It is not very mature to communicate in internet memes, but when I try to describe the Democrats’ attitude to protecting women’s rights, all I come up with is that Simpsons clip of Sideshow Bob repeatedly stepping on rakes and smacking himself in the face. So severe is this rake face-smacking tendency that last week the Democrats managed to make Texas senator Ted Cruz — a misogynist of such proportions that he thinks abortion should be banned even if the woman has been a victim of rape or incest — look like America’s last great feminist.
On Wednesday, at a US Senate judiciary hearing, Cruz questioned Judge Sarah Netburn, whom President Biden has nominated to the US District Court. Netburn has a long record of dealing with complex cases but Cruz focused on one in particular: her recommendation in 2022 that the serial rapist William McClain be transferred to a women’s prison.
In 2015, when McClain was 51, after he was released from jail for raping two children and before being reincarcerated for sharing violent child pornography, he chose to identify as a woman. And off he went to a women’s prison, with Netburn’s blessing. When the Bureau of Prisons suggested this could be traumatising and dangerous to the female prisoners, the judge dismissed that concern as “overblown”.
“The other women in that prison … do they have the right not to have a 6ft 2in man who is a repeat, serial rapist put in as their cellmate?” thundered Cruz.
“I considered the facts presented to me and I reached a decision based on the law,” replied Netburn in a “computer says no” monotone. Given she referred to the convicted rapist as “she” during the hearing, her grasp on facts is perhaps a little shaky. The Democratic senator Mazie Hirono declared Netburn would be “a damn good judge”. Smack goes another rake.
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Speaking as a US-UK citizen who has always voted Democratic and almost always Labour (save for the Corbyn years), I have a plea to those parties: can you please stop whacking yourselves in the face? Netburn was following the Democrats’ push to let inmates self-identify, meaning a male prisoner who claims to identify as a woman can potentially be incarcerated in a women’s prison.
Biden also expanded Title IX — the civil rights law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools — to include gender identity, after the Trump administration had restricted it to referring to biological sex.
Yet his team have been tentative about how this would work with school sports, and as a result, there are endless clips online of American boys with long hair body-slamming girls in basketball games and stealing gold medals in girls’ running races.
Activist groups insist being transgender is analogous to being gay, and so the Democrats have parked all critical thinking and waved through rights for males who identify as women. American women are now in the absurd position where defending their rights — the right to not share a prison cell with a rapist, to not be pummelled by a large teenage boy in gym class — places them on the same side as the misogynistic Republicans.
Before any British readers laugh too loudly, our own shadow minister for international development, Lisa Nandy, said in 2020 that male rapists who transition should have the right to go to a women’s prison. As recently as Monday, it emerged at an employment tribunal that staff at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre believe “there is no such thing as biological sex”. Yup, at a rape centre. Its chief executive, Mridul Wadhwa — who identifies as a woman — thinks the role of a rape crisis centre is to “challenge [raped women’s] prejudices” — those prejudices being a preference to talk to a female counsellor rather than a male one about their sexual assault. When a caseworker, Roz Adams, tried to defend the rights of the victims — an unforgivable crime at this re-education gulag — and argued they had the right to request a female counsellor, she was dismissed as a bigot. The tribunal ruled that the centre had unlawfully discriminated against her.
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You’d think, logically, that these cold shafts of reality’s light would make the phantasm of gender ideology wither away. But logic does not apply here. The same week the ERCC lost its employment tribunal, the shadow minister for women and equalities, Anneliese Dodds — no stranger to rakes — announced that Labour would make it easier for people to change gender. Because no problems have emerged from making it easy for people to change gender. Other than in the NHS, sport, schools, prisons, workplaces and everywhere else.
“Gender ideologues try to dismiss feminists — who argue there are major biological differences between men and women — by describing them as “right-wing”. It is true most politicians on the right tend to understand the existence of biological sex. They also probably accept the existence of gravity. That so many on the left would — still! — rather jettison women’s rights than state the well-established obvious reflects badly only on them, and it has left a lot of women politically homeless, stuck between anti-abortion homophobes on one side and biology-denying, rapist-pandering cultists on the other.
So please, Democratic and Labour politicians, can you stop making the worst Republicans seem like the only grown-ups in the room, simply for knowing that two plus two does not equal a unicorn? Or have you smacked yourself with so many rakes you’ve given yourself a permanent concussion?
