Violence Against Women? First, Define "Woman"

Tremaine Carroll, who was placed in a women’s prison before committing a violent rape of an incarcerated woman.

President Biden (or a ghostwriter) wrote an editorial for Glamour magazine, condemning violence against women and lauding the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). It’s hard to imagine something more audacious from an administration that repeatedly refuses to define what a woman is.

What are we defending from violence? The position of his administration has been that a woman is an undefinable object that identifies itself as this undefinable thing. There’s no cause to have special defenses for such undefined people. In truth, the Biden Administration has taken repeated steps to make women unsafe, and has legally penalized those who tried to intervene.

A roster of lawsuits has been standing in the way of Biden’s legal attacks against women and girls. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to revise their rules to change the definition of sex to incorporate so-called “gender identity.” The ramifications have been widespread.

It was thus his administration that tried to force schools and colleges to pretend that men who claim to be women are such, denying them federal funding if they refused. This would force colleges to house men-who-claim-to-be-women in female housing facilities. It tried to use the same redefinitions of Title IX protections to put males in women’s locker rooms and bathrooms, reducing women’s safety in ways that have tragically already materialized. It is the Biden Administration that destroyed the athletic dreams of girls who could not compete against the boys who were pretending to be girls, but who have the biological advantage of the males that they are.

One of the most egregious ways that this administration has been involved in the abuse of women is through their encouragement of placing such men in female prisons, where women cannot even limit their time with such prisoners. Under President Trump, prisoners in federal facilities were housed according to their sex. The Biden Administration changed that and encouraged states to do the same. Prison life is structured by authorities, leaving little control to each individual—which is a horrifying reality for the women who are now incarcerated with male sex offenders.

A New Jersey female prison reported multiple women becoming pregnant due to a trans inmate, a year after instituting a policy of housing them together. Inmate lawsuits from that prison allege that complaints of sexual assault by trans prisoners were met with retaliation, not protection. Unlike in men’s prisons, women are not even separated by security level.

In California, a man who said he was trans (Tremaine Carroll) and who had a lengthy criminal record of violence was transferred to a women’s prison at his request and subsequently violently raped a woman in the shower. This is the reality of incarcerating people according to their desired “identities”. It should shock no-one. The situation is so dire that California women’s prisons now hand out condoms, even though inmates have no legal ability to consent.

Biden’s latest editorial about his commitment to end violence against women began rambling about the LGBT community in the second paragraph. For him (and his handlers), women are just another victim group providing opportunities for virtue signaling. Yet for the actual women who are affected by violence, these terms matter. Policies that are untethered to reality and place them in harm’s way while claiming obtuseness—they have tangible effects.

Any attempts to defend women will fail if we also cannot define what they are, and thereby why they need to be protected. The reality is that protecting women is a beautiful and—properly understood—patriarchal idea. It comes from a time of chivalry in which men recognized women’s vulnerabilities and differences, and sought to protect them, sometimes at terrible cost to the men who protected the women. When people shrug off that world as an archaic mistake, it’s no wonder that they also fail to defend the values that the better generations of the past upheld.