The WNBA’s stunning inability to explain why Enes Kanter Freedom shouldn’t be eligible for women’s professional basketball is an unexpected gift to Republicans facing a difficult midterm election.
Once again, voters see how the left is now so controlled by radical ideologues that they can no longer acknowledge the obvious realities that made them champion Title IX and the need for separate sports teams for biological women.
But why stop with sports?
Republicans should do more to remind voters what the left’s radicalism means for even non-athletic women. Six-foot-10-inch Enes Kanter Freedom in a wig is amusing. But the erasure of women as a separate sex is no laughing matter.
Republicans should remind the public that next year, under the new Congress, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is up for reauthorization. Most people will be more than surprised to know that the law was changed in 2013 from protecting women to protecting anyone claiming to identify as a woman. That affects battered women’s shelters, for example.
And not included in the present version of VAWA? Honor killings, forced marriages, and child marriages.
Republicans should ask: Do we want this law to defend women – and for that term to have meaning – or are women’s needs once again going to be pushed aside?
Imagine right now, a battered woman fleeing a violent boyfriend, arriving at a shelter created for women like her. She may be bruised. Terrified. Perhaps she has children with her. She walks through the doors of a domestic violence shelter because she has been told this is one place where she will be safe.
But upon arriving at the shelter, she discovers that it isn’t actually just for women. The shelter fears running afoul of federal nondiscrimination laws, so their policy is to let in men who claim a female identity. The terrified woman has to hope that the violent man she just left hasn’t discovered this loophole. Her sense of safety and security disappears.
The Violence Against Women Act was enacted to help women like this. It was supposed to provide support and resources for women suffering from crimes that were too often ignored. But VAWA tying gender-identity requirements onto federal funding for shelters means women can no longer count on single-sex shelters.
Republicans should call this out resoundingly. They should make sure that people hear from women, like those in Anchorage, Alaska, who had to fight a legal battle to keep a shelter single-sex. These women, trying to heal from abuse, were shaken when a 6-foot-1 man claiming to be a woman demanded entry to their facility. The women were so alarmed that several reportedly said they would rather sleep outside in the Alaska winter.
Then there are the women at Naomi’s House, a shelter in Fresno, California, who alleged in a federal lawsuit that a trans-identifying male resident sexually harassed them, including making sexually explicit comments and staring at women while they were undressed. The women said they repeatedly voiced their concerns, but were told the shelter had to accommodate him based on federal gender-identity requirements.
In New York City, women at a homeless shelter were required to share living and shower facilities with trans-identifying male residents under the city’s gender-identity policy. One resident alleged that a male resident threatened an older woman with violence.
And in a particularly chilling example of what can happen when women’s shelters are unable to enforce sex-based protections, a convicted sexual predator in Canada gained access to women’s shelters and sexually assaulted two women, including a domestic violence survivor.
Do Democrats really support denying women their own spaces to heal?
The same issue plagues women’s prisons, where in some states female inmates – including women with histories of suffering sexual and domestic abuse – have been locked every night into cells with male inmates who claim to identify as women.
Prisoners cannot simply walk away. They cannot choose another cellblock or roommate. Their dependence on government makes government’s obligation to protect them greater, not smaller. Republicans should challenge Democrats on whether they think that what’s happening to these vulnerable women is fair.
Republicans should make clear who stands with women, not only against the radicals who want to erase women as a distinct sex, but against other movements that condone mistreatment of women.
Right now, women and girls face new threats. According to UNICEF, well over 90% of women and girls in Somalia undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), a deeply misogynistic practice designed to prevent women from the possibility of sexual pleasure. It’s widespread in numerous other countries that have growing populations in the United States. We cannot allow this barbaric practice to be imported here.
To compensate for VAWA being silent on FGM, President Trump signed the Stop FGM Act in early 2021, which strengthened our nation’s response to this heinous crime, making it clear this practice will not be tolerated in the United States. The upcoming reauthorization of VAWA will provide an opportunity to include a focused national strategy and dedicated funding stream to combat FGM and protect our young women.
Similarly, we need to ensure that girls – all girls – are free from coerced marriages and honor-related violence. These practices should be criminal and have no place inside our borders.
Democrats used to claim the mantle of being the party of women. Yet they have kicked away women’s interests and even the very concept of womanhood itself.
Republicans – the champions of first emancipation, then suffrage, and then civil rights (look it up if all you know is revisionist history) – have been steadfast in defending women against this radicalism, and they should make this case aggressively to voters.
