From ‘The Second Sex’ to a mother called Fred
by Mary Kenny, MercatorNet:
How feminism disrupted motherhood and made it a choice for ‘men’.
Recently, I wrote a short piece about a young person in the seaside town where I reside in Kent in England, Deal, near Dover. I had known the young person locally as Jess. She was a clever young woman with a degree in Arabic. Then we heard that Jess had transitioned from female to male, and become Fred.
Subsequently, Fred halted the transitional process temporarily to become pregnant, conceive a baby through sperm obtained via the internet, and give birth to a son. Fred then resumed the transitioning from female to male, and sought, legally, to register herself as the baby’s father, not the baby’s mother, although, in a TV documentary Fred made for the BBC – “Seahorse”, shown last month – the baby is filmed emerging from Fred’s uterus and birth canal in the same birthing process that runs through every mammal species.
Interestingly, Sir Andrew McFarlane in the Supreme Court in Britain ruled, on September 19, that Fred could not be legally described as the father of the child, because “men cannot give birth” — although Fred can continue to call himself a man. But we can be sure that this will soon be challenged, as part of ongoing gender rights. Because it is an absolute orthodoxy at the present time that “gender” and “sex” are “social constructs”: that is, not defined by biology, or what used to be called “nature”, but defined by “society”. An American “gender philosopher” called Judith Butler, who holds this view, has had enormous influence through academic networks: and that has become part of the accepted ideas of our culture.
“Equality” and “choice” are key mantras which have come to mean that men and women are defined by society, and “choice” has no boundaries in ethics or nature.
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