International Women’s Day is fast coming up (March 8), so I thought I’d look back at the absolutely unbelievable way that UN Women chose to mark the occasion four years ago.
For International Women’s Day 2020, UN Women thought it would be appropriate to tweet a quote from “model & disability rights activist” Aaron Philip:
Trans women are women at the end of the day. Every woman is a woman. Women are multifaceted, intergenerational, international. They are limitless, formless ... women are the world.
This statement makes me as angry now as it did then.
At the time, I made this snarky reply:
And my anger at not just the tweet and not just the quote but at this entire attitude and way of conceiving women has never subsided.
Limitless.
Formless.
It’s like we aren’t even human. And we aren’t, to these activists.
Almost a year ago now, I was able to gather my thoughts about this sentiment much more poignantly over at The Distance:
But this is not a compliment. A real-life woman is not a transcendental and ineffable entity. Pretending that a woman is something which can’t be defined doesn’t elevate or liberate women in the here and now of physical reality.
On the contrary—treating womanhood as a transcendental experience denigrates and subjugates actual female human beings. The idolization of what it means to identify as female requires us to dehumanize what it means to literally be one.
The physical needs, safety, privacy, and dignity of female human beings pale in comparison to the mystical wonder and power of the mystical woman. Why pay care and attention to the needs of real-life women and girls when women are limitless?
Why should us lucky women who were assigned female at birth leave the women who had the misfortune of being assigned male at birth out of the magic of womanhood? Why should we keep them out of our washrooms, our changing rooms, our sports, our rape shelters, and our prisons? They have the same vibe as us, after all.
Who cares about pesky bodies and the physical realities of sex, strength, and aggression when a man’s internal idea of himself as a woman demands our validation? When you forget that women are human, then the only explanation for our unwillingness to share the lofty fruits of womanhood with the other human sex is selfishness and greed.
We need to remember that women are human and that womanhood is not some mystical attainment. We are real, and we deserve respect for exactly what we are—adult human females.
Women exist—we aren’t just a fantasy in the head of a man who wishes he was one. And that’s all there is to it.
If you want to celebrate International Women’s Day in a more fitting and less frustrating way this year, then make sure you join me and an array of fantastic speakers in Toronto at Reality Based Women Unite! Get your tickets here.
Women are now " just a fantasy". We used to be "property". Either way, some men get what they want, stripping actual women of agency and person-hood. It is reminiscent of marital rape: the idea that no woman should be able to say NO because otherwise they are being mean, selfish and greedy...
Excellent. This entire cult of trans, both ends of it, is based on female-hatred and none of it is real. No man can be a woman, no woman can be a man. But the fact that they have invaded our last spaces, erased and rewrote our history (so now references to the past that were only Lesbian or "Lesbian and Gay" are now "LGBTQI" etc. ) and have bullied almost everyone into going along with it (as some predators parasitise their victims to do their bidding) is horrific and so obviously the ultimate in male supremacy. It's all so simple.