With my final exam out of the way, I (finally) have some free time to spend reading books unrelated to my schoolwork. I’ve been enjoying Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics’ War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights, an anthology edited by Ruth Barrett. The book offers a wide range of criticisms on what conservatives often call “gender ideology,” but most (if not all) of the essays are written by left-leaning feminists, some of whom are noticeably radical and use the word “patriarchy” rather liberally. The book provides answers to the right-leaning individuals who have wondered, “Where are all the feminists in this fight?” Although Female Erasure is more than 500 pages, I consider it a light read, since the essays are relatively short and written without the abstract terminology that is often found in academic articles.
Certainly, I disagree with some of the moral and intellectual frameworks defended throughout the chapters; I found portions to be rather unserious, and plenty of arguments are irreconcilable with my Catholic faith. But it was refreshing to engage with different approaches to the gender tyranny that dominates our society today. Plenty of informative passages distilled the horror of “transitioning,” exposed the social contagion that motivates self-mutilation, and illuminated the government overreach that supplanted sex with gender. I think the vulnerable personal essays are the most memorable, as shown in one woman’s disturbing account of her husband’s “descent into transgenderism,” who “imagined abuse and malice where none existed.” The book was published in 2016, and perhaps if it had been more widely read, we wouldn’t see such devastating consequences of what is dubiously branded as “gender-affirming care.”