Margaret Atwood's handmaids make a real-life appearance (and two other stories)
Three reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.
This week has gone by incredibly quickly and with a strong undertone of FOMO. I have been somewhat distracted by the political turmoil in Israel, and have also had the twisted feeling, which I know will resonate with many Israelis, of wanting to be there while it all unfolds. To make up for that, I did a little bit of coverage on the protests and Netanyahu’s judicial reform U-turn. For those who are unfamiliar, the government’s highly controversial reform would weaken the judiciary, removing checks and balances on the government (ostensibly in the service of democracy). Have a read and a listen here and here if you are interested in finding out more. And now, to our weekly stories, of which there are only three today, as each one is lengthier than the usual….
1) Handmaids appear at Israel’s judicial reform protests
Israel’s proposed judicial reforms would impact gender equality, too. Israel’s coalition government is overwhelmingly right-wing and religious. It contains few women members, because its religious parties either don’t have any women members or don’t have many. And, under Jewish religious law, women’s rights are restricted in all sorts of ways (I wrote about this in an earlier edition of this newsletter). Haaretz, Israel’s left-wing broadsheet, has this podcast about how women’s rights in Israel are in danger under the current government. In fact, protesters dressed as Margaret Atwood’s handmaids have appeared at demonstrations against the government’s judicial reforms (and Atwood herself retweeted footage of this).
Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar Ilan University, told Allison Kaplan-Sommer, who hosts the podcast, that the judicial reform package is a risk for women’s rights because:
The weakening of the power of the High Court of Justice will have a devastating impact on the ability of women to fight back against discriminatory laws…We have the clear examples of states in Europe who have been through this. It is exactly the way that Poland had gone, as well as Hungary and Turkey. And in each of these states, it was - and it still is - women who are paying the highest price.
2) Abortion rights are an election-winner — and “bigotry is bad for business”
Ahead of the 2024 US elections, some Democrats are pushing to make abortion rights the centrepiece of the party’s agenda, according to this long read in The Cut by Rebecca Traister. The Democrats’ successes in the mid-term elections already showed the party that reproductive rights are a vote-winner, she writes:
Multiple factors, including a slate of ghoulish right-wing candidates, helped Democrats, but there is no question that abortion was the preeminent issue for voters. “Democrats should have gotten wiped out,” said the pollster Tom Bonier. “But they overperformed. When you look at where they overperformed, it’s in places where choice was most present in the election, either literally on the ballot, like Michigan and Kentucky, or effectively in terms of the perceived stakes and the extent to which the candidates were talking about abortion, like Pennsylvania.”
Traister points to a bold new approach, of making reproductive rights central to a progressive agenda. “At the state level,” she writes, “the face of a new approach to abortion politics is indisputably Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer”:
Big Gretch, 51, has Ava Gardner bone structure, a flat midwestern cadence, and a fondness for athletic metaphor (before politics, she had planned to go into sports broadcasting). She is widely referred to as a possible future presidential contender. And she is selling abortion as both a practical, voter-friendly issue and an inalienable human right at the center of a galaxy of related concerns.
At the Michigan State of the State, she did not treat abortion as Democrats often do, as if it’s slightly icky and private, damp and sad. She did not cordon it off in its own dolorous corner separate from all the rousing stuff about creating a mighty Michigan economy. Rather, she led with it, weaving it into a business-forward spiel called “Make It in Michigan,” suggesting that prioritizing abortion rights and LGBTQ+ protections would help bring businesses and expertise back to her former manufacturing state. States with anti-abortion and anti-trans laws, she told her audience, “are losing talent and investment because bigotry is bad for business.” Then she went ahead and cast these issues as universal family values. “Every parent,” Whitmer said, “Republican, Democrat, or independent, wants our kids to stay in Michigan. Let’s give them reasons to stay; let’s … protect fundamental freedoms.”
This is an example of “women’s issues” not being siloed as such, and how powerful that can be.
3) The “trans panic” on both sides of the Atlantic
The same week that the US state of Kentucky passed what has been described as “one of the country’s strictest anti-trans bills” (details here and also here is more on the move to ban gender-affirming care in the US), Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank in the UK, has published a report called “Asleep at the Wheel: Gender and Safeguarding in Schools”.
Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP very much on the gender critical side of the so-called trans rights debate, writes in a foreword to the report that it “exposes the reality that this [gender] ideology is widespread across secondary schools” and that “we must end this reckless experiment now”. There is a nod in her foreword to the accusations of misogyny that those on the gender critical side make against those they say subscribe to a “gender ideology.” She writes: “Children as young as five are being encouraged to question their gender identity, or being taught they have been ‘born in the wrong body’ if they do not conform to regressive gender stereotypes.” The implication here being that this “ideology” is anti-feminist because it reinforces these stereotypes. Their detractors would claim that insistence on sex binaries does something similar, and perhaps that there is a scapegoating of trans people here in the face of the more general backlash against feminism.
The report made the front cover of some British newspapers yesterday, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he is concerned about its claims that parents are not being informed when children question their gender identity. I’m not saying we shouldn’t look into how schools handle this issue at all, but panic doesn’t seem like a good approach to doing that.
One finding the report highlights that really struck me was that “60 per cent of secondary schools are allowing children to participate in sports of the opposite sex.” Surely, allowing children to participate in “sports of the opposite sex” is exactly the kind of thing that dismantles gender stereotypes? From seeing my daughter at school, these gender norms are firmly entrenched at the tender age of 5. In her class the boys are constantly telling the girls that “girls don’t play football” when they try to join in.
BONUS: Mona Eltahawy’s Feminist Giant newsletter here on Substack has a great, regular global round-up of feminist activism.