This Afternoon We Find Out

This afternoon, we find out which of the 50+ policy resolutions get adopted by the CPC.  Back here, I reviewed 3 policy resolutions in context, and questioned just how “broad” the conservative tent really is.  If any of those 3 resolutions is adopted, we can safely conclude that the CPC continues to tilt at the windmills of women’s rights, 2SLGBTQ+ rights, and in particular transgender rights. 

Make no mistake about it, by openly attacking transgender rights, the CPC is lining up to attack a whole host of social issues, ranging from education to women’s healthcare.

Something I want to emphasize is that the current focus of the political right on transgender women has enormous negative implications for women as a whole.  In particular, it represents a return to policing women’s bodies and appearance through peer pressure.  If you don’t look sufficiently “feminine” by someone else’s standards, you will find yourself challenged when you try to use a washroom in a public space - and by “not looking sufficiently feminine”, that could be as simple as wearing a bunch of old clothes when you pop out of the house to pick up some new paint brushes while you’re in the midst of painting your home. Whoops - you’re not dressed in the latest fashions, your hair isn’t done, and you *gasp* forgot your makeup!  I assure you that there will be someone who decides that means you’re not really a woman.  

I wish I was joking.  I’m not.  Stereotypes like the so-called Stepford Wives exist because in numerous religious subgroups, women are not merely expected to be “obedient to their husbands”, but they come under enormous scrutiny and pressure to conform (and while I write this from a generally Anglo-Christian perspective, these same pressures exist in many cultural milieus).  The ultimate goal here is very much to return women to the social role that they were forced into prior to the civil rights era, and potentially even pre-personhood where biology - specifically the ability to bear children - defines womanhood entirely. 

Transgender people present a fundamental threat to that worldview because they demand a separation of “the body” and the social roles associated with that body.  A core demand of feminism has always been autonomy, and in particular bodily autonomy.  Women have long sought the means to control their own fertility, but it has only been in the last 6 decades or so that the tools to do so have come to exist in a reasonably safe form.  To many, the changes that resulted from this autonomy, ranging from women having careers (and demanding equality in the workplace), to having actual public discourse about things like reproduction, have been an existential threat not only to existing power structures, but to their own sense of security.  The old models of “dad goes to work, mom stays home and looks after the household” have given way to much more complex structures that make old biblical adages about “the woman shall submit to her husband” very difficult to place in the modern world. 

Just as the recognition of sexual diversity has challenged the idea that “marriage” only exists for the purposes of producing children (a very utilitarian concept), or that sex only exists between “man and woman”, the mere existence of transgender people challenges previously rigid categories of “masculine” and “feminine”.  That is something which more socially conservative elements in our society have long regarded as an existential threat because not only does it require deconstructing and separating the social and the biological aspects of being human, it undermines centuries old scriptures that they hold as “divine truth”.  

That’s the whole problem here.  We have an entire segment of the population that is struggling to cope with change, and are completely unable to reconcile the “truth” of their faith with the world we exist in.  They desperately seek to roll things back to a “simpler time” where absolutes of the past still functioned - and they can only do that by erasing hard fought rights and freedoms.  

It may seem easy to look at it and say “well, they’re just going after trans people”, but spend any amount of time poking through the content on sites like LifeSite News and others that the Social Conservative set control, and it’s quite clear that if they were to ever gain actual power, a rollback of rights and freedoms across the board is their plan … in some cases think in terms of “yeah - mandatory church attendance” type stuff.  

This afternoon’s votes will tell us how much influence the SoCon right has over the CPC.  My guesstimate based on what I’ve seen over the last 20 years is that the answer is “far too much”.  Remember, this is the party which only grudgingly removed its opposition to same sex marriage in 2015 or 16 (and it did not endorse it - just removed their opposition to it), and coming up on the last election refused to admit that global warming is a thing.