Over the past five years, we’ve seen an endless stream of hand-wringing and hysteria around the misogyny of Donald Trump. The President is the White Patriarchy epitomized: a man who believes women are objects for his grabbing, useless unless they are pretty to look at or satisfying their husbands. What a jerk!To be fair, Trump is a jerk. And, in my opinion, a misogynist. But he’s not the only one. There’s a group that prides itself on #MeTooing the world, tweeting the words cishetero patriarchy as much as possible in an effort to really stick it to the man (Jack Dorsey must be tormented) and repeating, ad nauseam, that Trump’s win is proof that Americans just loooove their bigotry. Yet they don’t seem to have much respect for women themselves. On Tuesday night, queen of the wokes, Chrissy Teigen, tweeted: ‘It’s insane what *our* fears are if we lose, compared to their fears if Biden wins. like we will prob all die or be handmaids and they’re worried about bathroom safety.’Yeah Chrissy. If Trump wins, you and your rich friends are all going to die. I have no idea who this ‘our’ is of whom Teigen speaks, but let’s assume she means ‘women’, since she drops ‘handmaids’ in right after her mass celebrity genocide prediction. There was a lot of talk online (and by ‘talk’, I mean all-caps accusations of Nazi love) about the American women who may have decided to abandon the Democratic party this time around, in favor of Trump, due to blue allegiance to gender identity ideology. In January, Joe Biden tweeted, ‘Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.’It seems, though, that there is compromise when it comes to women’s human rights.The Democrats have not only paid endless lip service to ‘trans rights’ throughout their campaign, but Biden has committed to enacting the Equality Act during his first 100 days as president, which would ensure males have the legal right to access women’s facilities, including washrooms, locker rooms and dressing rooms, should those males claim to be female. After committing to rolling back regulations instituted by the Trump administration, Biden would also likely allow trans-identified males to access women’s shelters and be transferred to female prisons, endangering some of the most marginalized women in the country. Not only that, but Biden has also said that male athletes who identify as transgender should be permitted to compete with and against female athletes in sport, essentially rendering women’s sport redundant. In other words, Teigen’s dismissive comments about ‘worrying about bathroom safety’ are a direct dig at women who have genuine concerns about losing their rights and safety if gender identity legislation should come into effect. You might think a bastion of women’s rights like Teigen, a member of the great ‘we’ herself, would avoid mocking women as silly for wanting to maintain their sex-based rights. Maybe she’d feel a sliver of concern for the women who will be made vulnerable as a result of Biden’s commitments. While Chrissy’s concerns are imagined, thousands of women around the world continue to fight for basics. One tweeter pointed out to Teigen, ‘You know women in third world countries are still fighting to have their own toilets so they won’t get raped as much?’ There has long been problems with access to women’s washrooms in the US, even, because the public sphere and workplaces were not designed with women in mind. Perhaps Chrissy Teigen is not the every woman she imagines herself to be, speaking up for the downtrodden, who would have no understanding of their oppression without a Hulu subscription.The speed at which Democratic supporters seem to have forgotten not only the history of women’s struggle for rights — which continues in other parts of the globe — but their more-feminist-than-thou bonafides is impressive. The moment progressives were faced with the reality that many women were indeed choosing to vote against the Democrats, the shallowness of their ‘feminism’ was revealed. The notion that a woman might make an autonomous, educated choice to vote for Trump was so impossible for these people to parse, within the insisted upon narrative that the current President is only supported through the Power of White Patriarchy, that they resorted to the most sexist of stereotypes. These female Trump voters were simply ‘voting as their husbands told them to’, or making emotional choices, so overwhelmed with anger at the Democrats they were no longer thinking rationally. It’s funny, because about a little over a century ago, before women gained the right to vote, after fighting for many decades, they were said to be too delicate, emotional and irrational to be involved in politics. Their husbands were there to speak on their behalf, after all, so women needn’t worry themselves with complicated things like voting. Now, a hundred years later, those claiming to be on the feminist end of the political spectrum are feeding women the same sexist bullshit — dismissing them as stupid or too enthralled by men to make decisions of their own.
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Feminists are announcing that women’s legitimate fears about male predators and concerns about women’s same-sex spaces and their abandonment of a party who has so fully abandoned them are irrational, silly and fueled by an inability to think rationally in the face of so much uncontrolled feminine emotion. Maybe we have to face the fact that ‘our side’ is not as progressive as we would like to think. When we dismiss swaths of voters who chose to support Trump as evil, stupid monsters — not even human beings — we are in dangerous territory. Women have long fought to be considered as full, autonomous human beings — not so they could do the bidding of a bunch of bullies on the internet and be treated like irresponsible children, but so they could make educated choices about their own lives and what they consider to be the betterment of society. And whether you like it or not, that means some women aren’t going to see things your way. My recommendation is that, if you do indeed claim to be an ally to women, try to understand those who don’t share your views. Treat them with a modicum of respect, rather than discarding, dismissing and condescending to them in the same way all women were, not so long ago.Meghan Murphy is a writer in Vancouver and the host of The Same Drugs.
