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California’s Berkeley City Council Erases ‘Women’

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The Berkeley City council has decided to erase women from official documents, all in the name of feminist equality.

The expulsion of women is required by the city’s adoption of unpopular “Third-Wave Feminist” gender ideology, which is designed to aid upper-income women by denying any significant legal, civic, social, or even biological distinctions between men and women. This ideology is shaping progressive demands far beyond Berkeley, and — for example — it prompts progressives to demand that “transgender” people be treated as members of the opposite sex, even in athletics, bathrooms, scholarships, and housing.

Berkeley’s erasure of women came July 16 when the council voted to exorcize from city code any words or ideas which recognize the male or female sex of their city’s population. The forbidden words and banned ideas include “female” and “sister.”

The council also exiled the words “firewoman” and “policewomen,” which recently were symbols of successful sexual equality for the prior “Second Wave Feminists.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reported the city council’s explanation:

“Gender-neutral language creates a lot of room to acknowledge that it’s not just men running the country,” said council member Rigel Robinson, who sponsored the ordinance.

…

Robinson, 23, was elected in November as the youngest city council member in Berkeley history. He graduated from UC Berkeley last year and credits his college experience with broadening his perspective on gender issues.

“Awareness and issues of gender identity are often particularly visible on college campuses, but it’s important that it doesn’t stay there,” Robinson said. “I’m a cisgender heterosexual male — in many ways these issues don’t affect me. I’ve gotten to know so many people for whom these issues are important, largely through the campus community.”

The council’s edict even tries to hide women’s’ unique and fundamental biological power: Their ability to get pregnant and give birth. Instead of crediting that power to a “pregnant woman,” Berkeley officials are required to say “pregnant employee.”

The council also ordered the erasure of men by directing the banning of words which refer to men — “manhole,” “fireman,” “repairman,” “salesman.”

The council directed that recognition of each person’s sex must be supplanted by assigning a replacement “gender” to each employee. This central committee’s decision to replace bright-line biological sex with the loosely defined idea of “gender” opens up many new opportunities for progressives and feminists to blur the civic and legal distinctions between male and female, as urged by third-wave feminists such as Judith Butler.

For example, a few progressives now refer to women as merely “cisgender women.” The linguistic subordination is intended to help “transgender” men win legal recognition as women, even though the two sexes now have their own two distinct terms because they have clearly different bodies, average preferences, and routine priorities.

A growing number of senior Democratic politicians agree that women must surrender female pronouns to men who say they are women. Breitbart News reported July 19:

Presidential candidate and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently edited her official campaign Twitter bio to specify her “preferred pronouns” as part of an apparent attempt to appeal to younger, more “woke” voters who view gender as a social construct.

As of Thursday, Warren’s Twitter bio stated (emphasis added): “U.S. Senator, former teacher, and candidate for president. Wife, mom (Amelia, Alex, Bailey, @CFPB), grandmother, and Okie. She/her. Official campaign account.” [Emphasis Added]

In Berkeley, the council also directed that officials give up their routine policy of allowing any “masculine pronoun” also to include “the feminine,” even though this grammatical evolution among the public provides recognition and inclusion for women when using terms such as “repairman.”

The council deemed the public’s evolved language for sexual equality to be insufficient and directed that officials start using “gender” instead of terms associated with masculinity or femininity: “Words referring to a specific gender may be extended to any other gender,” the council insisted.

The erasure of women — and of men — also means the council is anathematizing any public recognition that men and women are two distinct sexes. This effort to suppress ideas reflects the third-wave feminist effort to deny common sense and scientific recognition that humanity consists of two different, complementary, and equal sexes.

The two sexes are confirmed by a brief glance at male and female biology, careers, preferences, or different rules for awarding civic status.

The different and complementary nature of humanity is confirmed every time women and men jointly create a new person. The joint creation of new life is routinely admired and applauded by families, friends, and many strangers.

This sexual complementarity is vital for many ordinary people because it allows them to maximize their civic and economic strengths via marriage. Marriage helps men produce more and it really helps women who want to raise children. But this sexual synergy is deeply opposed by feminists — and by other elite groups — because it creates a large bloc of self-sufficient citizens who oppose the elites’ efforts to redesign society for the elites’ self-serving purposes.

The leadership directive to guillotine a male and female society in favor of an untested gender-based society is already having a huge impact on society via the activists’ push for government endorsement of transgender claims.

For example, many feminists ignore the greater danger to women scientists caused by the migration of cheap labor Chinese research assistants into American science centers. As American scientists’ wages are forced down by government-enforced immigration, most male scientists tend to fight for a diminishing share of the sector, but many female scientists rationally exit their l0w-wage, high-stress, low-security science jobs to seek other careers.

More recently, “gender” claims have helped weaken protections for women’s bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, the social status of women, mothers’ rights in child-rearing, women’s ideals of beauty, culture and civil society, prisons for female criminals, and children’s sexual privacy.

However, President Donald Trump has used his authority to roll back much of the legal clout gained by biology-denying transgender activists. To the surprise and anger of progressives, Trump’s pushback against the transgender ideology means he is the nation’s leading champion for the legal and civic status of women:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/breitbart/~3/dLL5PK4K3dw/

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