Feminism Paved the Road for Transgenderism

July 16, 2023 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: |  Print This Article

Feminism Paved the Road for Transgenderism

Paul Craig Roberts

In the Spring 2023 issue of City Journal, Kay Hymowitz in a well written and researched article reports on the transgender movements success in using public schools to teach children they might be born into the wrong gender.  A “health industry” has grown up around the transgender ideology, and doctors are now conducting Joseph Mengele experiments on American children.  Hymowitz notes that the transgender approach to children casts aside all we know about childhood and human nature and is undermining legal and cultural mores that are the foundation of our society. Essentially, transgenderism throws the accumulation of knowledge about children down the Memory Hole.

Although the news focus is on men claiming to be women, there seem to be few men who actually undertake the surgery to physically change their sexual appearance.  There do not seem to be many Jazz Jennings.  Most “transgendered” men just claim to be women so that they have access to female private areas and can compete against women in sports events.  It seems to be the young girls who are most likely to want to be the opposite sex.  I blame the feminists for the dissatisfaction of girls with their female gender.

The entire thrust of the feminist movement was to make women dissatisfied with women’s roles and encourage women to take on male roles.  Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, encouraged women to be as sexually promiscuous as men and to enjoy as many sex partners as they could find, while also pursuing acquisition of men’s roles in corporate executive ranks, the military, and legal and medical professions.  The normal roles of women as mothers and homemakers were disparaged.  The message was clear.  Women’s roles were unworthy of women and women should abandon them.

In effect, feminists discredited women by discrediting their role, and now transgenderism by letting men be women has destroyed the concept of woman. If a man can be a woman, what is a woman?  Women have nurture in their genes, but feminism has directed them away from nurture roles and made them unhappy and confused to be women.  This is my explanation why the transgender movement is more prevalent among young girls.

Today movies, TV entertainment, and video games have women in the aggressive roles traditionally assigned to men.  Women are in charge.  They beat up and kill weak men who succumb to female authority.  In effect, women have become men as they occupy the male role. Three decades ago the New York Times praised Helen Gurley Brown for helping women to redefine their role in society.  Since girls are expected to be men, little wonder they want to look like men.

Parents do not realize it, but they are up against feminism as well as transgenderism.  

I encourage readers to subscribe to the City Journal. The articles are very good and well researched.  The articles are not ideological or political, and the writers are excellent. Heather Mac Donald, for example, is as excellent as a writer can be, and she is certainly trenchant. I think of Heather Mac Donald as the Mike Tyson of the written word.