by Margot Heffernan
In mid-March, Patricia Silva, an Alaska resident, recorded a video of a grown man shaving in Planet Fitness women’s locker room in. The story went viral, and Silva has been featured in multiple media venues since then. The man claimed to be “transitioning” from male to female, an all-too-common justification for the presence of men in private women’s spaces.
Soon after Silva exposed the Planet Fitness story, the company revoked her membership for posting the video, while the “transitioning” man continues to use the women’s locker room with the assistance of an employee escort.
Such stories have become all too common; full-bodied men larping as women, demanding access to our spaces, our sports, our very identities.
What kind of a society upends itself this way – trading hard won women’s rights and private spaces for the “civil rights” of an invented class of people manufactured by a medical-industrial complex run amok. “Transgenderism,” after all, is an antiscientific doctrine that claims sex change is possible and that gender exists on a spectrum instead of a binary. It is a top-down ideology supported by a lucrative medical/pharmaceutical industry that largely benefits delusional men. Contrary to what many believe, “transgender” people are not a longstanding group of marginalized citizens: They are individuals who, for a variety of reasons imagine that they are the opposite sex or exist somewhere on a fictitious “gender spectrum.”
And make no mistake about it: Men who pose as women are an absolute threat to all females.
The “trans” movement has gained momentum by grafting itself to the legitimate concerns of gay and lesbian people. The LGBTQ movement deliberately conflates being gay with “transgenderism.” Many gays and lesbians are waking up to this lie by divorcing themselves from the “transgender” fallacy.
“Transgender” rhetoric has been imbedded in countless corporate policies, framed as a civil rights issue. Planet Fitness has a nondiscrimination policy that states that all members and team members may use Planet Fitness locker room facilities and programs based on their self-reported gender identity; these facilities include bathrooms, showers, and all other facilities separated by sex.
What are the repercussions for Virginia women?
Profound and heinous; widespread. The farcical idea that one can change sex is not only imbedded in corporate policies, but now codified into state law under the Virginia Values Act. This Act, signed into law in 2020 by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam, and pushed by a coterie of powerful trans activists and Democratic politicians, supplants the material reality of sex with the nonsensical idea of “gender change.”
Many Virginia women are not aware that this Act effectively cedes their rights to men who think they are women. Individuals can change “gender” on their birth certificate by claiming that they have had “appropriate clinical treatment.” A doctor’s visit followed by the self-proclamation, “I am a woman” will suffice.
This is by design, a deliberate dismantling of womanhood, construing gender as a self-defined idea, a fluid space for men to fill.
Melodramatic? Over the top?
Hardly. Remember Will “Lia” Thomas, the male University of Pennsylvania swimmer who not only swam on the women’s team, but was lauded for doing so, while the elitist college administration forced female swimmers to accept this interloper? Or how about the large, larping man, Artemis Langford, who was inducted into a Wyoming Sorority? Although a lawsuit was brought by six sorority members in an attempt to oust the 6’2,” 260 pound Langford, Wyoming District Court Judge Alan Johnson rejected the suit because the organization’s bylaws did not define what a woman is. The media continues to celebrate such delusional men as a progressive new reality.
These injustices are happening everywhere, and laws like The Virginia Values Act enhance the ability of men to “become” women: Men who masquerade as women are now a protected category whose rights are imbedded in Virginia statute.
Gender ideology, though, is a dangerous hoax, a new-fangled way to oppress, a boot on the neck of women everywhere.
It isn’t the first time that Virginia turned its back on women. In 1917 thirty-three long forgotten suffragettes were remanded to the Occoquan Workhouse, a prison in Northern Virginia. They were beaten and tortured. Their crime? Picketing the White House for the right to vote.
But history, it has a way of wending back. Women cast aside by a dismissive society must educate themselves and their daughters; comprehend the meaning of laws that are cast as progressive but are misogynistic at their very core. And just as our foremothers rejected the anti-woman dictums of a century ago, we must not be bamboozled by the “trans” agenda which insists that men have a right to be women.
Virginia women must speak truth, as modern suffragettes, ready to stand up all over again.
Margot Heffernan is Board Vice President at Women’s Liberation Front
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