Not long ago, my fellow staff writer Daniel Payne called for making common cause with radical feminists in a piece he wrote on transgender radicalism.
If Kara Dansky is the kind of radical feminist Payne was referring to, then Dansky's new book, "The Abolition of Sex", serves as a blueprint of sorts on how that might be achieved.
Make no mistake, Dansky is a hardcore "radical feminist," and the book reflects this in that many of her arguments spring from feminist thinking; however, it remains laser focused on the matter at hand.
I view this as an olive branch of sorts. She is true to her beliefs, yes. In fact, they inform many of her arguments, but she is clearly seeking allies where she can find them. In any case, her arguments are mostly grounded on the unobjectionable notion that being a woman is not a matter of whim or choice but rather real, objectively visible and verifiable facts tethered to a reality we once took for granted.
Many of the references she makes to her feminist roots are in the context of a kind of unspoken but obvious disbelief that the people who had once been reliable allies on the progressive left had all but abandoned her, leaving her to find support, or even just a venue to make her arguments, where she can.
As it turns out, those venues are largely on the political right. She is a frequent guest of Tucker Carlson, and the only think tank willing to sponsor a serious discussion of the topic from a feminist point of view was The Heritage Foundation.
This is how CNBC decided to report it:
Not pro-women.
Anti-transgender.
The article noted this growing alliance between the Left and Right.
"We disagree on a lot of things," Dansky said in a Family Policy Alliance video posted to YouTube, noting her organization supports gay rights and abortion rights. However, she added, "on certain issues, such as gender identity, pornography and prostitution, WoLF finds that the left has pretty much sold out women."
Who did she turn to to publish "The Abolition of Sex"?
Bombadier Books, a conservative imprint of Post Hill Press.
Before we get started, here's something useful to know about radical feminists:
They punch hard, whether they are punching at you or with you.
Here is how Dansky begins her book:
To the parents who watch in silent agony while a vicious industry works relentlessly to annihilate their children's bodies and lives.
And that's just the dedication.
The epigraph begins with a textbook definition of sex (as in the noun), that even a non-biologist like, say, a Supreme Court Justice nominee, could understand.
Sex: The differentiation between male and female determined by whether an X-bearing sperm or a Y-bearing sperm fertilizes the X-bearing ovum which determines the type of sexual and reproductive organs that develop and the biological differences between females and males.
You'd think that would settle the matter and we could all move on to more important things like nuclear proliferation and a defense of our sacred right to have all edible products infused with pumpkin spices during the fall.
But it's not of course. In fact, to say such a thing will get you labeled as a hater and quite possibly fired from your job.
That this madness has seized the Left en masse will surely be a topic of study for future historians to ponder over, but for those of us living in the here-and-now, it is a thing that must be dealt with head on, and we are fortunate that there remain people who are true to their beliefs, even if we disagree with many of them.
Kara Dansky is one of those people.
From the very start, she lays down a marker:
Sex matters. Biology matters.
Physical reality matters.
When those things don't matter, you get this, an anonymous post made to a British online forum that Dansky leads off with to set the stage:
They literally stopped recognizing every actual single woman and girl, every female person and they told us that we were now all an identity instead of a sex. Psychology instead of physiology. That was what female now meant so that men could say they were women. And they did, hundreds of thousands of them did. There was no single word for actual females. We weren't allowed one. The word was reallocated to men. We had to talk about ourselves as people with cervixes or menstruaters, and we had to agree that biology wasn't the real difference between the sexes identity-wise. One by one, every reference to biological sex was replaced in every law with references to identity until the law had erased any connection with female biology from pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood. Everything became something applied to both men and women because it was forbidden to have real reference to sex.... Men took over women's sports, institutions, groups. Men represented us in every level of society calling themselves women.... Men committed crimes and society said women did it. You could never escape a man because he could follow you into any public space by identifying as female. People were very very afraid to tell the truth. Many hundreds of children lost their reproductive organs trying to become the other sex. It was a very dark time.
In the chapters that follow, Dansky lays out, in at times excruciating detail, our recent history.
In the introductory chapter, "The ‘Transgender' Delusion (Observations of a TERF)", Dansky notes how much the insanity has gripped even those who should know better.
Referencing the confirmation hearings for Rachel Levine, a man who late in life decided he was a woman, to become Assistant Secretary of Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Dansky writes:
During the confirmation hearings… every single member of the United States Senate was expected to pretend that Levine is a woman. Every single member did so. No one was permitted to question this, and no one even tried.
Here are the Republicans who sit on that committee not one of whom dared suggest that the man sitting in front of them wearing women's clothing was anything other than a full-blooded woman.
- Richard Burr (NC)
- Rand Paul, M.D. (KY)
- Susan Collins (ME)
- Bill Cassidy, M.D. (LA)
- Lisa Murkowski (AK)
- Mike Braun (IN)
- Roger Marshall, M.D. (KS)
- Tim Scott (SC)
- Mitt Romney (UT)
- Tommy Tuberville (AL)
- Jerry Moran (Kansas)
Oh, there are some squishes in that list to be sure. I mean, seriously.
In addition, there was not one, but two medical doctors on the committee – Rand Paul and Roger Marshall – both of whom decided that, yes, there were five lights after all.
Oh, they all voted against the nomination, with the predictable exceptions of Collins and Murkowski because stunning/brave, but when they could have taken a stand for reality, for truth, for sanity, and when there was a real cost for doing so such as The Washington Post saying mean things about them, they took the coward's way out.
Dansky continues:
On October 19, 2021, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Levine had been sworn in as the first female four-star admiral of the U.S Pubic Health Service Commission Corps. On the same day The New York Times said the same thing on Twitter.
The United States government and The New York Times outright lied to everyone by saying that Levine is female.
While I believe we have grown beyond such things and so have tired of the "first" this and "first" that reflex of the media and it's comical narrowing of the definition (first black, gay, woman immigrant press secretary anyone?), it remains true that the first actual woman four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commission Corps just got robbed of that distinction, for what that's worth.
Dansky finishes the chapter with this.
At this point many readers might be thinking, okay, but I have a child, or sister brother niece nephew cousin friend etc., who is trans. What should I do about that? Just ignore his or her identity?
My answer is this: Your child sister brother niece nephew cousin friend or whomever is still either female or male biologically even if the person has adopted a so-called trans identify. That is what matters. That is what is true in a material, real, objective sense. The person in question can adopt subjective gender identity if she or he wants to, but that identity is no more real than it would be for you, me, or anyone else, to identify as a tree or a chair.
Like I said, she punches hard. But then, the time for avoiding hurt feelings and subtlety have long passed.
In Chapter 1, "What is a Woman?," Dansky begins by detailing how the rift between feminists and the nascent transgender movement had begun as early as 1973, noting the early voices who refused to succumb. Many, like her, still do.
Feminists do not use preferred pronouns unless compelled to do so and there are a few reasons for this. One is that we will never say that a man is a woman. Another is that we refuse to lie.
It is plain-spoken truths such as this that whip transgender activists into a frothing fury, send corporate toadies into a firing frenzy, drive political opportunists to make fiery floor speeches, and propel Big Tech Billionaires to… okay, I think I've run out of alliterations, but you get the idea.
In Chapter 4, "The Abolition of Sex in Media and Discourse," she dismisses the charge that being against men using the woman's room mirrors Jim-Crow racial segregation as "ridiculous" by noting the obvious fact that men and women use the bathroom in fundamentally different ways that people across races do not and then dismisses the notion that sex is a "social construct" that was imposed on others through "colonialism and eugenics" as "profoundly racist" itself.
Those who take this position are essentially arguing that the people of the global south, Africa, Eastern South Asia, and South America, had no idea how babies are made before Europeans came along to inform them.
Many readers here will bristle at the thought of throwing in with Kara Dansky. That is understandable. She makes no apologies regarding her support for abortion and other beliefs contrary to those of the Christian Right. However, this goes far beyond any of these issues, and rather encompasses them all, and threatens them all.
We are living in an age when saying something obvious is not only controversial, it is unacceptable. To have every power center in a culture demand you accept a lie as truth does violence to the notion of self-governance, free will, and the unalienable rights our Constitution recognizes as preexisting and outside of government. The fact that surrendering to this provable fantasy is already having lifelong and irreversible effects on impressionable young boys and girls is not even the worst thing.
The worst thing is that everything is at stake here, because if they can force you to pretend that a man is a woman and a woman is a man, they can force you to do anything.
And they will.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
