Under the banner of “gender inclusiveness” President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office to force schools to let boys who decide they are girls participate in girls’ sports events. This is a frontal attack on the fight for women’s rights.
Declaring “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the rest room, the locker room, or school sports,” the directive says any school receiving federal funding, which includes nearly every public high school, must allow boys who identify as girls onto girls’ sports teams or face federal retaliation.
Biden’s order ignores the real biological differences between men and women. If implemented it would rig sports events against girls by forcing schools to let boys — who develop larger muscle mass and bigger hearts, lungs and bones as they go through puberty — compete alongside them.
“This order opens the door to setting back gains won through hard-fought struggles for women’s rights, including for women athletes,” Candace Wagner, Socialist Workers Party candidate for lieutenant governor in New Jersey, told the Militant. “All working people have a stake in opposing the measure.”
The order undermines federal protection for women’s sports guaranteed by Title IX legislation passed by Congress in 1972. The implementation of that law reflected the broader impact of the rise of the movement for women’s liberation and helped pave the way for the creation of many women’s athletic teams.
In 1972 only 90 of the 428 U.S. athletes competing in that year’s Olympics were women. By 2016 the team consisted of 292 women and 263 men.
Biden’s edict joins other moves by the Democratic Party to enforce “wokeness.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck all language not deemed sufficiently “gender inclusive” from official House documents Jan. 4. The terms “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister” and other family terms were canceled and replaced with “parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling” and so on. Words such as “himself” and “herself” must now be replaced with “themself.”
Implementing such changes is aimed at reinforcing anti-scientific notions advanced by liberals who argue that “men” and “women” are merely subjective categories with no biological basis in fact. They argue a person’s sex can be freely altered anytime. “None of this has anything to do with fighting prejudices against people who do identify as other than the sex they are born with,” Wagner said.
Such is liberals’ zealotry in enforcing these codes that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, insisted it was necessary to say “amen and awoman,” instead of just “amen” at the House’s opening prayer. But the term “amen” has no meaning relating to or derived from the word “men.” It translates from Hebrew to mean “so be it.” But the alteration of the expression by Cleaver obeys the Democratic Party leadership’s “politically correct” language diktats.
Following laws signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom last year providing grants to hospitals to carry out “gender reassignment surgeries” on children who request them, the state’s insurance commissioner issued a directive reclassifying double mastectomies of healthy breasts this month. Such operations would no longer be considered “cosmetic” surgery when requested by a young woman wishing to change her gender. Instead they are described as procedures intended to “correct” what the commissioner claims are “abnormal structures of the body caused by congenital defects.”
Woke doublespeak also includes redefining skin color after Donald Trump garnered the largest share of Asian, Black and Latino votes of any Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. Support for Trump among Black women doubled, despite liberal media hysteria labeling him a “white supremacist.”
In response, New York University history professor Cristina Beltrán argues in the Washington Post that the term “white” no longer needs to refer to a person’s skin color. “To understand Trump’s support,” among non-Caucasians she writes, “we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness.” This “reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity.” In other words “whiteness” is now an epithet directed at those who don’t vote the way you think they should, having nothing to do with the actual color of your skin.