Protection Racket, Conclusion

What the anti-trans stuff really means and why we have to fight it.

The real significance of the anti-trans panic is hidden in the title of “The Protection of Women and Girls Act” and the first lines of Trump’s Executive Order. It has nothing to do with science or truth or freedom of speech. These actions have only one purpose and that is to emphasize that women in are in all respects inferior to men.

The misnamed “Protection of Women and Girls” only applies to transwomen who want to play on women’s teams.¹ Transmen who want to play football are more than welcome to do so, despite being genetically female and therefore ‘women’ in the world of the people who passed this law. Apparently they don’t need protection in sports, even though a team of males would be pose far more danger to a single woman than one male would to a team of women.

Trump’s Executive Order is explicitly titled “Defending WOMEN from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It’s state purpose is:

Section 1. Purpose. Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being.

Note that men don’t need protection from women; genetic males pose a threat but genetic females do not. Remember also that neither the new law nor the executive order actually bar males from women’s spaces; cis men can be coaches, prison guards, team doctors, trainers, wardens, or any other position but team member or prisoner. So long as the male is in a position of authority and power over the women, conservatives are perfectly happy. These laws don’t protect women from danger from men; they make women even more vulnerable because under them, women are always under the power of men.

There really aren’t all that many transgender people. As I noted in part one of this series, there are less than 100 transwomen athletes playing school sports in this country. In part two, I found that there are around 1,200 transwomen prisoners in the federal prison system. The total number of transgender people in the US is about 3 million, 1.14% of the total population. There are simply too few transgender people to pose any kind of threat to women.

Pretending that restrictions on women are actually ‘protections’ goes back a long way. One excellent example of this is GK Chesterton’s argument against letting women vote.²

On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions there would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as well as rotten eggs; of crying “Hosannah” as well as “Crucify.” But I do not like the public executioner being turned into the private executioner. I think it is a crooked oriental, sinister sort of business, and smells of the harem and the divan rather than of the forum and the market place. In modern times the official has lost all the social honor and dignity of the common hangman. He is only the bearer of the bowstring.

Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in order to emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else from which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the fact that the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make the situation different, unless we openly say that we are giving the suffrage, not only because it is power but because it is not, or in other words, that women are not so much to vote as to play voting. No suffragist, I suppose, will take up that position; and a few suffragists will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and penalties is an ugly, humiliating business, and that good motives as well as bad may have helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked in these pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple as well as of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. I noted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress. In the same way it is not evidently irrational, if men decided that a woman, like a priest, must not be a shedder of blood.

Stripped of the annoying Edwardian polysyllables, Chesterton is complaining that it is unfeminine for women to serve on juries because juries render capital sentences, and women shouldn’t be ‘shedders of blood.’ He actively believes in capital punishment, including subjecting women to capital sentences, but he can’t abide the thought of women having any say in whether or not the state can kill us. Chesterton never considers whether or not the criminal law should be reformed, and in fact he acknowledges and praises its brutality. By keeping women out of the process, he can avoid thinking about any other flaws in the system.

Chesterton’s opinion contains another conservative justification for giving men the right to rule over women: men have ‘responsibilities’ that can’t be shared with us poor fragile flowers. I recently had a conversation in the comments section of Terry Mattingly’s Substack The Rational Sheep.

Villanueva here claims that he has the right to make all the decisions for his wife because ‘the buck stops’ with him. He claims that he alone will face the consequences for bad decisions, but that is evidently false. His entire family will suffer, and in many cases, more than he will for any mistakes he makes. To use one example, if he denies his wife’s request for money to go to the doctor when she’s sick, and she dies, she’s dead. ALL the consequences are hers. He has to pretend that he faces more risks for decisions he makes than anyone else in his family. He has to deflect attention from an analysis of the real facts in order to maintain the fiction that he has power but faces no real risks from its exercise. He could be a partner to his wife and share the burdens and benefits equally, but that means actually sharing the risks, which he won’t do. Also, “First Officers” are inferior to captains.

The whole witchcraze over transwomen is an attempt to distract our attention from the ‘man behind the curtain,’ an unjust hierarchy of gender. The purpose is to keep women inferior to men and nothing else. Don’t be distracted.

1. The new law amends 20 United States Code Section 1601 as follows: (d) (1) It shall be a violation of subsection (a) for a recipient of Federal financial assistance who operates, sponsors, or facilitates athletic programs or activities to permit a person whose sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity that is designated for women or girls. See full text here

2. Chesterton’s bitter misogyny has, as far as I can find, only once been the subject of any critical analysis, and that was Rebecca West’s “Mr. Chesterton in Hysterics” That essay is the first use of the word ‘doormat’ to describe antifeminist women.