According to their Instagram account, the Women’s March U.K. will now be called “Intersectional Uprising.” The biggest irony in this rebrand that erases women is that on their website, the statement “End the war on women” was right next to the alert that the Women’s March is no longer just for women.

In the new film Truth Rising, Seth Dillon of The Babylon Bee remarked that some headlines read like comedy. This would be one of them if the stakes were not so high. In our cultural moment, a women’s rights movement that erases women is the inevitable consequence of ideas.

In 2020, Joseph Backholm asked protesters at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., “What is a woman?” The responses were beyond parody. Some were angered at the question. Others looked around worried that someone might hear their answer and not be pleased. Others regurgitated the incredibly dangerous non-answer, “Whoever identifies as a woman.” A few weeks later, teenagers at the annual pro-life March for Life had far less trouble giving a clear response.

Of course, everyone knows, to some extent or another, what a woman is, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. So, advocates of radical gender theory could only shame people who said out loud what we all know to be true, with feigned outrage that anyone would ask such a bigoted question. And so, the movement that began to protect women instead erases them.

The early feminists, like Susan B. Anthony, fought to ensure the rights and protection of women as women. At some point during feminism’s second wave, when the movement was hijacked by the sexual revolution, the movement became more about making women another kind of man. This was especially true of the movement’s focus on abortion rights. As Alexandra DeSanctis put it:

[F]eminists began to embrace abortion only after they began to take the male body as the ideal and maleness as the pinnacle of the human experience. As a result, they redefined female equality as sameness with men, adopting the view that women could not be equal unless they could participate in the economy, in sex — indeed, in life — in the same way that men do. The chief obstacle to this vision of fulfillment? The female body.

A common factor of Leftist ideologies is denying, and at times defying, reality. In her book Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, which describes a family’s tragic experience under communist rule, Jung Chang described how Communist women “wore shapeless clothes exactly like the men.” Revolutionaries would praise women who looked and acted like men as if it were a form of female empowerment.

A similar argument is made in the book The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory by Abigail Favale. Critiquing the ideas of contemporary gender theory and its roots in the vision of the atheist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir:

Too often, freedom for women is cast as freedom from femaleness. “Autonomy” is envisioned according to male parameters, and women are expected to use invasive chemical and surgical means to conform their bodies to that ideal. Women are not valued simply for being but only for doing.

The same can be seen in men who believe they have portrayed themselves as women by achieving shallow mockeries of feminine stereotypes. The transgender revolution of recent years resulted in a disproportionate number of young women rejecting who they are, as opposed to young men. Surgical and chemical interventions that were falsely called “gender-affirming care” left scores of young women with irreversible damage. In the trans community, stereotypical masculine traits like competitiveness and aggression are encouraged, while nurturing characteristics are derided. In almost every aspect, the whole movement is a war on women.

Mary Cassatt was a turn of the century American artist who portrayed women as women. Rather than reducing her subjects as objects of male gratification or as substandard men, she portrayed them as fully dignified persons, often occupied in conversation with one another or caring for children. Jane Austen achieved much of the same in her writing. These portrayals share the biblical perspective of the goodness and givenness of womanly glory. In the Old Testament, Ruth and Esther are among the many women who played integral roles in the unfolding story of God’s redemptive plan. They did this not in defiance of being women, but as women. The Marys of the New Testament—Mary Magdalene, Mary the sister of Martha, and Mary the mother of Jesus—“got” what Jesus was up to before the men around them did. These heroines point to the ultimate image of the Church as the Bride of Christ.

In the end, all atheistic philosophies promise the perfectibility of humanity because they reject the good of our createdness. Modern gender theories promised to promote women but instead reduced them and now attempt to erase them. Once again, the only vision of reality big enough to describe reality is the Christian vision. The dignity of women rests in the glory that God gave them in creation, when He made them in His image.

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