by Giulio Meotti
“Woman.” A word that didn’t need to be defined because its meaning was, until very recently, self-evident: “woman” is defined as a female with the XX chromosome and the only human being capable of having children.
Now Western nihilism in its worst form cancels it. It would be easy to dismiss these comic aspects of identity politics, according to which “what really matters is not who you are but which oppressed minority you belong to.” Exasperated existentialism is the dead end of a self-satisfied era. But if even the most banal question, “What is a woman?”, puts the system in crisis, then it means that the situation is serious, but that there is hope. Hope that senile progressivism’s days are numbered.
The American Civil Liberties Union, America’s foremost civil rights organization, just wrote that banning abortion does disproportionate harm to “people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q community, immigrants, youth, people with disabilities …”. The tweet neglected to mention a relevant demographic group: women.
Medical, government and progressive organizations have adopted gender-neutral language that draws few distinctions between transgender women and men. Last year, the editor of The Lancet, the British medical journal, apologized for a cover that referred to “bodies with vaginas” rather than “women”. The governor of New York has published a guide on “people who give birth”. And even The Atlantic, a liberal monthly, is embarrassed to note that the abortion debate is now about “people”, not “women” (the baby was removed many years ago).
Title IX is the American law that prohibits government-funded educational institutions from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” Now, says the Wall Street Journal, without the approval of Congress, the Biden Administration is writing Title IX to include gender identity. “Can women have a penis?”, is the question that British Labor cannot answer. Keir Starmer’s party is in the throes of a psychodrama on the issue of gender. In France, schools are canceling “Mother’s Day”.
“Can you define a woman?” the new American Supreme Court judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson, recently appointed by Biden, was asked. “No, I’m not a biologist,” she replied. Like the Spanish Minister of Equality Irene Montero di Podemos, who asked: “Are there men and women?”. Mattel just released the first transgender Barbie – and Twitter (let’s hope Elon Musk really buys Twitter to rid it of the fanatical censors) blocked Spanish MP Francisco José Contreras for saying “men can’t get pregnant”.
Harvard professor Carole Hooven came under attack after claiming that biological sex is real and she defended the use of terms like “pregnant women” and “male and female”. “The ideology seems to say that biology is not as important as how someone feels or perceives their sex,” Hooven said. “The facts are that there are actually two sexes – male and female – and those sexes are designated by the type of gametes we make.” Hooven, author of a book on testosterone, teaches Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Her words are not liked by the commissioners of the faculty, who defined Hooven’s “dangerous science”.
And to think that in 1978, at Harvard, a Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, put a scalpel into the crisis of the West. Solzhenitsyn had come from a distant country, an open-air Gulag, where communism had made a clean sweep of the conscience of a people rich in traditions. And this is a warning to the West, to us, because the same steamroller was set in motion by us as well, but under other guises. Where communism had been brazen, progressivism is more seductive, subtle.
“What is a woman?”. This is the question capable of sending progressivism into a tailspin, as demonstrated by the documentary “What is a woman?” by Matt Walsh. The viewer will be stunned at the vision because none of the interviewees is able to answer the question and they reply: “A woman is a person who identifies as a woman”. Meanwhile, the European Commission in its social channels informs us that “the future is queer.”
Solzhenitsyn understood it very well: He said: “The West is decadent”.