In her book, Charen explains how second-wave feminists had argued for years about how the differences between men and women were a result of social construct and conditioning.
“Overall, [their view of] sex differences has been debunked by scientific research in the last decades. We know so much more now about brain structure and organization, about the influence of hormones, about certain basic hardwire differences between male and female brains as well as bodies,” the 61-year-old author said. “The idea that everything that is different about man and women being a result of socialization has been shown to be wrong. That is where the science has caught up with them.”
Instead of acknowledging the scientific findings, Charen said, dishonest feminists sought to “change the vocabulary.”
“They stopped talking about there being no difference between the sexes and they started talking about gender,” she said. “They said, ‘Well, there are many genders and gender is subjective and it can’t be measured by hormones and chromosomes. They really just kind of, with sleight of hand and language, they avoided the scientific debunking of their pet theories about people being identical.”
The movement to change such language is also playing out at the public school level. Most recently, a school board in Virginia voted to change the language in its middle school and high school sex-ed curriculum to scrub out the phrase “biological sex” and replace it with “sex assigned at birth.”
“There are even parents now who are declining to assign a sex to their babies. They don’t want to tell people whether they had a boy or a girl. They are saying they are going to find out as the child develops what sex it is,” she said. “I regard this as the logical endpoint of the feminist’s wrong ideas of the 1970s that everything is socially constructed. That is where we have arrived.” “We have arrived at a place where we are now investing a lot into the idea of gender identity — which I am not even sure is a thing,” Charen continued. “They are investing a lot in the idea that this is all purely subjective.”
In Charen’s view, she doesn’t have a problem with adults who want to go through with gender transition procedures and therapies because it is a “free country” and “people can do whatever they want.”
“But I think it is really dangerous, just based on a theory about sexuality, to begin giving massive hormone-blocking injections to prepubescent children and to mess with their psyche’s by … cutting [a girl’s] hair in a boy’s fashion and putting [a girl] in boy’s clothing and treating her as a boy,” Charen stressed. “Kids go through phases. Some girls are very masculine and they are still girls. Some boys are very feminine but they are still boys. The notion that you would interfere with that is really scary. Children are not capable of making such life-altering, drastic decisions for themselves, certainly not when they are preschoolers. I find this whole thing very, very dangerous.”
