There’s a feminist civil war brewing over Caitlyn Jenner
By Carrie Lukas
October 26, 2015 | 8:13pm
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There’s a feminist civil war brewing over Caitlyn Jenner
Caitlyn Jenner speaks at the Point Foundation's "Voices on Point" Gala in Los Angeles. Photo: Reuters
Feminist Stalwart versus Transgender Icon: It may sound like a warped new comic strip, but really it’s the first installment in what could be a series of very real conflicts between warring politically correct factions.
Germaine Greer, the 76-year-old author of “The Female Eunich,” is making waves by lambasting the idea that Caitlyn Jenner may be honored by Glamour Magazine as “Woman of the Year.” Jenner isn’t a woman, says Greer. He’s just attention-starved and seeking to steal the limelight from the women in the Kardashian family.
He hasn’t actually had to endure what feminists depict as the true horrors of womanhood, such as being cursed with what Greer delicately characterizes as a “big, hairy, smelly vagina.”
When told that such comments are hurtful to the transgender community, Greer doubled down. “Try being an old woman. For goodness sake, people get hurt all the time, I’m not about to walk on eggshells.”
Those who have long walked on eggshells trying not to offend Greer’s feminist sisters should feel free to laugh.
For decades, feminists have skillfully wielded their victimhood status as a weapon, drawing it and striking public figures who fail to follow their obscure, but strictly enforced, rules. Use the word “bossy,” “silly,” “hysterical,” “shrill,” mention that women bear children or fail to mention that women bear children and you might face the wrath of the PC feminist police.
Now their tactics are being turned on one of their own. Campus feminists seek to stomp out diversity; they’ve been leaders in harassing universities into rescinding speaking invitations given to those who don’t sufficiently toe the liberal line.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Lagarde, activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Summers are just a few who have been successfully disinvited from university gigs because they failed the campus’ political-correctness test.
Now Greer’s the target for these liberal censors, as Cardiff University is being petitioned to ax her upcoming lecture there, “Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century.”
And feminists support the censorship. As Kaite Welsh wrote: “Isn’t it often the way? You fight your way from the trenches to the throne, overthrow the corrupt regime and set about remaking the world in your own image, only to realize that you have become the thing you most despised.”
Greer’s gone from “revolutionary to oppressor,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, Greer sees sexism at the root of the celebration of Caitlyn Jenner: “I think misogyny plays a really big part in all of this, that a man who goes to these lengths to become a woman will be a better woman than someone who is just born a woman.”
Greer is missing bigger drivers of the Caitlyn phenomenon. Our insatiable media must find new ground to break in tantalizing the public and normalizing what was once considered aberrant behavior. Cultivating a live-and-let-live attitude isn’t enough; alternative lifestyles must be celebrated as not only equal but superior to the boring, oppressive traditions that have dominated until now.
Yet Greer also uncovers an aspect of the transgendered phenomenon that feminists really ought to find disconcerting. It’s more than just a rival victim group, but one that threatens to expose feminists’ contradictions when it comes to sex differences.
Feminists typically deny that meaningful gender differences exist between men and women, while allowing that there are some areas in which women are superior to men. Women are better at consensus building, listening, languages . . . but don’t anyone dare imply that men may have an innate edge in any hard science. Ask former Harvard University President Larry Summers how that one turns out.
Surely Greer doesn’t actually care whom Glamour magazine honors as woman of the year. (Aren’t old-school feminists supposed to object to such beauty-obsessed rags anyway?)
Yet what happens when transgender women start competing against plain old women in other areas of life? Say, in tennis matches and swim meets?
Or how about for slots on corporate boards and in top universities looking to meet targets for gender balance? Feminists may find their cause stalled and themselves forced to acknowledge that biology plays a bigger role than they care to admit.
The Germaine Greer and Caitlyn Jenner brouhaha is surely, taken on its own, a tempest in a teapot.
But it’s the culmination of a PC culture that may be beginning to implode.
Carrie Lukas is the managing director of the Independent Women’s Foru
http://nypost.com/2015/10/26/theres-a-feminist-civil-war-brewing-over-caitlyn-jenner/
