The Real Women’s-Rights Campaigners

I once had a heated argument with Gloria Steinem at a costume party. I should probably mention that it wasn’t really Gloria Steinem, only my brother’s friend’s aunt, and I wasn’t entirely myself either; I had chosen to impersonate a figure of superior significance, Saint Queen Margaret of Scotland. Anyway, the subject of our disagreement was transgenderism.

“Gloria,” I said, “take it from me, a medieval woman, that what you’re saying” — men should be able to legally self-identify as women — “makes no sense.”

How did we get here? This point at which liberal feminists in the West are highly motivated in the pursuit of women’s rights for men but are relatively uninterested in the millions of women around the world living as though still in the Middle Ages. This is the question most on my mind this International Women’s Day.

In the West, there has perhaps never been a better time to be a woman. We’ve had the right to vote for over 100 years. Laws protect us from sexual violence, harassment, and discrimination. We are highly educated, outperforming our male counterparts in school and at college. We are free to be professionally ambitious, free to marry whomever we’d like or not marry at all.

This is more than can be said of the poor women of Afghanistan, who enjoy neither freedom of movement nor freedom of wardrobe. Since the Taliban took control of the region in August 2021, Afghan females have been forced to wear the hijab and are forbidden to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. Women and girls have been banned from education beyond the basics and barred from most professions. Saudi Arabia until recently prohibited women from driving.

In Africa, Asia, and across the Middle East, females are inflicted with permanent damage in the form of female genital mutilation. In Nigeria, girls can be given away as child brides to men old enough to be their grandfather, and young women of all ages are subject to forced marriages. In Pakistan, a disobedient daughter is at risk of being murdered in a so-called honor killing. In Ukraine, reports have emerged of women raped and gang-raped in war crimes.

Any serious global women’s-rights movement would acknowledge such things as the most pressing issues facing women today. But mainstream liberal feminism — the brand that gets the most funding and the most airtime — is evidently not a serious women’s-rights movement.

This was true before the transgender movement got off the ground. For the past 50 years, from the height of Gloria Steinem’s activism to today, feminists have worked with self-interested men to enshrine a culture of sexual hedonism and commercialization; to devalue motherhood; to demonize male strength; to discourage male virtue; and now to reject the very biological reality that makes women vulnerable to male aggression.

Now these mainstream feminists cheer on adolescent girls, who the CDC reports suffer from record-high levels of depression, as they poison their bodies and amputate their breasts and attempt to opt out of womanhood altogether. The same feminists are only too happy to hand over women’s hard-earned rights to men.

There are women’s-rights activists at work today worth admiring, of course. But they are not mainstream feminists. They are women such as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a mother of four from England, who has worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the assault on women’s rights in the name of transgender ideology. Or Mary White, the director of Gems Uncovered, a faith-based organization in Los Angeles dedicated to getting women out of prostitution and repairing their self-esteem. They are women who work, often in obscurity and sometimes in danger, to help women escape abuse and oppression.

This International Women’s Day — let’s raise a glass to them.