Move over, JK Rowling. The ranks of blasphemers are growing. On Monday morning, singer-songwriter Macy Gray told Sky News Australia host Piers Morgan: “Just because you change your body parts (that) doesn’t make you a woman.”
Predictably, a backlash ensued. But the social media frenzy inspired by her comments was quickly overshadowed by a new entrant into the heretic’s arena, with Bette Midler tweeting on Tuesday: “WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name! They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators’, and even ‘people with vaginas’! Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!”
Whatever one thinks of Midler and her politics, on this she is correct. And although both Midler and Gray have experienced a savaging on social media as a consequence of their comments, it is a healthy sign that more and more people are speaking out against the trend of denying biological reality in the name of trans rights.
While Rowling has been a leader on this front for several years, Ricky Gervais also has been a brave figure.
In May he released his latest stand-up comedy special, SuperNature, on Netflix and, while critics have lambasted him for his apparent transphobia, on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes members of the public have given it a 91 per cent positive score. The critics have given it 31 per cent.
(If you haven’t seen it, Gervais jokes about how great the “new women” are, “the ones with beards and cocks”, compared with those “dinosaur women – you know the ones with wombs”.)
But it’s not just entertainers who are pushing back against contemporary biology-deniers. Sporting authorities also are revisiting their rules and are making tough decisions to protect the integrity of female sports.
Less than three weeks ago, FINA, the International Swimming Federation, made the call to bar trans athletes from competing in the women’s division. Trans women, they determined, could compete in an open category to ensure inclusion for themselves and fairness for female athletes.
Immediately after the FINA ruling, International Rugby League also banned trans athletes from the women’s division. The International Olympic Committee and FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football, the world’s governing body for soccer, are going back to the drawing board to revise their own rules. And Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, said the global track-and-field authority might follow soon.
It’s as if the world has been waiting for just one governing body to state the obvious, and now that this has happened, the pretence that biology doesn’t matter can be dropped.
Of course, acknowledging that biology matters is not the same thing as denying trans people their rights. Trans people have the right to live their lives without harassment and discrimination, and with dignity and equality before the law. In free societies, adults can and do have the right to change their gender without obstruction, and most reasonable people would agree that referring to trans individuals by their preferred pronouns is simply a matter of good manners.
At the same time, however, no individual, and no group of activists, has the right to redesign the English language to suit their emotional needs. And no individual or group has the right to overturn basic biological facts just because they are inconvenient.
Women make up half of the population. And for many of us, biology and reproduction are a highly salient part of our lives. Describing women as “chestfeeders” and “menstruators” to spare the feelings of the tiny percentage of the population who are trans men was always going to backfire, especially among mothers. Very few of us wish to be dehumanised as reproductive machines in the name of social justice.
It is also no surprise that, after the recent overturning of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court, that progressive women such as Midler have had enough.
In several US red states, women now will be unable to receive the same reproductive healthcare that their sisters in neighbouring states, Europe and Australia take for granted. In certain regions, women will be forced to carry to term babies that have resulted from rape or incest.
In Ohio, women will not be able to terminate a pregnancy even if the fetus is determined to have fatal abnormalities, forcing women to carry and give birth to babies at term that will die shortly thereafter. As one Ohio specialist obstetrician described it in The New York Times, such a law is “unimaginably cruel”.
With this fraught new environment for women’s rights, feminists may find themselves less tolerant of the notion that womanhood is just a “feeling”. And now that more and more voices, including progressive voices such as Midler’s, are joining the chorus of blasphemers, we may just find that the era of denying female biology is coming to a close.
Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.
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