians said to another somewhat dolefully, ‘I guess that’s the end of our meetings in the urinal.’ The joke ruefully acknowledged, and good-naturedly accepted, the end of their all-male work environment.

Though this woman didn’t have any trouble with her male colleagues, who welcomed her civilly, she told the story with an edge of contempt. Even thoroughly modern men, the story suggested, held a foolish nostalgia for pre-feminist days.

But was it foolish – or did the men recognise something real?

No one thought seriously, then, about the disappearance of men’s single-sex spaces. The idea that men and boys need places where they can be with other men (defended, for example, in Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men) would have been cause, amongst the women I knew, for scornful laughter. In 2018, anti-male assumptions had become so deeply entrenched that the female author of a Guardian article titled Men-only clubs and menace: how the establishment maintains male power simply could not believe that any decent man could legitimately seek out male-only company.

The story of women’s appropriation of male space has almost always been presented as an unqualified good. Implicit in the story is the assumption that male spaces did not offer anything positive: on the contrary, they were alleged to be harmful by their nature to both women and men, though especially to women. If men’s needs were mentioned, which they usually weren’t, it was alleged that men would only benefit through contact with women’s much-touted superior empathy, team-building, and communication skills.

An article from Sports History Weekly showcases the stark clarity of the standard narrative. In 2018, an article titled Locker Rooms Open Up to Female Journalists told of the victory achieved 40 years previously when, in 1978, ‘a federal judge ruled that women reporters could not be barred from interviewing [professional sports] players inside the locker room’. The history of female reporters’ entry into men’s change rooms was framed as the triumph of women’s professional dedication over male chauvinism. One of the first two journalists to interview hockey players in the post-game locker room (in 1975), is said to have asserted, admirably if a trifle insincerely, ‘I’m not the story, the game is the story.’

Indeed, the picture chosen to accompany the story shows the reporter bent over her notepad, unselfconsciously focused on recording ‘the story’. Close by her side, a man scantily clad in his briefs is just getting to his feet, but the reporter’s attention does not waver. The message of the picture seemed undeniable: skilled female professionals posed no (sexual or other) threat to male players, so only an old prude or a sexist boor would deny women access.

Prudish was the image presented of Bowie Kuhn, Major League Baseball’s Commissioner, who had tried unsuccessfully to stem the tide of progress. When he prevented individual baseball teams from allowing women to report inside players’ dressing rooms, one of the reporters, Melissa Ludtke, took him to court and won.

By the late 1970s, ‘traditional notions of decency and propriety’ under concerted attack for years, didn’t count for much in a liberated world.

If any men were made uncomfortable by the presence of women in their change rooms, their concerns were not even entertained. No women’s group or feminist advocate seems to have objected either. In the pre-trans 1970s, most women were unfazed by the prospect of being the lone woman amidst high-testosterone near-naked men, and feminist activists saw no disadvantage to women in minimising the fact of sex difference.

The locker room triumph became a paradigm for the equality movement of the 1970s and 1980s, as male bastions fell one by one. The idea that men might claim any space as their own came to seem, almost overnight, an ugly relic of bygone times, as states and cities in quick succession took steps to prohibit male-only businesses or clubs. The coup de grace came in 1987 when, in response to a lawsuit by the Rotary Club of California, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was perfectly constitutional to ban sex discrimination in business-oriented private clubs, making clear that women’s interests outweighed men’s.

Finding that the Rotary Club’s evidence ‘fails to demonstrate that admitting women will affect in any significant way the existing members’ ability to carry out [club] activities,’ the Supreme Court judgment went further to clarify that, ‘Even if the [Unruh] Act does work some slight infringement of members’ rights, that infringement is justified by the State’s compelling interests in eliminating discrimination against women and in assuring them equal access to public accommodations. The latter interest extends to the acquisition of leadership skills and business contacts.’

By the late 1980s, ‘eliminating discrimination’ had essentially been broadened in law to mean equal access by women to anything positive men had made that women now wanted, including the networking opportunities and associations men had built over decades.

As male-only spaces were being equalised, affirmative action and equity hiring initiatives saw women’s numbers swelling in formerly male-majority domains such as newsrooms, courthouses, legislatures, boardrooms, government offices, and university classrooms. By the 1980s, female university students were already at par with (and soon to surpass) their male colleagues, while female lawyers, doctors, and business owners were flooding into once-majority male fields. The two decades demonstrated the relative ease with which women were establishing a dominant presence in a formerly man’s world.

It had been male because men had built it. In North America, men had, within living communal memory, hewn civilisation out of the wilderness, building roads, bridges, mills, farms, centres of trade, industries, sewer lines, and the electrical grid; establishing law, a police force, a judiciary, a military, markets, hospitals, food processing plants, and centres of learning. They had invented labour-saving technologies and had built highly complex city-systems. They had done it because that’s what men do – not as an act of exclusion but because, as Roy Baumeister argues persuasively, ‘system-building and empire-building appeal to the male mind’ (Is There Anything Good About Men? p. 155). Women had been labouring too, of course, bringing children into the world and managing household economies. Until the late nineteenth century and later – and only then in urban centres – it had hardly been possible for women to work alongside men in significant numbers.

It’s not clear that men were under any moral obligation to admit women to the spaces they had made theirs – many men have never felt at home in feminine domestic spaces – and if men had wanted to, they could have resisted women’s call for equal access; for the most part, however, men welcomed and supported women’s professional and business advancement.

The women’s movement, however, not content with measurable gains, was unable to rest until every vestige of the old order had been destroyed. Feminists’ next step was to discover that workplaces were not always perfectly welcoming. Some women didn’t like their bosses or the men they worked with; some felt uncomfortable with men’s sense of humour or manners. With the help of policy-makers and legislators, feminists created an arsenal of rules designed to empower working women under the guise of protecting them from harassment and hostile environments.

But the legislation was always about more than that. The very style of work-life was forced to change under the new dispensation. In particular, every interaction between men and women, including even such minutia as eye contact, gestures, and compliments, was placed under the regulatory and oft-punitive regime of anti-harassment legislation, which Daphne Patai has chronicled as ‘the quixotic pursuit of a sanitised environment in which the beast of male sexuality [would] at long last be vanquished’ (11). Any man who fell afoul of the (elastic and subjective) rules, or was merely claimed to have done so, could see his reputation and career destroyed.

Such policy and legislation changes – many of them undermining commitments to due process and the presumption of innocence – could never have been implemented were it not for the bedrock belief that male spaces were associated (as in ‘locker room talk’) with sexual menace, the degradation of women, and men’s corruption of one another. This belief is at least as old as the feminist movement itself, having galvanised the radical suffragettes who called for ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Chastity for Men’. Women, of course – allegedly lacking power and the killer instinct – never needed to be monitored or restrained, never encouraged one another in bad behaviour, and would never abuse the destructive license harassment legislation had given them.

It wasn’t surprising that even the Boy Scouts of America, once the byword of decency, modesty, and rectitude, could not be allowed to stand. The most famous feminist organisation in the United States, the National Organisation for Women (NOW), pulled out all the feminist stops in a 2017 press release that championed the demand for the admission of a 15-year-old girl. NOW called on the federal government ‘to prohibit any federal support for the Boy Scouts until the organisation ends its discriminatory ban against girls’. Naturally, NOW did not lobby the Girl Scouts to let boys in, with the result that there are now two scouting associations in the country, one that boasts of equal access, and one that touts the special advantages to girls of a female-only space.

Interviewed about whether the Girl Scouts of America had changed in the wake of the opening of Boy Scouts, the CEO of the Girl Scouts expressed her conviction that, ‘There are very few opportunities for girls to be in a single-gender space where they can rely on one another, build relationships with one another, be themselves, not have to compete for space, not have to show off in any kind of different way.’

It is difficult to avoid incredulity that so few in our culture seem able to understand that single-sex spaces might be just as necessary for boys or even more necessary in a feminised culture that actively dislikes boys and seeks to make them subordinate to their female peers.

Many men, happy in the company of women and fortunate (at least for the time being) in their circumstances, have adjusted to the feminist new normal. For other men, however, the erosion of male space has left them uneasy and justifiably angry. Now, after years of forced accommodation to feminine norms and requirements, men are expected to rise up in defence of female spaces – allegedly against a renewed patriarchy. The gall of the women who demand this male support, regardless of the willingness of many men to give it, seems boundless.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/mens-spaces-were-colonised-by-feminists-first/

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The French Left is becoming anti-woke

Nearly one in two left-wing voters in France believes the country has too many immigrants. When the same polling company conducted a similar survey five years ago the figure was 27 per cent. The fact it is now 48 per cent demonstrates how the gap has widened between left wing politicians and their electorate when it comes to immigration.

The polling company that carried out the survey headlined their findings ‘The Great Taboo (on the left)’. The refusal of left-wing politicians in France to heed their voters’ anxieties about mass immigration is mirrored across western Europe, except in Denmark, where the left has listened and as a result is in power.

The French left, or specifically Jean Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), has a curious set of values; they hold Marine Le Pen and her 13 million voters in contempt, describing her supporters as ‘fascists’ and refusing to shake the hands of Le Pen and her 88 National Rally MP2s.

But LFI have fewer scruples when it comes to domestic violence. On Tuesday they reintegrated into the party Adrien Quatennens, who was given a four-month suspended prison sentence in December for what his wife called ‘physical and psychological violence’ over a number of years. ‘What shame!’ tweeted the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. ‘Here is the patriarchy. How can we still be here in 2023?’

The decision to rehabilitate Quatennens, once tipped to replace Mélenchon as the leader of the LFI, has created further divisions within the left-wing coalition of LFI, Socialists, Greens and Communists. When the coalition was assembled last year to contest the parliamentary elections Mélenchon was seen as its strongest asset, the only figure on the left capable of rallying the disparate factions. But he’s failed to hold the unity. In a recent interview, Fabien Roussel, the leader of the Communist party, described Mélenchon and his increasingly radical party as ‘out of touch’, and said that ‘we have to talk to the whole left’.

Mélenchon once did. In the summer of 2020, for instance, as the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the West, Mélenchon rubbished one of its key tenets, declaring that: ‘Those who talk of “white privilege” have never seen a poor white.’

Mélenchon no longer talks like that. He has joined the ranks of the radical progressives and has become what the French call an ‘Ecolo-Bobo’ (an ecological bourgeois bohemian).

Perhaps that is why his approval rating has dropped by 4.5 per cent in the last year. Marine Le Pen’s has risen, on the other hand, by 7.5 per cent, to make her the most popular politician in France in 2023. The only other leader to boast a meaningful increase in popularity is Fabien Roussel, up 2.7 per cent.

Half a century ago the French Communist party boasted five million voters and was a serious political force. But in 1972 they entered a left-wing coalition run by François Mitterrand, ‘a Union of the Left’ that ultimately won the Socialist the presidency in 1981 but reduced the Communists to a fringe party.

Many Communists were unhappy with the alliance from the outset, and transferred their allegiance to a new party they considered better represented them than the bourgeois Socialists: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. Between the 1974 and 1988 presidential elections, the National Front vote went from 200,000 votes to 4.3m.

Fabien Roussel’s father remained loyal to the Communists, taking his young son along to factories in the north of France in the late 1970s to distribute tracts. Most of those factories are long gone and the deindustrialisation of that part of France explains why the Le Pens have found it such fertile territory for their cause.

Coming from the region, Roussel understands the people’s despair and when he talks about his Euroscepticism, his support for nuclear energy and his love of a good steak with a glass of red, he is talking to these people, not the progressives in Paris who want nuclear energy and red meat outlawed.

Last weekend Roussel was re-elected National Secretary of the Communists with a huge majority. In his acceptance speech he accused successive governments of having ‘transformed [France’s] borders into sieves.’ In a subsequent interview he doubled down on this remark, saying that there needed to be ‘firmer’ control of the borders.

Progressives reached for the smelling salts. Typical of the many angry retorts was that of the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who raged: ‘The term “sieve borders” is a term coming from the nationalist extreme right. You don’t fight the far right by going to its terrain.’ Roussel provoked a similar reaction in 2020 when he said that ‘Islamism is fascism’.

The hysteria that Roussel provokes demonstrates how out of touch the progressive left is with millions of its traditional voters. ‘He sees himself as the heir of a French left, rooted in the political history and geography of the country,’ wrote Le Figaro of Roussel this week. ‘He rejects this new American left, which is more focused on societal struggles. Roussel is the anti-woke left.’

I have seen this division within the left on the pension reform demos in Paris. The workers marching in their overalls are protesting against the raising of the age of retirement; most of the students, with their blue and pink hair, and their LGBTQI flags, are protesting in the name of progressivism, encapsulated by their banner: ‘Burn Their Old World’.

Roussel has been on TV this week warning about the dangers posed by the far right, by which he means Le Pen. But if she poses a danger than so do the Communists because economically and culturally they have a lot in common.

In particular, both have a visceral opposition to ‘wokeness’, described this week by Le Pen’s National Rally as a ‘danger to civilisation’. The National Rally have launched a cross-party parliamentary group to combat the spread of progressive dogma in French society. For them, as for the Communists, it’s a choice between nuclear energy or Net Zero; Red Meat or Vegan burgers and firmer borders or free movement.

Politics in France is no longer a struggle between the left and the right, it’s a fight between the proles and the progressives, and it’s only just begun.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-french-left-is-becoming-anti-woke/

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CVS Goes Fully Woke - Look at the Insane Requirements Employees Must Now Follow

CVS Pharmacy, a health care corporation that hires people who presume to embrace science in medicine, has gone fully “woke” and will require all employees — without exception — to buy into the falsehood that people can change their genders.

Employees at the retail giant’s thousands of U.S. stores have recently been given a policy on how to address their “trans” coworkers, which included a note that any restroom is to be used by anyone at any time.

Additionally, employees who tell their supervisors they intend to engage in gender-bending will be entitled to time off, and the company will force their colleagues to address them by their preferred pronouns.

The company’s new “gender transition guidelines” were obtained by Fox Business, and they make it very clear how company executives feel about skeptics of the gender madness consuming so much of the culture.

For employees who intend to undergo a gender transition, CVS told them to let everyone know, so the company can “provide support and to make your transition as smooth as possible.”

“You may also wish to have appropriate medical care to support your transition, including treatments such as hormone replacement therapy and/or gender confirmation surgery,” the guide said.

It added: “During and after the transition has occurred, CVS Health encourages you to continue to partner with your Leader and your Advice & Counsel representative, and to immediately report any issues that you might have with your employment, your work environment, and/or your Leader, co-workers, clients, and customers.”

As if validating the delusions of confused people was not enough, CVS also told its employees that it will poison the working environment in stores by forcing everyone on the payroll to pretend that a man masquerading as a woman — or vice versa — is what they say they are.

Buried among a bunch of other corporate jargon regarding how committed the company is to diversity, CVS included “Guidelines for Supporting a Colleague who is Transitioning.”

It asks employees whose sole purpose is to come to work each day with the hope of making a living and being comfortable while doing so to be hyper-vigilant in regard to ensuring they do not misgender anyone around them.

“People use different terms to refer to themselves, but some terms are universally considered disrespectful and violate CVS’s policy against discrimination and harassment,” the company told its employees. “Terms like transgender, trans-male/trans-female, non-binary or ‘male’ or ‘female’ should be used.”

Meanwhile, women who might not be thrilled by the idea of sharing intimate personal spaces with men no longer have a choice.

Employees are instructed to use bathrooms that are “the most appropriate” to make them feel validated.

“Any colleague, customer, or patient — transgender or otherwise — may choose to use the restroom and/or locker room that is appropriate to the gender they identify with,” CVS told employees.

More likely than not, the person or people who authored this new policy did so under the impression they were being “progressive” in joining the left in its charge to undo the country’s social fabric.

In reality, this is all nothing more than more bad business from “woke” corporate America.

The policy is an immoral directive that reads as though it is intended to intimidate people who might want to simply come to work to help customers while simultaneously not having their employer force them to pick a side on divisive issues.

This guideline is likely to poison relationships among staff members at company stores.

It also raises some serious questions about whether CVS is the right place for people to obtain quality medicine from people who are qualified to sell it.

CVS is asking consumers to trust their medication doses, vaccinations, and other needs to a company that has taken a stance against science.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/cvs-goes-fully-woke-look-insane-requirements-employees-must-now-follow-report

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Why Is the Race Industry Booming?

Racism, in the purest sense of discrimination against another person due to race, is incredibly low in the United States. According to Eric Kaufmann of the Manhattan Institute, less than 10% of Americans are actually truly bigoted. In fact, when compared to the world at large, the United States is very racially tolerant.

Yet many Americans would be surprised to learn that our country doesn’t have as terrible a time with race relations as is often assumed.

There are several reasons for this. A big one, according to Wilfred Reilly, assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University, is that the media talks about race and racism overly much.

Reilly says: “Mentions of terms such as ‘racists’ and ‘racism’ have increased by hundreds of percent across virtually every major news outlet since the empirically more bigoted 1970s and 1980s. In The New York Times, that Gray Lady of record, these two words surged from 0.005 percent of all words used in 1970 to 0.02 percent in 2020. In The Washington Post, mentions grew to 0.03 percent of all words appearing in print today. In 2023, headlines like CNN’s ‘There’s Nothing More Frightening… Than an Angry White Man’ and Salon’s ‘White Men Must Be Stopped (the Very Future of the Planet Depends on It)’ are a daily occurrence.”

This over-saturation of the race narrative in news media gives a false impression of racism occurrences. If a lie is told enough times, soon everyone will believe it. That narrative divides the American people and sows chaos and confusion, which leads to those in power taking advantage of the breakdown. A masterclass in this tactic was demonstrated during the riots that followed the George Floyd killing.

In the academic arena, there is a booming business of race grifters. There are several examples such as diversity, equity, and inclusion hires, but a most recent example is of Florida State University Professor Eric Stewart. Stewart, who is black, was making $190,000 a year but last week didn’t show up to his job after he was caught faking data on several of his papers to make racism appear to be a bigger problem than it is. Stewart exploited his position and the trust of his peers and students, all to promote the bigger narrative that America is racist.

Stewart uses the veneer of academics while others use accusations of racially motivated attacks to profit. Jussie Smollett is a perfect example. False accusations of racism can be used another way as well, e.g. the Democrat state legislators — the “Tennessee Three” — who joined the invasion of the state capitol by activists. Two were subsequently ousted for breaking the rules.

Those two individuals happened to be black, so naturally the media and the Biden administration cried racism. The accusation served to confuse and distract the narrative away from the inconvenient truth. There was an actual hate crime committed against Christian school children and teachers in Nashville by a transgender-claiming person. Sadly, it worked. All people could talk about was these three state legislators and not why they were ousted.

Faux racism trumps actual murderers.

Finally, there’s big activism like BLM, which use any perceived social injustice as a platform to manipulate feelings and extort money from people and businesses. Just how much money has BLM received from peddling its neo-Marxist critical race theory nonsense? At last count, $82 billion. And that’s just from corporations.

Why is the race industry blooming? Because it is a lucrative business based on the lie that the United States is the most racist place to live; a lie that has convinced people that more murdered blacks are killed by whites, that unarmed blacks are killed all the time by police, and that straight white men are the worst of oppressors. The reality is far from that. Hatred in a human heart has all skin colors, and that is really what is at the root of racism.

This lie is one of the greatest modern facilitators of injustice in this country, and the only way to fight against it is to keep telling the truth to anyone who will listen.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/96534-why-is-the-race-industry-booming-2023-04-17

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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