'Strange bedfellows' tackle threat to women and girls

FPI / November 8, 2019

A radical feminist and her organization “have struck up an unlikely alliance with conservatives over the increasingly influential transgender-rights movement, specifically its implications for the lives of women and girls,” a report said.

Kara Dansky and her organization, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), have forged an alliance with conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, Concerned Women for America and Independent Women’s Forum “to challenge what they see as a campaign to erase women,” Valerie Richardson wrote for The Washington Times on Nov. 8.

“I guess you would call it strange bedfellows, radical feminists and conservatives and religious people who are all just trying to protect women and girls,” said Emilie Kao, director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at Heritage. “It’s that simple. It’s not a big mystery.”

Dansky said: “The Women’s Liberation Front has always stood for the right to privacy and safety of women and girls, and we see the trans movement as a threat to those. We absolutely think that women and girls have the right to intimate spaces without the presence of men.”

By “men,” Dansky also means biological males who identify as women, known as transwomen. That stance that puts her at odds with leftist organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, as well as feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women and UltraViolet.

Richardson noted that leftists call women like Dansky “TERFs,” or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” and it’s not a term of endearment. They have also been called “transphobes,” “misogynists,” and worse, while WoLF was described by the National Center for Transgender Equality as a “hate group.”

Jennifer Braceras, director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, said “I do think that there is something deeper here, and that is that some feminists and many women on the right share an essentialist view of what it means to be female. We share the view that sex — as opposed to gender — is biological, and we understand that men and women are different in some important ways that impact policy.”

The feminist-conservative alliance opposes the Equality Act, passed by the House in May, which would amend federal civil-rights law to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” Foes warn that it would outlaw sex-specific public accommodations such as restrooms, locker rooms and prisons, and all but kill women’s sports.

Conservative groups and WoLF have also filed amicus briefs in the pending U.S. Supreme Court case Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, concerning a transgender employee, Aimee Stephens, who was fired after dressing like a woman instead of a man at work.

“Legally redefining ‘female’ as anyone who claims to be female results in the erasure of female people as a class,” said the WoLF brief filed in August. “If, as a matter of law, anyone can be a woman, then no one is a woman, and sex-based protections in the law have no meaning whatsoever.”

WoLF is not the only feminist organization to align with conservatives on the transgender issue, Richardson noted.

“Hands Across the Aisle was founded in 2017 by Kaeley Triller Haver, a Christian activist and rape survivor, and Miriam Ben-Shalom, a former Army sergeant and the first person to be reinstated to the military after being discharged for homosexuality.

“Ben-Shalom has paid a price her politically incorrect stance. She was disinvited as grand marshal of the 2016 Milwaukee Pride Parade for her ‘transphobic’ posts on Facebook, prompting her to retort, ‘I see that Milwaukee Pride cares more about men than it does about women’s safety.’ ”

In a May interview with the Christian outlet Q Media, Ben-Shalom said that she takes “more balderdash, pish-posh, and folderol from people who are on my side of the aisle — ‘Oh, you’re hanging out with them conservatives, my God. You all don’t like gay people.’ And my response to that is, education is a two-way street. I have learned that my conservative sisters care as much about me as anything else.”

In Canada, feminist Meghan Murphy was kicked off Twitter for saying men can never be women — she’s now suing — and drew mass protests at a speech last month on her opposition to “trans activist doctrine.”

In the United Kingdom, the newly formed LGB Alliance “supports freedom of speech, accurate biological definitions of sex and fact-based education.”

“The drive to move toward mix-sex facilities is not driven by the needs of women, it is driven in defiance of our needs,” said alliance founder Allison Bailey in an Oct. 22 tweet. “It is being driven by the needs of men who wish to live as women. That’s going to stop, right now.”

Free Press International