Political Correctness Trumps Feminism

One supporter believes Donald Trump articulates voter frustration well because he doesn’t worry about being politically correct. “…that’s the nerve that Trump is hitting.”

Nowhere does politically-correct speech grate more on the nerves of people’s sensibilities than in the socially-volatile conflict over sexuality. Even the once politically-correct feminist opponents of anything patriarchal are becoming victims of the new PC speech police.

Germaine Greer, the radical feminist of yesteryear, lambasts Glamour Magazine for honoring a 65-year-old man, Bruce/Caitlin Jenner, as “Woman of the Year.” “Jenner isn’t a woman,” affirms Greer, who is not the buying latest form of pc ideology, because Jenner has not endured “the real suffering of women.”

But now the boot is on the other foot.

“For decades,” says a social observer, “feminists have skillfully wielded their victimhood status as a weapon, striking public figures who fail to follow their obscure, but strictly enforced, rules. Use the word ‘bossy,’ ‘silly,’ ‘hysterical,’ ‘shrill,’ or mention that women bear children…and you might face the wrath of the PC feminist police.”

Presently, however, my alma mater, Cardiff University in Wales (UK), plans to disinvite Germaine Greer because in a lecture on “Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century,” Greer opposes transgender “diversity.”

Nevertheless, Greer would have doubtless supported Williams College students who recently disinvited Suzanne Venker, a longtime critic of feminism. Venker had been scheduled to speak on the subject, “One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back: Why Feminism Fails.” One of the reasons given at the very liberal, upper-class Williams College, established in 1793, was: “When you bring a misogynistic, white supremacist, men’s rights activist to campus in the name of ‘dialogue,’ you are not only causing actual mental, social, psychological and physical harm to students, but you are also paying for the continued dispersal of violent ideologies that kill our black and brown (trans) femme sisters … you are dipping your hands in their blood.” All Venker had planned to say was, “how feminism had failed because it denies the existence of biology and teaches that equality means sameness, which is a losing proposition when it comes to a life that includes marriage and family.”

If you did not get into Williams you could possibly get into the all-women’s Wellesley College—as long as you were sure of your female gender. Wellesley, founded in 1870, is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges and happens to be my wife’s and my two oldest daughters’ alma mater. The college that graduated Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Madame Chiang Kai Shek, recently had to redefine what a woman is, in order to remain a bona fide women’s college. Here is the fruit of their deliberations for contemporary society:

if you are a trans-woman (a person with a male body who thinks he is a woman) you are admitted; if you are a trans-man (a biological woman who thinks she is a man) you will not be admitted.

It’s all in the mind!

Little wonder toy manufacturers and fashion designers are playing it safe, creating gender-neutral products and androgynous clothing lines, thus adding to the present gender confusion.

In a public lecture, “Busting the Binaries,” I attempt to show that the surface war of words masks a much deeper conflict between the only two worldviews on offer—Oneism or Twoism.

Oneism, the worship of creation and the belief in the oneness of everything, seeks to “join the opposites” to destroy distinctions, so colleges in their student accommodations reject “the traditional gender binary.” But if there are no longer any gender distinctions, it is because there are no spiritual and theological distinctions. In Oneist spirituality, one goes within to meet one’s higher, divine self. In Oneist theology, there is no Creator God; matter creates itself because it is divine, and so we create in our autonomous minds who we want to be. The logical extension is Oneist sexuality that joins the opposites and destroys sexual and gender distinctions so essential to human survival.

The political war of words thus comes down to a theological war with the original founding words that have always defined who we are:

God said, “Let us make man in our image,…so God created man in his own image; male and female he created them…and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:26, 31).

A contemporary journalist naively opines: “We are opening up to the idea that classic binary conceptions of gender are unnecessarily rigid.” He fails to see that in this Oneist world a deep identity crisis is arising for our children and their eventual inability to understand the “binary” truth about the God of the Gospel, where via the picture of heterosexual marriage Christ comes to redeem his bride, a Savior who is distinct from us but whose intentions for us both in creation and redemption are “very good.”