Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…
The 2024 US Presidential Election was momentous for lots of reasons. But if your primary concern was the rights of women and girls then the choice on offer made for a sorry spectacle. Women and girls have been thrown into the garbage compactor and the walls are moving in.
A Comparison with the UK
The 2024 general election in the UK was troubling enough for women’s rights. If your political compass leaned left, then you had no one to vote for — the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats were and still are captured by cranks and kindly fools (if a party can’t even define what a woman is, how are they going to defend women’s rights?). The Labour Party showed some green shoots of rationality but was and still is a confused mess — on the one hand, they have committed to implement the findings of the Cass Review in full, on the other they have Cabinet ministers who think a woman is anyone who says they are a woman and a Foreign Secretary who says it’s possible for a man to acquire a cervix following ‘various procedures and hormone treatments and all the rest of it’ (yes, he really said this).
Worst of all, there was the Women’s Equality Party, the most ironically named political party in history, which campaigned for a man (who ‘identified as a woman’) convicted of violent crime to be transferred to a women’s prison and whose female founder told women to stop complaining about men in their sports and just suck it up because life is not fair (unless, of course, you are a man).
At least if your political compass leaned right, you were fine. The Conservative Party was and still is rational and strong on protecting women’s rights. The Reform Party, although dangerous and ridiculous in other regards, was equally strong on this.
So, British voters primarily concerned about women’s rights still faced a difficult choice if they were left-leaning, but at least they had a choice.
The US
In the US, women’s rights have been caught in a pincer movement, under attack from both sides.
The left is as it is in the UK, soaked in ideology and idiocy, opening the door to the same dangerous impacts on the lives of women and girls. And there’s no sign of this changing. The Biden/Harris administration called women “birthing people” and supported men being housed in women’s prisons. Kamala Harris stated support for adding the meaningless and performative label of ‘non-binary’ as a third option in addition to male and female on official identification documents. Why non-binary was selected and not gerbilgender or any of the 367 other genders identified so far is anyone’s guess. I suppose there’s only so much space on the forms.
But unlike the UK, the political right in the US offers only a short sharp trip from the frying pan into the fire, in the form of authoritarian abortion controls and related restrictions. In 2022 there was the Republican-stacked Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade. Further measures could be on the horizon. Although not part of official Republican party policy, “Project 2025” — the potential blueprint for the Trump presidency — includes a proposal to withdraw the abortion pill mifepristone from the market and use existing but little-enforced laws to prevent the drug from being sent through the post. The origins of such deranged policies are transparently religious — the Project 2025 document itself makes no secret of this. For example, it contains the absurd suggestion that the Department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”. So once again, it’s men in dresses trying to assert control over women’s bodies and lives.
This means that beyond the obvious irrationality, the one thing Democrats and Republicans have in common is misogyny, albeit in different forms. That’s a stark and disturbing truth. Like so much of modern politics, it feels like a painful regression. Surely one of the shared ideals of Western democracy, across the political spectrum, should be to defend and promote the hard-won rights of women and girls, to be a beacon against the oppression seen in the past and still seen today in countries like Afghanistan (Afghan women are already banned from speaking in public, now they have been told that they must refrain from reciting the Quran aloud in the presence of other women).
The choice on offer on November 5th will have alienated countless decent rational American voters, men and women alike. Even if they decided to vote on women’s rights alone, they will have faced an impossible choice. Worrying times.
Colton.
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