Dress the Emperor

Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war.  Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace. I am focused on making sure that every New Yorker is safe. I have been in contact with our Police Commissioner and emergency management officials. We are taking proactive steps, including increasing coordination across agencies and enhancing patrols of sensitive locations out of an abundance of caution. Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.

Any organization that wants to speak on behalf of women (talking to you, European Parliament) must recognize that the category of people who are female deserve their own advocacy groups based on issues they experience that are unique to their sex. Allowing a subset of men to redefine the word "woman" based on their external impression of what it means to be a "woman" is a male supremacist position. It claims that not only do people who are not and will never be female possess an epistemic understanding of the female experience so strong that it warrants a redefinition of what "female" means, but that the naming rights of women, a sex category, belong to men. At the same time, it erases all legitimate advocacy for women and girls. It is possible to care about achieving beneficial outcomes for multiple groups, but, at the end of the day, the job of a women's rights advocate is to ensure that the needs of women and girls as stakeholders is properly considered in the decision-making process. There are frequent instances where the demands of men laying claim to the notion of womanhood threaten the safety and dignity of women and girls. Allowing men to self-identify into women's prison centers leads to women being assaulted and raped by people who are bigger, stronger, and criminally violent. Allowing men to participate in women's sports leads to their categorical advantage placing them on the podium even when their training does not make them competitive in the men's division. Allowing single-sex intimate facilities to be sex-neutral leads to women and girls excluding themselves from those services out of discomfort. In each of these instances, what is best for the set of people who are female conflicts with what the set of male people who want to be treated "as women" are asking for. It would be one thing if representatives and organizations with similar levels of power were able to discuss this on behalf of the stakeholders they represent. But no, acknowledging that the set of people who are female exists is reframed as "exclusion" or "bigotry," killing off any chance of women and girls being fairly represented in these discussions by means of a linguistic sleight of hand that erases them from policy. If you redefine "woman" to include men, you are not a women's advocacy group. You are male supremacists, and are ensuring any "progress" made in women's rights advocacy contains a newspeak loophole that benefits men and only men.