RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-would-we-do-without-the-word-racism-11564782112

If the country had a National Language Commission, and I were appointed commissioner, the first word I would put in cold storage—filed permanently away beside the N-word, the C-word, the K-word and other prohibited words—would be “racism.” In our day the word has been used imprecisely, promiscuously, perniciously and well beyond abundantly. If you are politically on the left, racism is what you accuse people of who don’t agree with you. If you are on the right, you can accuse them, I suppose, of socialism, but it doesn’t carry anything like the same resonance in moral opprobrium or self-awarded virtue as does racism.

The racist, if we can use the dictionary definition, believes that all members of a particular race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, which distinguish it as superior or inferior to other races. The true racist of course feels his own race is superior, and thereby he hasn’t any difficulty in discriminating or otherwise ill-treating members of other races, sometimes through government policy—as formerly under apartheid in South Africa or during the strict segregation once pervasive in the American South—or sometimes through ugly personal actions.

I am old enough to remember Jim Crow racism in action. When I lived in Arkansas in the early 1960s, there were still “colored” and white drinking fountains, separate bus and movie seating, and obvious differences in the quality of school buildings and other facilities available to blacks, and most people made no bones about it. Blacks were suppressed, oppressed and made to feel inferior in nearly every way that local governments could devise. The word racism wasn’t much in vogue in that place, or anywhere else, at that time. The majority of people who could rightly be called racist would not know what you were talking about if you accused them of racism.

https://quillette.com/2019/08/01/how-feminism-paved

In the last decade, in many parts of the English-speaking world, transgender advocacy has made substantial, and at times, expansive gains, with trans rights becoming embedded in institutions and enforced by the state. Like any significant historical event, this gender revolution has multiple causes. One is digital technology, providing virtual worlds which transcend physical reality and online networks for spreading activism. Another is academic theory: postmodernism and queer theory. I want to make the less obvious argument that transgenderism has been promoted by feminism.

Not all feminism, of course. From the start of the second wave, some radical feminists opposed the inclusion of male-to-female transsexuals under the general heading of “women.” Their argument culminated in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire (1979): “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact.” Transsexualism, she observed, was the creation of medical men like John Money and Harry Benjamin. As the current wave of transgenderism was building at the beginning of the 21st century, a handful of radical lesbian feminists warned that it was detrimental to the material interests of women. They included Sheila Jeffreys, an English political scientist then teaching at the University of Melbourne, and Gallus Mag, a pseudonymous American blogger. At the time, their warnings must have seemed hysterical; they now appear remarkably prescient.

These radical feminists argued that “trans activism is misogyny” and “a men’s rights movement.” They were correct about its objective consequences being bad for females, as set out by the philosopher Kathleen Stock and the journalist Helen Joyce. The end of segregation by sex threatens the dignity and safety of women rather than men, because men are more violent and sexually predatory than women. Men in prison, for example, have a huge incentive to claim a female identity. In sports, the physical advantages of men are so great that their entry into women’s competitions automatically takes places from females. Women who enter men’s competitions, by contrast, are destined to lose. In the realm of sexuality, young lesbians are vulnerable to aggressive pursuit by transwomen, which activists celebrate as “breaking the cotton ceiling.” There is no equivalent pressure on men, whether straight or gay.