Tea at Trianon: Women or ‘Pregnant People’?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Women or ‘Pregnant People’?

From the National Catholic Register:

A recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion access and the law featured the tortured state of America’s debate on what defines a woman. In the process, the ensuing verbal fireworks also marked the collision between a women’s movement that sees legal abortion as key to sexual equality and the transgender-rights movement that believes biological sex is a social construct.

During the July 13 Senate hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked University of California at Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges whether a phrase she had used, “a person with the capacity for pregnancy,” referred to “women.” Bridges agreed that “[m]any women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy,” but “trans men” and “nonbinary people” can conceive a child, as well. Hawley then asked whether abortion was “really a women’s-rights issue.”

Bridges said it was possible to recognize that abortion access “impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups.” Bridges then pivoted to accuse the GOP senator of engaging in a “transphobic” line of questioning that “opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.” She repeated that judgment after Hawley stated his belief that men could not get pregnant in an exchange that went viral and provoked an explosive response on social media.

Once confined to graduate-school seminars, gender theory — the view that biological sex must be brought into line with a person’s separate, inner feelings of being a man or woman — has moved to the forefront of American public discourse, as this congressional exchange demonstrated. Gender theory’s surge to political prominence has divided the political loyalties of progressive-minded abortion-rights advocates. Many do not want to take the focus off of what they see as the particular vulnerabilities women face in a post-Roe world, while others insist that the abortion-rights push must be inclusive of biological women who identify as trans or nonbinary. (Read more.)