Misogynists And Bigots Have Weaponized "Fairness"

The anti-trans activists harping on about "fairness" in sports for women couldn't care less about women.

by Justin Rosario

While scrolling through Twitter a series of tweets by The Editorial Board journalist Magdi Jacobs caught my attention:

I’m not going to do a deep dive into the entire trans debate and “fairness” in sports for girls and women. Jacobs is right, no one gave a damn about making sports fair for anyone, much less girls, until “fairness” became a slogan for the right to use as a cudgel against the trans community.

In fact, before we go any further, I’m just going to gently remind you, dear reader, of the right’s long crusade against participation trophies which is still going on. There have to be winners and, more importantly, losers. It’s no fun if someone doesn’t leave feeling bad about themselves, right?

That brings us to my larger point, that these great defenders of leveling the playing field for women would rather throw themselves off a bridge than institute even a modicum of fairness in any other context.

Fairness? For women?

The conceit at the heart of the “fairness” complaint is that girls and women are subjected to allegedly unfair conditions. I get that sports can feel extremely high stakes, but outside of professional leagues, they are recreational hobbies with no life changing consequences.

For real high stakes, take a look at American medicine. Historically, women have been, to put it politely, treated like cattle. In the 19th century for example, women were locked away in insane asylums for the horrific crime of being uppity. I’m not making that up:

Yet according to 19th century psychiatry, female independence was madness. Elizabeth, a housewife and mother of six, had simply stood up to her domineering husband. As she would record in a defense of her sanity that she wrote while in the asylum, she’d insisted, “I, though a woman, have just as good a right to my opinion as my husband has to his”—but assertive women in those days were swiftly dispatched to asylums, institutionalized for causing “the greatest annoyances to the family” and for defying “all domestic control.” No wonder Elizabeth had found herself on the wrong side of a locked ward door in the Jacksonville Insane Asylum, in Illinois.

The word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word hysterikós. Translation? “Suffering of the womb.” Lady parts were thought to be a source of madness as in, your vagina would drive you insane. The women in the 1800s asylums were lucky, though. Lobotomies hadn’t been invented yet. 

Lobotomies, if you’re only colloquially familiar with them, are a barbaric medical procedure in which the patient’s brain is mutilated. Connections from one part of the brain to another are physically and permanently severed, frequently leaving the patient docile and easy to control. Guess which gender that got used on the most?

A comprehensive survey of all psychiatric institutions and general hospitals with psychiatric wards in the United States between January 1, 1949 and June 30, 1951, shows nearly 60% of the lobotomy patients were women although men significantly outnumbered women as patients at the majority of these institutions. This disparity was noted by many practitioners at the time; one neurosurgeon with approximately two times more female than male lobotomy patients sought to explain and justify the gap: “one of the criteria for surgery on chronically ill patients has been disturbed behaviour; and female patients are generally more disturbed on a behaviour level”

They gave the man who invented lobotomies, Egas Moniz, a Nobel Prize for it. They were still butchering brains, still mostly women, as late as 1967. We landed men on the Moon two years later.

Biases in medicine still exist today. The overwhelming majority of clinical studies are done on men, so our healthcare inherently limits how much we know about the difference between women’s health and men’s. As the Guardian reports:

According to the Institute of Medicine, every cell in our bodies has a sex, which means men and women are different at a cellular level. That also means that diseases, treatments, and chemicals might affect the sexes differently. And yet there’s a long and storied tradition of ignoring gender when it comes to health research.

Then there’s the whole “women overreact” bias in medicine. I actually saw this happen firsthand as my wife went to her doctor repeatedly with heart palpitations only to be told it was “anxiety” and “stress” producing a “panic attack.” That doctor actually prescribed Debbie Xanax and didn’t listen to a word she said. She ignored the doctor’s advice and went to the emergency room instead. Surprise! She was having a minor heart attack (don’t worry, she’s fine). Needless to say, she changed doctors.

This is an insanely common occurrence in the medical field. And that’s before you mix in race which makes it so much worse. Once you layer on religious scumbaggery and Republican laws designed to murder women? The medical field is anything but fair for women. When is the fairness crowd going to get started on this?

Show me the cash!

Surely the fairness mob wouldn’t stand for economic inequality! Just kidding. They surely do. And don’t call me Shirley. Equal Pay Day passed a few months ago. That’s the day on which women finally earned, from January 1st, 2022 to March 13, 2023, the same amount of money as men did during just the calendar year of 2022.

There are a million excuses from the fairness crowd about why this is. Women “choose” lower-paying jobs because they’re not as competitive as men. Women “choose” to not pursue raises because they’re not as aggressive as men. Women “choose” to raise families and miss out on promotions as a result, etc, etc.

And yet, NPR still calls bullshit on that:

Even if you account for things like women taking more flexible jobs, working fewer hours, taking time off for childcare, etc., paychecks between the sexes still aren't square. Blau and her research partner Lawrence Kahn controlled for "everything we could find reliable data on" and found that women still earn about 8% less than their male colleagues for the same job.

"It's what we call the 'unexplained pay gap,'" says Blau, then laughs. "Or, you could just call it discrimination."

This issue can be fixed. There are, in fact, several ways to fix it. None of them complicated or onerous. Would it surprise you in the slightest to find out the fairness patrol has been blocking every avenue to address this imbalance? Politico explains:

Senate Republicans successfully blocked Democrats’ bill to narrow the gender wage gap Tuesday in the party’s second use of the filibuster to block majority-backed legislation.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would require employers to demonstrate that any gap in pay between a man and a woman was due to job performance rather than gender.

It would also bar employers from retaliating against workers for sharing salary information and from inquiring into or taking into consideration an employee’s wage history. Another provision would authorize the creation of a grant program that would train women on salary negotiations and require public education regarding wage discrimination, among other things.

Nothing in this bill directly forces companies to pay women more. It is simply leveling the playing field. You know, making things fair. Which the fairness crowd strongly believes in, right?

It seem fairness is actually the last thing they believe in. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the domain of sexual assault and harassment. 

#MeToo is too much

Back in 2017, the #MeToo movement, which had been quietly brewing for a decade, took off with the downfall of rapist and general all-around disgusting pig Harvey Weinstein. Several other rapists and serial sexual predators fell in rapid succession and, for a brief moment, it looked like one of the worst and most persistent inequalities in the workplace was going to be addressed. But the same crowd that would later be the tireless champions of all things fair looked upon the encroaching fairness in 2018 and was appalled:

"We have females that make false allegations and jumping on the 'me too' bandwagon," says Nate Jurewicz. "And it's ruined a lot of guys' lives."

Earlier this month, Jurewicz, a self-described "Christian, conservative, Republican, deplorable Trump supporter," launched a #HimToo Facebook page that drew nearly 15,000 likes in the first two weeks. It's full of slogans like: "No man is safe!" and memes mocking the #MeToo movement, such as one cartoon— showing "Jill" accusing "Jack" of pushing her down the hill, 300 years ago.

I don’t know if Jurewicz’s FB page is still up or if he is still on social media but I’ll bet you a shiny nickel he’s virulently anti-trans women in sports. After all, it’s not fair.

The idea that powerful men (or any men, really) could be held accountable sent the right into an indignant frenzy. All of this #MeToo stuff was unfair to men! They were the true victims here! Women were taking advantage of the situation! You’d think the goal of #MeToo was to chop every penis off and feed them to starving dogs.

Lifting the tiniest finger to end rape culture is anathema to the fairness crowd. Which is strange given the loudest screeching from the anti-trans fanatics is about all trans women being predators waiting to pounce on women in bathrooms. This never actually happens but, good lord, we need to do something about it so women will be safe. But if that “something” involves even the most minor inconvenience to men so they’ll stop sexually assaulting women roughly every minute or so? Oppression and tyranny and the worst conceivable persecution a man can suffer!

Misogyny Inc.

None of this is really new. As long as women have been fighting for fairness, the right has been fighting back. The level of violence directed against the Suffragettes was staggering. Just demanding the right to vote inspired a rage we would not see again, despite the constant ebb and flow of violence against women, for almost a century in the form of the MRA (Mens Rights Activism) movement.

Women have been making slow and unsteady progress for generations. But the second that progress even hinted at an even playing field, the fairness mongers went insane with rage. It’s hard to isolate what the tipping point was — too many women graduating college? Too many female managers in the workplace? Hillary Clinton? Rachel Maddow? Ru Paul? The result was Mens’ Rights Activism; a warped ideology so steeped in misogyny and violence that it regularly produces spree killers who almost exclusively target women.

If you’re still somehow blissfully unaware of the MRA movement and the Manosphere in general, god, I envy you. I’ve written about them before and you really should get familiar with what’s happening on the ostensible fringe of the Republican Party. It’s vile beyond all comprehension and it is already creeping into the Republican mainstream. The more immediate issue is that the people who scream the loudest about fairness in sports for women are the very same people who think men are being persecuted by a feminist conspiracy. 

Please take note that the fairness crowd has zero interest in tackling the MRA movement and making the world more fair, ie “safe” for women. Instead, the right has increasingly taken to adopting their deeply misogynistic hate speech. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a very comfortable fit.

The worst part is that we have not even come close to rock bottom. We joke about Republicans and “The Handmaid’s Tale” but it’s not really a joke anymore. And as awful as “The Handmaid’s Tale” is, I don’t recall the fictional country of Gilead pushing sex with children. It takes real effort to be more monstrous than one of the most reviled villains in literature. Perhaps the fairness crowd can kick off the inaugural Hunger Games while they’re at it, and only have women participate.

Keep all of this in mind the next time you hear someone sobbing their heart out over the pain and agony they feel on behalf of women everywhere being oppressed by trans women. These mighty protectors of defenseless females, in the same breath they rail against “predatory” trans women, will fight tooth and nail against reducing actual sexual assault in schools and on campuses. They view holding men who commit sexual assault accountable as, itself, a form of assault. Protecting women and girls is the furthest thing from their minds, even as they use their safety to persecute the trans community.

I can’t think of anything more shameful than weaponizing fairness to justify and codify bigotry and hate but here we are.

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