I am woman, hear me roar

In numbers too big to ignore…

And I've been down there on the floor

No one's ever gonna keep me down again

This song would never be written today. This simple anthem of feminine affirmation -- real gender affirmation, not the Orwellian gender-denying kind -- meant a lot to me as a girl. It was empowering.

It came out in 1971 and was popular throughout the early 1970s, just as I was figuring out what womanhood meant to me. Of course, it meant the usual things (“usual” to me, anyway, the way I was raised -- as a Catholic: menstruation, education, career, marriage, children, in that order). I had all kinds of dreams about what my life would look like. The entire country was dreaming then. The music was alternatively raw, “Four dead in O-hi-o,” and ethereal, “Oh, mercy, mercy me…”

Imagine being weaned on that song then being told that someday, in the not too distant future, we’d have a (woman!) Supreme Court Justice nominee unable to define what a woman is.

This is a statement of struggle, real struggle, not the struggle the Left has when someone uses the wrong pronoun. No, these were real struggles for women in the world, making our way in a man’s world, and it was a man’s world. In many ways, it still is, to the extent that we allow men to be men anymore.

Can you imagine a “feminist” anthem being written today with the word “embryo” in it? Not sure it’s possible to set “product of conception” to music, but that’s what we call a baby in-utero nowadays because abortion has become the secular equivalent of a holy sacrament to the Left, which necessitates the dehumanization of everything pregnancy related. Hell, we’re not even “mothers” anymore. We’re “inseminated people.”

It would be only a couple of years after the release of “I Am Woman” that Roe v. Wade would be decided. The Supreme Court which decided it, by the way, was all male. (A fact I point out to lefties whenever they screech that “men shouldn’t have a say over women’s bodies.” I guess we should all be glad that at least, in that moment, they know what a woman is.)

It’s important to recall that ultrasound wasn’t a thing then. The technology was in its infancy, not omni-present in every hospital like it is now. Can you imagine? Or remember? What it was like before we could look into the womb? I like to call Roe an “analog” decision, because it was made before the digital revolution made it possible to humanize the tiny little people in our wombs. I actually remember saying to my mother that I wish we could see inside a pregnant woman’s belly, to see what the baby looked like. We really had no idea then. Now we know everything: when we can see the tiny heart start beating, when eyes blink, when thumbs can be sucked etc. It’s amazing what we’ve learned during these fifty-odd years.

And what do our “brothers” need to “understand” these days? That they’ve been so dehumanized too that they are merely “inseminators”? That they’re “toxic”? It’s awful what we’ve done to gender roles, denigrating them. Let the boys be boys. Let the girls be girls. Celebrate them the way they’re made. Affirm them the way they are made! Rather than enabling mental illness, a parent’s job should be to help their children feel comfortable in the skin they’re in!

And speaking of “toxic,” what could be more “toxic” than being told an existential mistake was made when you were made? That you are doomed to a lifetime of pharmaceuticals and/or surgery? That the “you” you’ve always known has to be fixed, renovated, and that in order to effectuate this change, you will have to go “buy” a “vagina” “made” from your male genitalia (yes, this is a thing) like it’s a commodity, the way one buys a car. That you are now a cobbled together commodity of a person. What a death sentence to one’s soul that is. What a misery to be doomed to mutilation and artifice all the rest of the days of your life, especially when it’s done to a minor by a parent. We’ve all suffered at some point in our lives feeling like our parents don’t love us just the way we are but this seems the penultimate rejection.

Our girls are precious. My womanhood is precious to me. As a young woman, I could (and did!) carry and give life. And before the feminists start screeching that the ability to reproduce isn’t what defines a woman, let me cut you off this way: I understand there are women who cannot carry a child, either through infertility (the exception) or age (the natural course of things) but regardless, the inability of (menstruating) “women” to carry a child is the exception, not the rule, and we don’t organize societies around the exceptions, otherwise society would be perpetually disordered… like trans people are perpetually disordered.

I also don’t care by what neo-scientific, Frankensteinian artifice some male can be made to carry a child; it’s unnatural and wrong. It’s not, in short, normal.

And speaking of “normal”: “normal” is a perfectly good word. We “normals” have been made to feel there’s something wrong with the word “normal.” I reject that outright. There’s nothing wrong with the word “normal.” We instinctually understand “normal” and it’s “normal” to have only two sexes: X/Y males and X/X females, and no matter how modern science can chop, nick, or tuck, all the other “genders” our friends on the left have come up with, they are derivative of only those two.

I am woman! Viva la difference!

Image: Open Clip Art