I wish that was the case, but it isn’t…
Cathy Brennan, a radical feminist, collaborated with a Christian fundamentalist group called The Pacific Justice Institute to fabricate a story about a transgender teen who allegedly harassed other students. That claim was debunked by the directors of the school that the teen attended.
And now’s a good time to replug this piece.
This is an except from an article entitled “Christian Right tips to fight transgender rights: separate the T from the LGB″ by the Southern Poverty Law Center, posted on October 23rd, 2017. I recommend reading the entire article. It details how some radical feminists have actively collaborated with Christian fundamentalists, how some Christian fundamentalists are using radical feminist arguements to push for the religious traditionalism they want the country to adhere to, and it expands upon some of the events referenced in the first article I mentioned in the original post.
[Meg] Kilgannon [a member of a Christian fundamentalist group: Concerned Parents and Educators of Fairfax County] identified a wide coalition of potential allies outside the Christian Right who could confront trans friendly measures. Here’s her advice on how to draw them in:
“Explain that gender identity rights only come at the expense of others: women, sexual assault survivors, female athletes forced to compete against men and boys, ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty, economically challenged children who face many barriers to educational success and don’t need another level of chaos in their lives, children with anxiety disorders and the list goes on and on and on.”
The list could almost read like a manifesto for intersectionality, if it weren’t for its exclusion of some key groups, most notably transgender people themselves.
For Kilgannon, an example of effective coalition building [among the Christian Right] includes the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC), a group that unites religious and non-religious women to oppose transgender rights. The co-founders of the group are sexual assault survivor Kaeley Triller Haver and lesbian activist and radical feminist Miriam Ben-Shalom, who was discharged from the U.S. Army for declaring herself a lesbian in 1976. This started her decades-long battle against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
In 2016, Ben-Shalom was disinvited from being the grand marshal of the Milwaukee Pride parade because of her views on trans people and support for so-called “bathroom bills,” which would deny people access to public restrooms and other facilities that match their gender identities. Ben-Shalom claimed to Fox6Now in Milwaukee that “my fight is ensuring that women are safe from the pretenders who might use the trans issue to get in and hurt somebody,” a popular talking point on the anti-LGBT right as a justification for anti-trans bathroom bills.
The group, according to Kilgannon, is mobilizing seemingly progressive rhetoric to oppose transgender rights: in the group, she says:
“The feminists make eloquent arguments that gender identity really is the ultimate misogyny and the erasure of women. And lesbians in the group are concerned that trans and masculine girls is a form of lesbian eugenics.”
With little transparency on its website about who and what formed the group, HATAC might simply be a secular-facing iteration of the same anti-LGBT agenda that has driven the Christian Right for decades. Hands Across the Aisle sent a letter to Ben Carson, director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, speaking out against the inclusion of trans women at single-sex women’s shelters. Revealingly, the letter’s co-signers (which include Meg Kilgannon) also include Michelle Cretella, the current president of the American College of Pediatricians, an anti-LGBT hate group that pumps out junk science on LGBT people, including attempts to link homosexuality to pedophilia or claims that LGBT people are a danger to children.
The attempt to depict the pushback against nondiscriminatory measures that include transgender people as a feminist struggle (an ironic fact for a movement that often derides feminism) was also embraced by other panelists. Cathy Ruse and Peter Sprigg, both senior fellows for the anti-LGBT hate group Family Research Council embraced this rhetoric. Cathy Ruse, who gave the opening speech of the panel, declared:
“Now what about girls? Did you know that feminists are at odds with the transgender movement? Last year a prominent feminist published a compendium of article under the title of Female Erasure. The subtitle is: what you need to know about gender politics’ war on women, the female sex, and human rights? What is the impact on girls who are bombarded with gender transition messages? In their young minds, do they hear that being female isn’t good enough?”
Peter Sprigg, who peddles myths linking homosexuality to pedophilia and has hinted that homosexuality should be criminalized, also wrapped his intervention in feminist rhetoric, commenting that:
“It’s particularly ironic that as our culture has developed where there is a greater range of choices, of activities, of careers that are available to men and women, boys and girls than there ever was before. And it’s really kind of ridiculous and almost retrograde to assume that we have to identify somebody’s gender identity on the basis of their activities or preferences.”
In many ways, there are possible allies to this pivot toward anti-trans secular movements: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, dubbed TERFs by some activists, have made waves in recent years. Some TERFs have reclaimed the term and redubbed themselves PERFs, penis-exclusionary radical feminists. Their rationale is that people who are assigned male at birth can never experience the same conditions as women do, and still hold on to their male privilege. (The latter becomes harder to prove in the face of the discrimination experienced by trans and gender non-conforming people.) As reported by Political Research Associates, trans-exclusionary feminists “may actually be guilty of drafting [the Christian Right’s] talking points, adding fuel to the fire of this dangerous anti-trans frenzy.”
And another damning thing said by Meg Kilgannon, excepted from the article Values Voter Summit Panelist: ‘Divide & Conquer’ To Defeat ‘Totalitarian’ Trans Inclusion Policies which was published on October 19th, 2017. It also references the events discussed in the previous article I linked.
Kilgannon said secular arguments can reach a more diverse audience. Feminism is generally a dirty word among Religious Right activists; at the Values Voter Summit, Dana Loesch declared feminism “dead.” But Kilgannon said that the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition—which describes itself as a group of conservative and progressive women that rise above their differences “to oppose the transgender agenda”—includes feminists who argue that gender identity is the “ultimate misogyny” and “erasure of women.” She said lesbians in the group are concerned that “transing masculine girls is a form of lesbian eugenics.” Citing shared opposition to gender identity, pornography and prostitution, she quipped, “I had no idea we agreed on so much.”
