If Women Don't Reclaim the Left , the Right Will Keep Winning

Trump, Sports, Strategy

Rarely has an image incensed me so. We are surrounded by pictures of man’s inhumanity to man, of devastation, of horror, to the point where we often just turn away

.

This was different, this was the image of Trump surrounded by excited young women and girls as he signed his executive order excluding male people from sports.

This was reported by the BBC as “ Trump signs order banning transgender women from female sports “. The order is titled “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports”

There is some relief that such clear language is being used about this issue.

Remember Biden’s Title IX, which was the US law that banned sex discrimination in federally funded education programmes? This has allowed much confusion and male-bodied transgender women into women’s sports. It must be noted that it’s never the other way round, trans men in men’s sports is just not an issue is it? Why is that?

Trans athletes are not banned from sports, they must merely compete in the correct sex category. This is easily determined by a cheek swab, no need for any invasive genital inspection; no more arguments hopefully about whether a man with artificially lowered testosterone is actually a woman.

What has made me so angry though, is that Trump of all people gets a photo op to pose as a protector of women’s rights, when we all know that he and his crew of neanderthal sex pests are the very opposite. Nor should we be fooled by the flurry of Executive Orders. He is following the Steve Bannon strategy of “flood the zone’. The zone is the media and all of us who react to it.

No sooner have we been outraged by one thing and another comes along. Resistance therefore is difficult and dispersed until it amounts to little more than despair. ‘Trump is very bad, doing very bad stuff.’ The Democrats themselves seem stupefied and stuck in some moment of 2020. So is most of “the left”. Palestine may have replaced Occupy and Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police as the nexus of protest but it is almost as if the last 5 years did not happen.

The academies are years behind the changing reality. Well of course, entire reputations have been made on by the cross fertilisation between queer theory, critical race theory, ideas about decolonisation and a lot of half-understood post-modernism. I once taught a summer school on post-modern theory to American students. It was telling that because they had never studied Marx at all, they had no real context with which to understand it.

We have got to a point now, where to say there are two sexes is seen as a white, colonialist interpretation of how the world works. Simply put, you can deconstruct everything until you get to the somewhat awkward question of ‘Where do babies come from?’. Then we get back to some sort of biology even if we prefer to refer to mothers as “gestational carriers’ and fantasise about womb implants and go all trans-humanist.