By Ryan Gierach, Freelance Reporter
In America everything seems to boil down to change and resistance to it, as you might have noticed.
It is in this way, dealing with change, where politics of gender divide gender traditionalists — the forces of anti-abortion, anti-transgender legislation and activism — from supporters of women and queer equity.
Random Lengths News recently attended a webinar sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations at which the speaker, Ann Norris, senior fellow for women and foreign policy at CFR, discussed the societal, economic and security benefits of advancing gender parity.
While much of what she had to say represented progress, much more faced an impossible-to-cross chasm in the human psyche, misogyny and traditional gender role ideology.
You no doubt have heard about the Dodgers’ kerfuffle with right-wing Catholics and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. You have likely heard much about the fall of Roe vs. Wade and the dozens of abortion laws passed. You might have heard, but this seems less likely (we all have lives to live), a couple dozen states have also legislated attacks against transgender youths.
State Medicaid policy explicitly excludes transgender-related health care for all ages in nine states: Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, Florida and South Carolina (Ohio with some modifications).
A queer journalist stated during the seminar, “We’re seeing an increase in anti-trans rhetoric and anti-trans policy. And transphobia is deeply rooted in misogyny.”
To which Norris replied, using her experience in the non-governmental organization world, “…we wear it as a badge of pride that we’re focused on gender equity. And that includes the trans issues too. It kind of all falls under this umbrella. [Yet] we’re not there. The trans… the trans stuff is hard. I mean, I think it gets — I mean, it just — it’s just it’s so toxic right now.
“In Los Angeles, I live in a progressive area of Los Angeles,” she said,” and everyone [from around the world] always asks me: Isn’t it being shoved down your kids’ throats? I’m like, no. Like, it’s not. You know, I think they’re—but people are paying, and especially a lot of young people are paying a horrible price for this.”
Not long ago as one in a spate of similar laws being passed in Republican statehouses, Jim Pillen, the GOP governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19.
Wrote Moira Donegan in the Guardian recently, “Twenty-five states have enacted pre-viability abortion bans since Roe was overturned last summer, although in some states, like Iowa and Montana, abortion has remained legal pending judicial stays. Meanwhile, 20 states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, with a rush of bills being introduced over the past months. In addition to Nebraska, a slew of states has passed transition-care bans in 2023, including Utah, Mississippi, South Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee, and Florida. Texas is soon to join them.
“That Nebraska combined these two projects into one bill, then, is less inventive than it is a dropping of pretense: the anti-feminist movement is anti-trans, and the anti-trans panic is at its core anti-feminist,” she finished.
For his part, Sen. Steve Erdman raised the specter of the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory in remarks on the floor before the vote. “Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here.”
According to Dr. Nitasha Kaul in his scholarly work, The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies, “The existing [scholarly] work tells us that the contemporary leaders who claim … to be “strongmen” are part of a tradition; they emulate each other, and they have toxic/regressive effects in terms of gender equality … the present article specifically elucidates the role of misogyny in their political projects.”
Furthermore, he notes that the authoritarians leverage “questions of women’s and men’s roles, rights, and relative power; it pits those defending traditional gender arrangements against those advocating for egalitarian gender arrangements,” to sow confusion.
Acceptance of change stands as key to societal growth, experts say. Most social scientists observe that progressives embrace life as it is, conservatives value the way things were over the way they become.
“In questions of gender, race, and class, and vice versa; my analyses imply that voters are increasingly aware of what they are going to get on these issues from each party. For a liberal egalitarian, who views systems of racial (and other) oppression as central to the American political economy since the Founding, this clarification of partisanship is probably crucial to building sustained support for real change,” said Dr. Kaul.
In other words, you know what to expect when you vote. You also know which way to vote.
Ryan Gierach founded and owned WeHo News, serving West Hollywood, for a dozen years until retirement and has written two histories; he now lives in San Pedro walking his dog, WeHo, who is groomed to look like a lion.