feminine-genius

Who will protect the children?

There are two riveting accounts at the Witherspoon Institute of how gender disphoria harms children. The first shows the irresponsibility of the medical community for suggesting that sex-reassignment surgery can heal emotional wounds:

It wasn’t my mother but my grandmother who clothed me in a purple chiffon dress she made for me. That dress set in motion a life filled with gender dysphoria, sexual abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, and finally, an unnecessary gender reassignment surgery. My life was ripped apart by a trusted adult who enjoyed dressing me as a girl.

My mom and dad didn’t have any idea that when they dropped their son off for a weekend at Grandma’s that she was dressing their boy in girls’ clothes. Grandma told me it was our little secret. My grandmother withheld affirmations of me as a boy, but she lavished delighted praise upon me when I was dressed as a girl. Feelings of euphoria swept over me with her praise, followed later by depression and insecurity about being a boy. Her actions planted the idea in me that I was born in the wrong body. She nourished and encouraged the idea, and over time it took on a life of its own.

This story shows how difficult it is for children to process dysfunction in their parents:

When I was nine years old, my father told me he wanted to become a woman...In a sense, I lost my dad that day, when he told me he wanted to become a woman. As I tried to process that revelation, he blindsided me with another. He told me he never wanted to have children. To him, my siblings and I were mistakes, because we did not align with his desires. His confessions left me confused and hurt. After all, I just wanted a dad who would love and cherish me, who would make me feel special as a daughter. I felt rejected and abandoned by my own father.

For all our talk of safe environments, when we don't protect the dignity and purity of children, we are party to abuse. There are many more excellent resources at Witherspoon. Kindly educate yourself and pass the word.

The "patriarchy" whipping boy

When feminists consider the plight of women, they seem to fixate on tearing down male "privilege" (where they notice it) and providing contraceptives to coeds, rather than highlighting the real problems that women of the world face. Consider the battered in Bangledesh:

About 87 percent of married women in Bangladesh have been victims of various forms of domestic violence in their lifetime, according to a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)-sponsored survey conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, released this January.

Of 12,600 women surveyed, 65 percent said they were physically tortured by their husbands, 36 percent were victims of sexual violence, 82 percent faced psychological abuse and 53 percent were victims of mental anguish.

Only half the victims received treatment, while one third said they didn’t seek treatment for their injuries over fears of a backlash from their husbands.

In Muslim-majority Bangladesh, the conservative patriarchal attitude of society is blamed for sexual violence within marriage.

The use of the phrase "conservative patriarachal attitude" is interesting, because many go to its heart to name the culprit: men. Indeed, the attitudes of Bangladeshi men are deeply troubling:

A WHO survey of 2,400 Bangladeshi men found that 89 percent of rural men believe a husband has the right to mildly beat his wife to correct her, while 83 percent of the urban males surveyed held the same view.

Moreover, 93 percent of urban men and 98 percent of rural men believed that one needs to be tough to become a real man and 50 percent of urban men and 65 percent of rural men thought women need to tolerate repression to save their families.

But there are patriarchies, and then there are patriarchies. Consider what historian Christopher Dawson has to say about the concept:

1. historians love to consider that matriarchies and polyamourous societies abounded alongside those that established traditional marriage;

2. traditional marriage is supposedly founded on economic principles, to protect property;

3. there is no date to support these theories -- all cultures say a woman must be attached to a man to have a child (a woman and her children has never been accepted as a "sociologically complete unit";

4. "It is impossible to go back behind the family and find a state of society in which the sexual relations are in a pre-social stage, for the regulation of sexual relations is an essential pre-requisite of any kind of culture. The family is not a product of culture; it is, as Malinowski shows, 'the starting point of all human organization' and 'the cradle of nascent culture.' Neither the sexual nor the parental instinct is distinctively human. They exist equally among the animals, and they only acquire cultural significance when their purely biological function is transcended by the attainment of a permanent social relation."

6. there is a vital tension to families, since all persons have to strive constantly to conquer natural appetites and embrace subordination and sacrifice; 

7. and then the money quote:

The patriarchal family, on the other hand, makes much greater demands on human nature. It requires chastity and self-sacrifice on the part of the wife and obedience and discipline on the part of the children, while even the father himself has to assume a heavy burden of responsibility and submit his personal feelings to the interests of the family tradition. But for these very reasons the patriarchal family is a much more efficient organ of cultural life. It is no longer limited to its primary sexual and reproductive functions. It becomes the dynamic principle of society and the source of social continuity. Hence, too, it acquires a distinctively religious character, which was absent in matrilinear societies, and which is now expressed in the worship of the family hearth or the sacred fire and the ceremonies of the ancestral cult. The fundamental idea in marriage is no longer the satisfaction of the sexual appetite, but, as Plato says: "the need that every man feels of clinging to the eternal life of nature by leaving behind him children's children who may minister to the gods in his stead."

Thus, we weep for all women who have been harmed by marital arrangements that degrade and debase them -- not to mention wounding and killing them. We decry the cultures that don't honour women as fundamental equals to men, and we mourn the family cultures that aren't built on the harmony that flows from mutual respect. But to blame their absence on patriarchy is to misrepresent what the family is called to be. 

Muslim cultures make no apologies for their customs that hold a woman's worth to be half of that of a man, the man is capable of spousal abuse, unilateral divorce, and polygamy, which introduces chaos into the home. Yes, one might refer to Islam as a patriarchal religion, but there are patriarchies and then there are patriarchies. It all depends on the source of authority: a Father-God, or an All-powerful God subject to no restraints whatsoever.

Despair in Punjab

It would be difficult to create a more oppressive culture for women than that of the Punjab, in which at least 17 women daily are victims of "gender related" violence (I still take issue with how "gender is used in our vocabulary). 

According to the report, there were 1,650 cases of gender based violence in July and September. They included 477 cases of abduction, 347 murder cases (including 85 killed for ‘honour’), 250 cases of rape, 165 suicides, 37 incidents of domestic violence, 10 cases of burning, eight acid attacks and two cases of sexual assault.

While educational opportunities are minimal for girls (and certainly, not all boys have access to school either), that status only changes the nature of the abuse:

The report suggests that the type of violence the women were subjected to varied across socioeconomic class and age brackets. The more educated women were subject to more emotional and psychological abuse than women from rural, feudal or tribal backgrounds. Women from the lower income bracket were subjected to more physical abuse.

According to the report, 56 per cent of the incidents were reported from rural Punjab, 38 per cent from urban centres and around six per cent from small towns. The report suggested that women from rural areas were more vulnerable than their counterparts in urban centres and towns.

The number of rape complaints in rural centres was double the figure for urban centres. Furthermore, 62 per cent of incidents of honour killing occurred in rural areas.

The authors said that most of the cases probably went unreported.

So the statistics are probably much higher in every case, since some villages accept the status quo as "normal" and police aren't often involved. 

Skirkat Gah Advocacy and Communications Director Fauzia Viqar said domestic violence was an invisible crime in that it was rarely reported till it bordered on extreme. The notion of “sanctity of privacy” had stigmatised open discussions of domestic violence.

Viqar said the matter required a law that criminalised acts of domestic violence, otherwise considered quite normal in Pakistani society. She said redress for victims of domestic violence in civil courts and criminal courts were also limited.

Irfan Mufti, of the SAP-PK, said violence against women took place in their families, communities and the society. The latter two forms were kept in check to some extent but violence within households are rarely reported, he said.

He said there had been several reported cases in which the men of the family had subjected their women to violence and had their elders’ approval to do so.

Imagine the feeling of despair--which explains the high number of suicides. Extricating the religious roots is impossible at this point, although one would hope that Christianity would eventually make a difference. Prayers for these dear women.