The true agenda of what has become known as the “transgender movement” is to abolish sex, according to author and self-declared feminist Kara Dansky.
Dansky, author of the new book “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls,” not only takes issue with the objective to destroy the concept of sex, but also with the use of the term “transgender.”
The term “transgender” was invented, but the “word has no coherent meaning whatsoever,” Dansky says, adding that “every single person on the face of the planet, all 8 billion of us, are either female or male, and that’s it.”
Dansky joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the history of the term “transgender” and what she thinks the movement’s ultimate objective might be.
We also cover these stories:
- Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., says he is very hesitant to consider changes to the filibuster rule sought by many in his party.
- A federal judge issues a preliminary injunction preventing the Navy and the Defense Department from enforcing a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
- In November, a record number of 4.5 million employees quit their jobs.
Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript:
Virginia Allen: We taught quite extensively on this podcast about the transgender issue because it’s something that affects all Americans and it specifically is harming women and girls. Kara Dansky is the author of the new book “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” Kara is also on the steering committee of the U.S. chapter of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign and previously served on the board of the Women’s Liberation Front from 2016 to 2020. Kara, thank you so much for being here today.
Kara Dansky: Thank you for having me.
Allen: Kara, your book just came out in November, “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” As you state right in the title, the transgender movement is working to abolish this idea of sex. Why are they doing this?
Dansky: It’s a good question. So I want to just go back to how you introduce the topic by saying “the transgender issue.” I don’t use that language and that’s why the word “transgender” is in quotes on the cover of my book.
Allen: Yeah, please explain that.
Dansky: Sure. I just think it’s really important that people who are fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls use accurate language.
For example, I was having a conversation one time with a group of Republican women in a fairly major U.S. city. I don’t want to say where it was, but they invited me to their meeting, knowing who I am. They knew that I am a radical feminist and a registered Democrat, and this was a group of Republican women and they invited me and I was very happy to accept their invitation.
And one of the women said to me, “Kara, what are we going to do about the issue of having transgender athletes in women’s sports?” And my response was a question, which is, “OK, we can talk about that, but when you say ‘transgender athletes,’ what do you mean?”
She kind of paused and she kind of struggled. And then she said, “Well, I thought we had to say that.” And I asked her, “OK, do you mean men and boys?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, you can just say that.” And she said, “I didn’t think we were allowed to say that.”
I thought that was so interesting because I understand where she was coming from because we are all under a tremendous amount of social pressure and political pressure to use language like that. But I think it’s really important that we resist that pressure.
And if we mean men and boys, we can just say “men and boys,” it’s OK to speak the truth. In fact, it’s important to speak the truth. So that’s why when you say “the transgender issue,” I just have to take a little bit of exception to that.
This is not “the transgender issue.” This is about women and girls having rights, privacy, and safety. And I’m going to hold to that stead ghastly.
I was on the Tucker Carlson show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the other night and I made a plea specifically to conservatives, to Republicans, because as much as I dislike it, I know that Republicans are the political party that is the only one that is holding firm to the material reality of biological sex.
But Republicans lose that. It all goes out the window when you say things like “the transgender issue” or “transgender athletes” or “transgender students,” things like that. We just have to stop using the language.
Allen: Mm-hmm. Kara, that’s such a powerful point, that we need to hold firm to the fact that there’s two genders. There are men and there are women, there are boys and there are girls. And that’s all the language that we need to describe the two sexes.
Dansky: Can I interrupt?
Allen: Please do.
Dansky: There are two sexes.
Allen: Yes.
Dansky: Not two genders.
Allen: Language is incredibly important. Thank you for pointing that out. Why has it become such a debate? Why do you think that so many people are fearful of drawing a line in the sand and saying, “No, there are two sexes,” and how did this become so controversial that that is now somehow this really almost bold statement to make, to say, “No, there’s only two sexes. There’re only men and women”?
Dansky: It’s a great question. And isn’t it weird that it seems like a bold statement to make that there are only two sexes? Yes.
So essentially, what happened—and I lay this out in Chapter 5 of the book—is that there’s a movement and it has persuaded America and the rest of the world that this is a civil rights movement to protect a marginalized group of people. That is a lie.
What is actually happening is that there is a massively well-funded industry that is pushing this agenda. And it manufactured the word “transgender” because, in the 1960s and ’70s, the postmodernist movement grew in academia, out of which launched so-called queer theory, which at its heart proclaimed that there is no such thing as biological sex.
But it was very smart. And it knew that if it tried to persuade Americans that there’s no such thing as biological sex, it would have failed colossally because that’s ridiculous. So they did something that was very intelligent and ended up being very successful, which is that they invented the word “transgender.”
That word has no coherent meaning whatsoever. Most people use it, even though the people who use it have no idea what they mean when they say it. It was invented out of whole cloth to sell an industry. And that’s what we’re seeing playing out now.
But it did it very effectively by persuading Americans that there is some coherent category of people who “are transgender.” There’s not. There is no such category of people. Every single person on the face of the planet, all 8 billion of us, are either female or male and that’s it.
Allen: But Kara, I guess what I’m struggling with is then what is the ultimate end goal that is trying to be accomplished here? Why is there this push to do away with the concept of men and women with the concept of sex?
Dansky: So, there’s a guy named Martine Rothblatt and he wrote a book. He “identifies as a woman.” He’s a billionaire. He spent millions of dollars creating a robot replica of his wife. And he wrote a book literally called “Transgender to Transhuman.”
So this sounds a little bit conspiratorial, except that it’s not, he’s very open about this. His goal is to obliterate human beings and get us out of our bodies and into the cloud. I wish I were kidding. I know it sounds crazy, but he’s very explicit about this.
And if your goal is to obliterate human bodies and get us out of our bodies and into the cloud, a really good way, a really strategic way of doing that would be to sell America on the idea that sex is irrelevant, that biological sex is irrelevant.
My friend Jennifer Bilek talks about this at great length in her blog, “The 11th Hour Blog,” she talks about it in terms of the colonization of human bodies. And I think it’s important that we start to think about that and as crazy as it sounds, and I know that it does.
Allen: Well, it does, but at the same time, I think 50 years ago, if you had told the average American citizen the debate about men and women and sexes is going to be a massive national debate and there will be lawsuits filed, most people would’ve laughed and said, “But there are only men and women.” And then in part, I feel like we have reached a stage in America where it’s like one thing just constantly leads to another, and very few things maybe are surprising.
But Kara, if there is this kind of staunch movement forward and there’s this really targeted agenda to do away with sex, where are we in this process right now? You’ve told us some of the history and how this has come about and how this argument started. Where are we in this process? And how much further is this agenda trying to go? And how long do we have before we get there?
Dansky: We are very far into it and we don’t have much further to go. And this is why I think that there has to be nonpartisan or cross-partisan, if you like, opposition to it.
We have to understand that my priority as a feminist is fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. And by that, I mean, all women and girls, I don’t care about political parties. I am interested in fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls.
I remain a registered Democrat and I’ve made common cause with a lot of Republican women. And I am very happy to work across the aisle with women who are fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. And also, men have to understand that this impacts them, too. It mostly harms women and girls, but it impacts men as well.
And so one of the things in my book that I lay out, one consequence, I lay out this hypothetical. So the hypothetical scenario, if our society and government completely obliterate the material reality of biological sex, here’s a hypothetical, there’s a drug company that is testing a drug to cure prostate cancer. And it invites men to sign up to test the drug.
I signed up and I say that I’m a man because I identify as a man. They don’t question it because they’re not allowed to because the government has said gender identity is supreme and sex doesn’t matter. Anyone who identifies as a man is a man.
So I sign up for this trial to test a drug to cure prostate cancer. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a prostate because I don’t have a male body.
I sign up for the test, they test the drug on me and they include the results of the test in their trials. They report it to the [Food and Drug Administration]. And when they report it to the FDA, they say that these are the results for all the men that we tested this drug on. They don’t bother to note that one of their test participants was female and the FDA approves the drug.
Do the men who then take the drug to cure prostate cancer have a right to know that one of the test participants, at least one of the test participants, was actually female and does not have a prostate? I don’t know the answer to that.
It’s a somewhat bizarre hypothetical except that we are living in it now. We are living now in a state where the Biden administration has literally told every federal agency that sex doesn’t matter. That all that matters is gender identity. That includes the [National Institutes of Health], that includes the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].
We could talk about the FBI and the recording of crime statistics, but we need to understand that abolishing sex and enshrining gender identity is going to have massive implications for everyone, especially women and girls, but for everyone.
We know from studies that have been conducted that COVID has affected men and women differently. But the only reason we know that is because we acknowledge biological sex. If that ends, we lose our ability to know those kinds of things. And those kinds of things are important to know.
We can have political debates or social debates about to what extent that matters or what are the solutions we should prescribe for it. But just the basic level of knowing how diseases affect men and women differently because we have different bodies is important. And we’re losing that.
Allen: Kara, you’ve been laying out all of these issues. What is the road map out? What do political leaders need to be doing right now legally? What laws need to be changed in order to be protecting women and girls? And then what do we as private citizens need to be doing to push back and again, confirm the truth that there are two sexes, men and women?
Dansky: One thing is that the Senate needs to scrap the so-called Equality Act. It’s been pending before the Senate for a long time now and it probably won’t pass, and that’s a good thing.
If the Equality Act were passed to protect sexual orientation, I would be in favor of it. But the Equality Act as currently written replaces sex with gender identity. And that needs to go.
The Biden administration needs to be told in no uncertain terms that it needs to retract every single order that it issued in the first half of 2021 to replace the word “sex” to mean “gender identity.”
Now, there’s a lawsuit to make that happen. It’s currently pending in the Eastern District of Tennessee, and that’s a good thing. In my organization, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, the U.S. chapter filed a brief in that case and I’m very glad that we did that. So we’ll see how that litigation pans out.
[The] state of California defines sex in its Civil Rights Act to include gender identity, gender appearance, and gender expression. It makes no sense.
If you have listeners in California, I have people who are part of my organization who are working very hard to get that law changed. And I’m sure they would be very happy to work with women and men across the political aisle to get that law changed, and I hope it does.
Be very mindful of what is going on at your local government level and at your state government level, of how the governments are redefining sex to include gender identity. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your elected officials at the local level and at the state level.
Again, it doesn’t matter about political party. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. I don’t care if your elected official is a Democrat or a Republican. Your elected officials represent you. They are required to listen and their job is to listen to your concerns. Please do not hesitate to reach out.
And the other thing that people can do is a lot of us are noticing that employers are starting to do things like requiring us to put so-called preferred pronouns in our email signatures. Resist, resist.
I don’t want anyone to lose their livelihood, I don’t want anyone to lose their employment, but we can resist. We can all resist this by saying, “You know what? I don’t want to put my so-called preferred pronouns in my email signature because I think that’s ridiculous.” You can just say that.
I really want Americans across the political aisle of every religion, every race and ethnicity to just say “no” and to stop capitulating to what is an authoritarian onslaught on our ability to know that we are all female and male.
Allen: Excellent. Kara, thank you. Kara Dansky is the author of the book “The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” And for anyone that wants to order the book, you can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever books are sold. This is an excellent read.
Kara, we hope to have you back on again soon. This is such a critical issue and unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. So thank you for the work that you’re doing on this.
Dansky: I agree. And thank you so much for having me.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.