THE FEDERALIST/ CARRIE GRESS-
he trans movement is in full bloom. Many are scratching their heads as to how we got here.
A survey of the last two centuries reveals that it was long in the making, with deep roots found in feminist ideology, as discussed at length in my book, The End of Woman. Feminism ushered in significant shifts in thinking about women, fundamentally changing the way Western civilization considers biology, language, and law.
Each of these shifts on its own would have been damaging enough, but like the poisonous tentacles of a jellyfish, when taken together, they were fatal and brought about the triumph of the LGBT movement.
Biological Argument: Make Women More Like Men
One of the earliest efforts of the feminist movement was to help women with the suffering associated with fertility. It is a laudable goal, except that rather than help women as women, the feminist vision was to help women become more like men, namely, rendering their bodies sterile to enable sex without consequences.
The idea was to get rid of the connection between women and motherhood. Among first-wave activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, “The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.” A few decades later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman said motherhood made it “impossible for women to achieve their potential.” And by the 1960s, Betty Friedan completed the transformation by famously encouraging every woman to leave the “comfortable concentration camp” that is the home to do productive work. The message was clear: Career is more important than motherhood.
The biological transformation away from motherhood would not have been possible without the work of Margaret Sanger, promoter of birth control and founder of Planned Parenthood, who envisioned a eugenic utopia where individual pleasure triumphed over the family. Women, she believed, were the source of “the most flagrant of our social evils” because of their fecundity, and as a result, women had not only “incurred a debt to society” but must “pay that debt” by not having more children.
With the Pill and later Roe v. Wade, women could finally live the ideal of consequence-free sex by eliminating their reproductive capacities entirely. Birth control was the prophylactic, and abortion was its backup safety net.
Erasing this essential element of women, the capacity to conceive and bear life — biologically, psychologically, and spiritually — quickly made the meaning of woman murky. For women, motherhood was largely erased as an essential and replaced with a vision of womanhood modeled after a masculine ideal. To maintain this new ideal for women — the pursuit of a career — women were sold the rabid dependence on contraception and abortion that we see today. It can be argued that feminism has been transitioning women into men for decades, with few noticing because of the enticing idols of achievement and independence. Continue reading…
