Posted on 06/04/2015 4:26:14 PM PDT by Morgana
If you’ve ever wondered whether modern progressivism could create an argument so convoluted, contradictory and esoteric that it collapses on itself, we have an answer. And it comes at the expense of feminists who believe they can fight for “women’s rights” without running afoul of their own speech police.
During “All In With Chris Hayes” on June 2, the host fostered a discussion among media representatives on the “reaction to Caitlyn Jenner” or “The Jenner Effect.” In the middle of the conversation, Michelle Goldberg, senior contributing writer for The Nation, suggested that using the word “women” in abortion language “excludes trans men.”
Directly before Goldberg’s comments, Huffington Post’s Gay Voices editor Michelangelo Signorile expressed hope on the “complicated issue about gender.”
“When you talk to young people about it,” he said, “they have a more of an understanding of gender as fluid, it’s not necessarily about your biology.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, among young people, you know, I’ve had this conversation,” Goldberg responded. “I’ve written about this and they’re some conflicts especially within feminism over these issues.
Seeing an opportunity, Goldberg then turned to make the conversation about abortion.
“So a lot of the younger feminists, for example at the abortions funds,” she said, “no longer want to use the word ‘woman’ in relation to abortion because it excludes trans men.” Video Below.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
Agreeing, Hayes attempted to clarify the terms “gender” and “sex” for his viewers.
“Right, because when we’re talking about reproductive, the physical attributes that allow one to give birth, right? That is part of category that is sex, right?” he asked. “That’s a physical category. That’s not gender.”
“Right,” Goldberg agreed before continuing the argument to take the “woman” out of “abortion”:
So there’s been this kind of move to remove the word ‘women’ from a lot of language around abortion, abortion funds and there’s a lot of second-wave feminists – and not only second-wave feminists – who say, you know, if you kind of take, if you take women out of this, and you kind of take an understanding of patriarchy out of this, which I don’t necessarily think you have to do, but I think, yeah, there’s still a lot of sort of conceptual murk to clear away, but among younger people that I’ve talked to, it almost seems amazing to them that anybody would question the need to have gender neutral language.
Wrapping up the conversation, New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden disagreed – that is, on how many agree with the “enlightened” Goldberg.
“Well, I’ve been around some people, other places not so enlightened,” he said. “I mean, and I think that we have to really be clear about that.”
In the past, for The New Yorker, Goldberg has indeed written about a feminist “move” to take the word “women” out of “abortion” – a move she proves by citing one organization.
“The members of the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund, an all-volunteer group that helps to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, are mostly young women,” she wrote in 2014. “In May, they voted unanimously to stop using the word ‘women’ when talking about people who get pregnant, so as not to exclude trans men.”
But earlier this year – in a piece published by Goldberg’s The Nation – author Katha Pollitt argued against Goldberg’s sentiments.
“I don’t see how it denies ‘the existence and humanity of trans people’ to use language that describes the vast majority of those who seek to end a pregnancy,” she wrote. “Why can’t references to people who don’t identify as women simply be added to references to women?”
According to Pollitt, including trans men in abortion language threatens the pro-choice argument.
“Once you start talking about ‘people,’ not ‘women,’ you lose what abortion means historically, symbolically and socially,” she said. “It becomes hard to understand why it isn’t simply about the right to life of the ‘unborn.’”
A feminism that refuses words like “women or “vagina,” Pollitt ranted, “is cutting the ground from under itself. “
“How do you even talk about women’s being underrepresented politically, or earning less than men, or being victims of rape and domestic violence? In an era where politics is all about identity, as a tool for organizing and claiming public space, are women about to lose theirs?” she asked. “Because after all we’re all just people now.”
Uh-oh. I think I’ll sit this one out.
A feminist herself, Pollitt authored “Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights,” which the media used as a launching-pad to spin abortion as a “moral,” “social good” last year.
LifeNews Note: Katie Yoder writes for Newsbusters, where this originally appeared.
Got it...I was confused...(not hard to believe)
I took trans-men to mean men transitioning into women...
Since Bruce Jenner was the topic de jour.
I only recently got it sorted out myself. The world has gone mad.
What’s really scary is that the entire “intellectual” and media and political world of the United States has adopted this and doesn’t even expect it to make sense.
"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,..." Romans 1:22
Read the whole chapter!
I'm so confused.
With "trans-men" are they talking about XY-men who amputated their genitals and can't get pregnant but want to be included in abortion language because it's part of their lets-play-make-believe language of calling themselves women?
Or are they talking about amputated XY-men who don't want to included and resent being included (excluded?) in the group that gets abortions because the language calls attention to the fact that they are not really women and cannot get pregnant and thus cannot be fully feminist-female by celebrating their womanhood with an abortion?
Or does "trans-men" refer to XX-women who have added to their anatomy but can still get pregnant if they want a child, but they want abortion language to include their claimed male status so that if (even though they claim to be men) they have sex as the XX-chromosome women they really are and get pregnant, they are included without admitting that they are still women?
I fully expect any day now that some “transgendered female”(a.k.a. a sexually confused male) is going to complain the he/she can’t have an abortion.
So the women’s right movement has to change the language of women’s reproductive charter to include the woman who still has the uterus and has sex / insemination to get pregnant but calls herself a man to be able to get an abortion, so that the mentally ill woman intact enough to get pregnant doesn’t feel excluded when she goes to a woman’s clinic to have an abortion.
What, on God’s green Earth, is a ‘trans man’? Is that a ‘human’ who was born a male and decided to have a sawbones chop off some parts to give ‘it’ a more ‘streamlined’ appearance, like Bwucie Jenner? Or, is it a person born female who decided she was a ‘he’, like Chastity Bono?
If the former, the libs better check a biology textbook! Born male means you cannot, in any way, shape or form become preggers therefore, the ‘need’ for an abortion to get ride of a ‘pregnancy’ is NIL, ZERO, NADA! If the latter, then what the libs and progs want makes some sense in a sick, deviant, reprobate reality that they have constructed.
A “trans-man” is biologically a woman.
msNBC has fallen to viewship levels far far below the weather channel. They now stoop to appeal to sexual deviates suffering severe mental illness. I removed them from my sattillite surf.
They don’t even try to sound smart anymore, do they?
Can Bruce Jenner get ovarian cancer?
Can he get prostate cancer?
And Monty Python’s Life of Brian comes to life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgp9MPLEAqA
“It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.”
I could just cry.
Life used to be a lot simpler when there were just men, women and Democrats.
Well, it that level of stupidity is OK with Obamacare, why not in abortion language?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
“Professing to be wise, they became fools”
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