Conservatives have been sounding the alarm bells for years now, warning that the denial of the natural sex binary would have devastating cultural ramifications, particularly for women. We were right. Men have invaded female spaces, taking away scholarships, awards, and opportunities from real women.
More importantly, it has put women’s and girls’ safety on the line. No longer can females peacefully use a locker room or bathroom with the assurance that predatory men won’t be allowed inside. Sorority girls are forced to live with disturbed and perverted men, and female prisoners are having abortifacient drugs distributed to them because they’re being raped and impregnated by “female-identifying” male inmates.
A growing number of female leftists are realizing that the transgender movement hurts women. Droves of young and progressive feminists are taking to TikTok to join the older generation of so-called “TERFS” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), such as J.K. Rowling and Germaine Greer, decrying what they rightfully perceive as female erasure.
These younger feminists naturally take a page out of the only playbook they know. Victimhood and name-calling are their weapon of choice.
In one video, TikToker Angelene Fratto prefaces by identifying as an “LGBTQ community ally,” who has “many gay people in her family,” including a transgender sibling (as if that will somehow protect her from being labeled a transphobe). Fratto states that she does not want the phrases “chestfeeding” or “birthing person” applied to her. However, she will use that delusional terminology for others if they ask her to. Essentially, Fratto weakly tries to defend femininity while massively compromising with those who are actively expunging it.
In a similar vein, another woman who goes by the username LuxGamma specifically calls out “trans white women” for their “misogyny.” She explains that terms like “chestfeeding” and phrases like “trans women get periods” contradict reality and science, and she describes trans women’s insistence that everyone uses said terms and phrases as “mansplaining.”
Both women make some excellent points, but their left-wing framework, bizarre racial fixation (in the case of LuxGamma), and woke buzzwords ultimately set them up for failure.
Trans folks have shot back with the same woke terminology, saying that being a “cis woman” is a “privilege” and asserting that men cosplaying as women will always be more oppressed than real women. “Even though you might not have it great because you’re a woman, you don’t have it twice as bad because you’re trans,” says James, a “they/she” TikToker.
@jamesissmiling Cis Privilege 101! #trans #nonbinary #queertiktok #intersectionality #intersectionalfeminism #transrights🏳️⚧️
Another transgender activist attacked leftists who oppose radical trans ideology by saying their “allyship to trans people is conditional” and smearing them as bigots with a “superiority complex.”
After LuxGamma began receiving hate from the radical trans movement, she felt compelled to go on a nearly 3-minute rant to prove her victimhood. But in the minds of the people she felt compelled to defend herself to, she was doomed to fail because transgender activists will always claim greater victim status.
The biggest reason modern feminists cannot defend femininity from radical trans activists is that they themselves erased it decades ago.
Listen to TikToker Mikala Tingler, who admitted that while she’s “all for being inclusive and making people feel seen and heard and welcomed,” she can’t get behind terms like “chestfeeding” or “birthing person.” “These are things that make womanhood so incredibly unique,” Tingler said.
Terms like chestfeeding and birthing person ignite visceral reactions from women of all persuasions, progressive or otherwise, because, as Tingler said, it’s an erasure of something that makes women unique. It’s an intrinsic part of our being, and we all know it.
Yet it was the second-wave feminist movement that first began popularizing the concept of “gender” as a social construct. It was the feminists who demonized women’s reproductive gifts, labeling them a curse and instead embracing hormone-disrupting birth control and abortion. Indeed, the feminist movement killed millions of unborn children, while also rejecting femininity and dismissing the beauty of motherhood.
In a 2015 BBC interview, old-school feminist Germaine Greer stated that men who have undergone transgender surgery are not women. Leftist students at Cardiff University, where Greer was scheduled to speak following the interview, created a petition to revoke her invitation on the grounds of “misogynistic views towards trans women.”
The college students who “canceled” Greer are her protégés. For decades, Greer has been demonizing the nuclear family. She has claimed gender roles are a social construct and femininity is a form of subjugation that limits women’s autonomy and personal happiness.
Greer admonished the sexualization of women by men and countered it by sexualizing herself and encouraging other women to do so too. In 1969, Greer co-founded a pornography magazine called Suck: The First European Sex Paper. An interview with Greer published in the magazine was titled “I Am a Whore,” and in a separate issue, the magazine published a naked photo of Greer lying down with her legs over her shoulders and her face between her thighs.
“There is nothing feminine about being pregnant,” she said in a 2018 interview. “It’s almost the antithesis of that. There’s nothing feminine about giving birth. It’s a bloody struggle, and you’ve got to be strong and brave. There’s nothing feminine about breastfeeding.”
If there’s nothing feminine about giving birth, why not use the term “birthing person”? When you peddle radical gender ideology for decades, don’t be surprised when it catches on.
To Greer’s credit, she’s had enough integrity to stand against transgenderism when she saw how damaging it has become for women. But she hasn’t renounced the radical feminist ideology — that she helped create — which made the transgender movement possible.
Transgenderism is Greer’s legacy. She and her boomer second-wave feminist allies turned womanhood into a costume. The young progressives on TikTok fighting for womanhood are fighting a losing battle. Just like Greer taught them, they engage in hookup culture, avoid marriage, vilify men, and forgo motherhood for professional rat races. Thanks to their foremothers, young progressives will never win back womanhood and femininity because they reject both.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
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