New Biden directive is blow to fight for women’s rights
https://themilitant.com/2021/01/30/new-biden-directive-is-blow-to-fight-for-womens-rights/
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
Vol. 85/No. 5
February 8, 2021
Under the banner of “gender inclusiveness” President Joe Biden issued an
executive order on his first day in office to force schools to let boys
who decide they are girls participate in girls’ sports events. This is a
frontal attack on the fight for women’s rights.
Declaring “children should be able to learn without worrying about
whether they will be denied access to the rest room, the locker room, or
school sports,” the directive says any school receiving federal funding,
which includes nearly every public high school, must allow boys who
identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face federal retaliation.
Biden’s order ignores the real biological differences between men and
women. If implemented it would rig sports events against girls by
forcing schools to let boys — who develop larger muscle mass and bigger
hearts, lungs and bones as they go through puberty — compete alongside them.
“This order opens the door to setting back gains won through hard-fought
struggles for women’s rights, including for women athletes,” Candace
Wagner, Socialist Workers Party candidate for lieutenant governor in New
Jersey, told the Militant. “All working people have a stake in opposing
the measure.”
The order undermines federal protection for women’s sports guaranteed by
Title IX legislation passed by Congress in 1972. The implementation of
that law reflected the broader impact of the rise of the movement for
women’s liberation and helped pave the way for the creation of many
women’s athletic teams.
In 1972 only 90 of the 428 U.S. athletes competing in that year’s
Olympics were women. By 2016 the team consisted of 292 women and 263 men.
Biden’s edict joins other moves by the Democratic Party to enforce
“wokeness.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck all language not deemed sufficiently
“gender inclusive” from official House documents Jan. 4. The terms
“father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister” and other family terms
were canceled and replaced with “parent, child, sibling, parent’s
sibling” and so on. Words such as “himself” and “herself” must now be
replaced with “themself.”
Implementing such changes is aimed at reinforcing anti-scientific
notions advanced by liberals who argue that “men” and “women” are merely
subjective categories with no biological basis in fact. They argue a
person’s sex can be freely altered anytime. “None of this has anything
to do with fighting prejudices against people who do identify as other
than the sex they are born with,” Wagner said.
Such is liberals’ zealotry in enforcing these codes that Rep. Emanuel
Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, insisted it was necessary to say
“amen and awoman,” instead of just “amen” at the House’s opening prayer.
But the term “amen” has no meaning relating to or derived from the word
“men.” It translates from Hebrew to mean “so be it.” But the alteration
of the expression by Cleaver obeys the Democratic Party leadership’s
“politically correct” language diktats.
Following laws signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year
providing grants to hospitals to carry out “gender reassignment
surgeries” on children who request them, the state’s insurance
commissioner issued a directive reclassifying double mastectomies of
healthy breasts this month. Such operations would no longer be
considered “cosmetic” surgery when requested by a young woman wishing to
change her gender. Instead they are described as procedures intended to
“correct” what the commissioner claims are “abnormal structures of the
body caused by congenital defects.”
Woke doublespeak also includes redefining skin color after Donald Trump
garnered the largest share of Asian, Black and Latino votes of any
Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. Support for Trump among
Black women doubled, despite liberal media hysteria labeling him a
“white supremacist.”
In response, New York University history professor Cristina Beltrán
argues in the Washington Post that the term “white” no longer needs to
refer to a person’s skin color. “To understand Trump’s support,” among
non-Caucasians she writes, “we must think in terms of multiracial
Whiteness.” This “reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political
color and not simply a racial identity.” In other words “whiteness” is
now an epithet directed at those who don’t vote the way you think they
should, having nothing to do with the actual color of your skin.
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President Joe Biden spent his first days in office churning out
executive orders, avoiding debate or vote by Congress. He aims to put a
stamp of “political correctness” on government agencies and much more.
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George H. Smith “It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain,
emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how
comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on
the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands,
on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his
reason, is contradicting himself. There can be no knowledge of what is
good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there
is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through
reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is
destructive to human life.” ― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
