Shedding light on five gender mentality

Dale O'Leary, The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality

This book grew out of a series of articles published in Catholic World Report on the Cairo and Beijing conferences. As many of us know, the series of UN conferences supposed to further the rights of women have become battlegrounds between radical feminists who want to restructure society and those who want to protect the values of the traditional family. Dale O'Leary describes these confrontations, and their consequences, in considerable detail.

In 1990 WEDO was organized, the Women's Environment and Development Organization, with a veteran anti-life crusader, Bella Abzug, as its head. It first target was the Rio Conference, and it managed to change the focus from environmental issues to its own concerns - abortion and women's empowerment. "The real work of WEDO," the author writes, "goes on behind the scenes. WEDO has become a shadow UN. In Cairo, Bella was overheard claiming that she had written the Platform for Action. she insisted that Beijing would be her conference."

At Cairo, WEDO mounted a massive campaign for sexual and reproductive rights "respect for women's bodily integrity and decision-making as well as their right to express their sexuality with pleasure and without fear of abuse, disease, or discrimination." It all sounds fairly harmless; doesn't the expression "reproductive rights" mean the right to reproduce? Probably most delegates to UN conferences do not realize that these are code words which have different connotations from what is expected.

"Those familiar with feminist literature," O'Leary points out, "would know that this would include not only the right to contraception of all kinds and abortion on demand but also legal recognition of lesbianism, sperm banks for lesbians and unmarried women, voluntary prostitution, and the prohibition of pro-life demonstrations."

The preparatory meeting for Beijing brought out the issue which is the main subject of this book. Bella contended that defining gender as a synonym for sex was an attempt to reduce women to their physical sexual characteristics. The feminist definition of gender was commonly understood and accepted, she claimed:

The concept of gender is embedded in contemporary social, political, and legal discourse. It has been integrated into the contemporary social, political, and legal discourse . . . . The meaning of the word gender has evolved as differentiated from the word sex to express the reality that women's and men's roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change.

The logic here is bewildering. How can men's and women's roles be socially constructed? Men cannot be mothers; a woman can't father a child. My dictionary says that gender in many languages describes the grouping of words into classes, such as masculine, feminine or neuter, or that it equals sex, as in "the feminine gender." But Bella said firmly that her definition of gender was non-negotiable:

The current attempt by several member states to expunge the word gender from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word sex is an insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us, and to block further progress. We urge the small number of male and female delegates seeking to sidetrack and sabotage the empowerment of women to cease this diversionary tactic.

So Bella's abuse of language and of logic was all in aid of the goal of radical feminists, the empowerment of women. In a chapter on "Reimagining Gender," Dale O' Leary shows how pervasive is the ridiculous idea that gender is a social construction. For example, Lucy Gilbert and Paula Webster write,

Each infant is assigned to one or the other category on the basis of the shape and size of its genitals. Once this assignment is made we become what culture believes each of us to be - feminine or masculine. . . . gender is a product of human thought and culture, a social construction that creates the "true nature" of all individuals.

Similarly Kate Bornestein writes that "Women couldn't be oppressed if there was no such thing as 'women.' Doing away with gender is key to the doing away with patriarchy." And Anne Falso-Sterling has an article entitled "The Five SExes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough." The acceptance of the existence of more than two sexes advances the feminist and homosexual agenda.

Such discussions are bizarre, but O'Leary comments that the pro-family delegates to the Beijing Conference could not help noticing that many of the themes contained in them were reflected in the proposed Platform for Action.

At the preliminary conference in New York, WEDO and its allies came fully prepared to push their agenda. But the pro-family delegates organized themselves into a Coalition for Women and the Family, and members of this group were quick to notice the repeated references to gender in the draft proposals and to issue a warning that gender perspective "means seeing everything as a power struggle between men and women" and regarding "all men as guilty."

Following the New York meeting, O'Leary writes, she and many other defenders of the family underwent a crash course in feminist theory, and following the suggestion of a friend she was surprised to find that a good deal of it was based on marxism, especially with its idea of a class struggle.

A book by Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, showed how Marxism could be transformed into radical feminism. The radical feminists agreed with the Marxists that the goal was a classless society, but the feminist revolution would do away with sex classes, through "control of reproduction." Really radical thinkers, like Peter Beckman and Francine D'Amico consider that the labels men and women create fictitious beings and perpetuate inequality.

Marxism should have died with the fall of the Berlin wall, but O'Leary found that it is still alive on some American campuses. Why? One professor answered this question by saying that atheists need something to believe in.

At Beijing, the radical feminists who controlled the meetings managed to push through most of their agenda, and proclaimed that they had won a great victory; but O'Leary shows that Republican Congressman Chris Smith of the United States was able to ensure that his country offered only muted support for the agenda, and the heroic efforts of pro-life women like Dr. Margaret Ogala of Kenya, Mercedes Wilson of Guatemala, and our own Gwen Landolt, helped Third World delegates to realize that the UN was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. When the U.S. representatives were no longer in the forefront of pushing the feminist platform, delegates from the European Union and Canada were happy to take their place. The behavior of the Canadian delegation was disgraceful throughout. All this is described by O'Leary in fascinating detail.

She also has a chapter illustrating how specific provisions of the Beijing Platform are working their way into American practice. For example, in San Francisco the police are obliged to deal with people whose "chosen" sexual identity does not match their biological identity. They were instructed to house "transgendered individuals in jail cells appropriate to the person's gender identity." Cells for men and women won't do apparently. Commitment to equality in certain states mean pressure for as much money to be spent on women's athletics as on men's, and for an end to the disgraceful discrimination against employment of women as football coaches. Ruth Ginsburg, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice, was co-author of a report on sex bias in the U.S. legal code which objected to "husbands and wives" rather than "spouses," "fathers and mothers" rather than "parents" and "brothers and sisters" rather than "siblings."

But the most curious event of all was the decision of a divinity professor at Howard University to ensure that his baby would have no gender barriers. When asked whether it is a boy or a girl, he answers, "Ask the baby," and with the help from a fillable, strap-on tube he ensures that the child receives sustenance from both parents.

On the first page of her brief conclusion, Dale O'Leary summarizes what U.N. representatives believe that the world needs free contraception and legal abortion to start with; sex ed courses to encourage experimentation among children, and to teach them that homosexuality is normal and both sexes are the same; and the discrediting of all religions which oppose their agenda. The gender Agenda reminds her of a giant balloon, which may expand to suffocate all the people in a room. But all that is needed is one sharp pin and this book is intended to be that pin. It is a useful instrument to expose the aims and machinations of a strange new breed of people - people who believe in five genders, male, female, homosexual male, homosexual female, and bisexual.