When our world is becoming gender-neutral, there is still a vital place for women.
My two-year-old daughter is going through a funny phase at the moment. She is in the habit of asking everyone she meets whether or not they have a penis. “You got a willy?” she says innocently to men and women alike. Sometimes she volunteers her own thoughts in response to whatever answers she receives. “I don’t,” she says, “’cos I’m a girl”, and then wanders back to helping her older sister build an ice palace out of cushions, or whatever the latest project is.
In the old days, our parents would have reprimanded us for asking such intrusive and inappropriate questions of people in public. Indeed, in simpler times, I wouldn’t be writing about such total and utter banalities in a magazine like the Catholic Herald. But we live in complicated times.
We live in times where, as happened in my daughter’s nursery school, teaching staff are reprimanded and given a black mark by the inspectorate for segregating boys and girls when taking the daily register. Heaven forbid we draw attention to the fact that girls and boys are different.
We live in times where thousands of unhappy, traumatised children in the UK have been receiving, in the broad light of day, untested puberty blockers in an NHS-run, tax-payer-funded clinic to stop them from developing into the adult version of the sex they were assigned at conception.
We live in times where websites, such as parents.com, which has apparently “since 1926 been committed to supporting caregivers through every step of the parenting journey”, and where mostly women go for so-called expert advice on anything from pregnancy to toddler tantrums, has in almost every scenario replaced the words “woman” and “women” with the words “person” and “people”, “people who menstruate” and “people with vaginas”.
As a result, instead of reprimanding my daughter, I find myself encouraging her because soon she will go to the local state school where she will be told to bow to the altar of equality and taught that women can be men and that men can be women and that anyone can marry anyone.
I feel a strange pride that my two-year-old knows more about the difference between the biological sexes than many adults today seem to, which is sad. But I also feel sad and desperately worried for her and her sister. Not because I think either of them is in danger of going down the sex-change route, but because their God-given female-ness and femininity has no value in our society anymore.
Unlike people who define themselves as “feminists”, I am not easily offended. While some people might be offended on hearing the phrase “a woman’s place is in the kitchen”, my inclination has always been to laugh – at the silliness of the person who would say such a thing, but also because this is in many ways true in my own domestic situation and I don’t particularly mind. Frankly, I would rather cook nice meals than have to push giant wheelbarrows of logs around in the freezing cold, which is how my husband spends most of his free time.
But I am offended by the phrase “people who menstruate”. In the words of my fellow columnist Katherine Bennett: “We are women”. What hurts most about it is that all of the articles where the word “woman” has been deleted seem to have been written by women, although I realise the irony in my assumption that in this day and age the “people” with feminine names are actually women.
And suddenly, out of the blue, I find myself agreeing with the feminists. Not that long ago, I could hardly bear to read the left-wing rants of former Guardian turned Sunday Times journalist Hadley Freeman, who last month wrote extensively in the Sunday Times magazine about the revelations emerging from the Tavistock clinic, whereas now I find myself agreeing with every word she says.
Even the Church of England is at it – first women’s ordination and now a gender neutral God – ripping our God-given value away from us all in the name of greater equality. The C of E and the rest of secular society is telling women that their womanhood is meaningless and that they will only be valuable humans if they play the role of men. Mother-hood, daughterhood, femininity, wifeliness – these are all worthless in the eyes of the world today, unless of course a “man” becomes a mother in which case it is marvellous.
Truly the only saving grace for my girls is that they belong to the Catholic Church, one of the very few institutions left that loves women and doesn’t want to change them.
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