The Malignancy of Gender Identity Politics

If you want evidence of the malignancy that has invaded the body politic, look no further than this appalling NYT oped, in which one Alexis Grennell accuses any woman who supported the Kavanaugh nomination, or who doubted his accusers–no matter how absurd–as traitors to their sex:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.

To start with: “stories of sexual trauma.”  They were, at most, stories, a word that is frequently used to describe works of fiction, with nothing in the way of corroboration, let alone anything approaching what could be called evidence.  Indeed, some of the stories were palpable falsehoods.

But let us continue:

But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades. Since 1952, white women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

Note to Alexis: Uteruses have no neurons, so yes, they are pretty stupid.  And for you to suggest that is the body part that should exclusively drive your decisions (and those of others so endowed) is as ridiculous as suggesting any man should follow the lead of his johnson, and will probably work out just about as well. (Aside: where do transgenders sans uterus fit into this? Transgenders with a uterus? I’m genuinely curious.)  (Further note to Ms. Grennell: if you advocate thinking with your uterus, men will naturally and inevitably respond by thinking with their johnsons.  How do you think that will work out, for women in particular?)

Insofar as being handmaids to the patriarchy simply because of their race is concerned, just who is the stereotyping bigot here?  Just who is damning and demeaning vast swathes of women, merely because they have the temerity to vote differently or have different political opinions that the oh-so-superior Ms. Grennell.  (Is “Ms.” still OK?  Or have it transgressed again?!? It’s so hard to keep up–which is kind of the point, because a la 1984 acceptable terminology changes arbitrarily as a test to see who is hewing slavishly to the party line.)  This is not about respecting women, or honoring women: it is about enforcing a smelly orthodoxy and demonizing anyone who dares dissent.

Ms. [or whatever] Grennell is so over such trivialities as due process:

Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.

Due process?  We don’t need to show you no stinkin’ due process.  Cultural revolutions don’t need no due process.  Or freedom of speech, or presumptions of innocence, or any other procedural obstacles that slow the path to the gulag for those who have committed thought crimes.

I don’t want to belabor the Kavanaugh hearings, because most of what needs to be said has been said.  I will close with one thing that strikes me whenever these sorts of melodramas are played out–which is all too frequently, of late.

That thing is cognitive dissonance brought on by clashing narratives.  The one narrative is that women are physically capable of handling any task that men can.  They can be firefighters, or Army Rangers, or Marine squad leaders, or SEALs for that matter.  They are physically tough and emotionally strong.  The alternative narrative is that women are constantly brutalized by men, which implies (that since someone has poor odds of brutalizing an equal) that women are not the physical equals of men.  Well, both of these things cannot be true simultaneously: yet the same people routinely argue both with intense vehemence, and in particular claim that those who deny the first narrative are hopeless sexists, and those who deny the latter are rape enablers.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The latter narrative relates to another n-th (I can’t keep up) wave feminist tactic (which is also employed by all identity politics grievance mongers): women are powerless victims of some vast social force (usually described using Grennell’s term “patriarchy”).  This is actually a rather canny judo move that uses an assertion of powerlessness to achieve power.  It exploits empathy, and effectively manipulates those who do not dare (either out of cowardice, or the fear of loss of job or social standing) risk obloquy for being so heartless as to trammel the weak.

Ironically, and perversely, this tactic is employed more frequently, more ruthlessly, and more effectively, as the objective evidence in support gets weaker and weaker.  In the United States, female educational attainment is outstripping men’s.  Moreover, controlling for relevant variables, including crucially endogenous educational, career, and life choices that just may reflect distinctly distaff preferences and attributes (including, notably, the possession of a uterus, which should be determinative, according to Ms. Grennell) female incomes are comparable to men.

Yes, women are less likely to be in right-tail jobs with right-tail incomes.  But they are also far less likely to be in the left-tail, without a job and socially marginalized, if not socially detached altogether.  But to suggest a possible explanation for this–that men are higher variance/more leptokurtotic than women–is to bring the furies down on your head, as discovered recently by a CERN researcher who lost his job for expressing this heresy.

An illustration of the clash between the victim narrative and reality came to mind the other day when I saw some UN agitprop that put great importance on the claim that women represent a majority of the poor in the world.

Well of course they do.  Because male mortality is greater, especially among the poor.  Indeed, one major contributor to the poverty of women, especially in developing nations, is that their poor husbands and fathers have snuffed it.

In other words, a factoid meant to emphasize the plight of women is in reality a testament to the rather dismal life prospects of poor men.

Social outcomes are complex. The reductionist explanations du jour–class, once upon a time, “patriarchy” today–are therefore always ridiculous when evaluated using facts and reason: which is precisely why facts and (especially) reason are under relentless assault from the left.   This would be a matter of little consequence were it restricted to the more idiotic corners of academia.  Alas, as Ms. Grennell’s jeremiad on the august pages of the NYT demonstrates, the views of the academic fever swamps infuse politics and drive the Democratic Party.  Meaning that the Battle of Brett (oh, for the innocent days of pine tar!) is merely just one struggle in a long, long war.

A white woman named Amy Barrett is supposedly the front-runner for Trump’s next Supreme Court pick (narrowly losing out this time).  Can you imagine the paroxysms of fury from Ms. Grennell and her like if that does come to pass, and the next candidate for associate justice is not just supported by female Quislings in thrall to the patriarchy, but is one?