An expert on gender has urgent news: Fiendish forces are fueling sexual segregation.
In a recent paper for the Journal of Gender Studies, Oxford Brookes University researcher Helen Clarke pinpoints the problem with believing genital differences should result in mutually exclusive spaces. If you think females deserve to take showers without the presence of unfamiliar males, it turns out you're sexist.
Correction: You're racist.
Helen pegs an ongoing argument -- in the United Kingdom, but her analysis applies broadly to the West:
Public toilets, changing rooms, refuges and other spaces deemed "female-only" have become contested grounds: Gender-critical feminists argue that some predatory men masquerade as women merely to access these spaces...
Might the argument, rather, be against males of any sort -- predatory or otherwise -- moving into private female areas? According to Helen, no. Sadly, anti-inclusive opposition demands "the exclusion of trans women to protect (cis) women’s safety."
This sinister seeking of safety comprises a colossal campaign:
Self-described "gender-critical" feminism, a movement that campaigns to exclude trans women from cis women’s spaces, is now hugely influential in...politics and culture.
Helen bullseyes a particular enemy to naked, sudsy inclusion: the sans-trans LGB Alliance, which "reinforces trans-hostile imaginaries, seeking to exclude trans women from queer spaces by presenting them as a threat to (cis) lesbians."
Indeed, the LGB Alliance "functions as an example of the mechanisms through which trans lesbians and trans gay men are constructed as 'falsely' claiming a label of homosexuality."
Then again, could unwoke women's stance simply be -- altogether apart from sexual cravings -- that unencumbered, scuttling scrotums are unwelcome where undressed ovary owners trod?
Expertise says uh-uh.
Meanwhile, the LGB Alliance is "(re)producing harmful discourses" that "hinder progress towards LGBTQ+ equality."
Maybe worst of all, the goal of shunning scepters and rejecting jewels -- or even prohibiting prostates -- is white supremacy:
[L]GB Alliance can be understood as deploying strategies of heteroactivism and political whiteness.
In women's locker rooms, let the liberating bell of gender justice divulge its dong. Alternately, we're wrecked by colonizing racism:
Sex/gender normativity is discursively framed through specific configurations of gender, race and class, including visual codes determined by biological and cultural standards that are, ultimately, a product of colonial/racial science.
If you're unfamiliar with political whiteness, enjoy an explainer:
[Political whiteness] operates as a form of property, in which unearned social, economic and material benefits awarded to particular groups of white people are jealously guarded as possessions, their privileges and rewards reconfigured as "natural" entitlements to justify their accumulation and bequeathment to succeeding generations.
Are you wrapped in ebony epidermis? No matter -- if you oppose co-genital community bathing, in the words of Joe Biden, "You ain't black." At a minimum, you're passively pale:
[Nonwhites] can become passive participants in this system of white supremacy: Individual people of color who benefit from particular institutional and organizational power may be coded white.
RELATED: Are Democrats Really Losing Younger, Nonwhite Voters? The Data Sure Suggests It
On top of that, "truth" is transphobic:
LGB Alliance deploys heteroactivist strategies, denying accusations of trans-hostility by defending normative relationships and "natural" boundaries. ... [LGB Alliance's] argumentation can be read as operating through a prism of white feminism, in which whiteness is re-centered and the so-called "feminist" values are upheld through a lens of white subjectivity. ... LGB Alliance can be understood as deploying strategies of both heteroactivism and political whiteness to argue that the mere act of speaking the "truth" about biological sex is now depicted as leading to "accusations of transphobia."
There's certainly a lot of trans-related phobia going 'round. Irrational fear appears to have gripped the nation; and that fist is calamitously Caucasian:
A Pennsylvania Dental School Fights the Cultural Cavity of Transphobia
Gay Campground Gets Accused of Hateful Transphobia for Banning Female Genitals
Sorority Kicks out Woman Because She's Also a Man
Dough Nuts? Flour Company Bans Caucasians From Contest to Battle Baking's White Supremacy
One More Gone Woke: Girl Scouts Stick With BLM, Will Train to 'Decenter' Whiteness
Scientific American: The Racist Myth of Binary Sex Wasn't Invented 'Til Nearly 1800
State University's Philanthropy Center Welcomes Half-White Activist Who Says 'F**k White People'
Back to Helen, she envisions a bucking of traditional, crotchety concerns:
[L]GB Alliance recounts the anti-gender and gender-critical feminist concern that traditional understandings of sex/gender (that "males don’t have vulvas and females don’t have a penis") are under attack from "gender ideologists" who seek the eradication of human beings as male or female.
Bottom line, regarding the LGB Alliance and anyone of similar mind:
LGB Alliance can be read as (re)producing harmful discourses related to heteronormativity, racism and classism, ultimately, hinder progress towards LGBTQ+ equality.
Fortunately for the expert, no one she knows -- or, at least, knew in 2022 -- is on board with KKK-ish exclusion:
The LGB Alliance conference has started today. I am a cis lesbian, with a cis lesbian wife & lots of cis lesbian friends. LGB Alliance does NOT speak for me or, indeed, anyone I know. #LGBWithTheT #LGBT
— Helen Clarke (she/her) (@Dr_HelenClarke) October 21, 2022
Will the West someday see the end of white supremacy's sex-specific spaces? It seems there's a good chance. In the meantime, hopefully America can keep its racism to a bare minimum -- as bare as the male and female bodies that may eventually fill every ladies' shower room.
-ALEX
See more content from me:
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