An analysis by Eva Engelken
What do gender identity theory and fundamentalist Islam have in common? Can they be seen as two facets of the reversal of women’s rights that can be observed worldwide, and is it perhaps no coincidence that their current massive appearance and their top-down infiltration into Western society coincide? But why do some women hold back with their criticism? For fear of being seen as anti-Muslim?
First of all, the parallels.
Both make women invisible. Gender identity theory, by taking away their right to their own name and redefining womanhood as an identity that can be applied via makeup, while at the same time erasing the word woman in favor of sexist word creations such as “people with uteruses”. Fundamentalist Islam makes women invisible by wrapping at least their hair, if not their entire bodies, in black or gray cloth.
They both push women out of their rooms and restrict their freedom of movement. Some take away women’s safe spaces by opening them up to men. The others deny women free and safe participation in public life from the outset. Both restrict women’s participation in society. Some take the hard-won leadership positions (or women’s quota places) away from women by identifying themselves as women. The others do not even allow women to run for relevant positions.
Some are making women’s sport obsolete by allowing men to play it. The others do not allow women to take part at all or only allow them to do so in a textile covering.
Some drive a wedge between parents and children, others declare child marriages to be legal. Some celebrate genital-altering and libido-restricting interventions as health care, while others declare genital mutilation of girls to be a necessary act of purity. Both of them are lording it over women’s fertility and sexuality. Some declare themselves mothers and use women’s bodies as contractually rented incubators via surrogacy and egg donation. The others forbid their wives to use contraception — here they are similar to fundamentalist Christians — and systematically turn their wives into incubators for as many offspring as possible. Some celebrate all sexual deviance as a sexual identity worthy of protection and prostitution as sex work. The others enable prostitution by declaring it an ultra-short-term marriage.
Both place ideology and victim narratives above reality: some create the narrative of the privileged cis woman, which allows them to reinterpret the defence of urgently needed women’s safe spaces as the “discriminatory exclusion of marginalized trans women”, and the sexual harassment made possible by the intrusion as the right to “equality” and the “right to pee”. The others use the postcolonial narrative of the injustice of the Western world to portray themselves as the sole victim in the event of a crime, which, based on this narrative, cannot be a perpetrator at all
Such a complete perpetrator-victim reversal is otherwise only found among pedocriminals who try to justify the abuse of a little girl with the lie that they were seduced by the little girl.
Both demand unconditional, almost totalitarian submission to the narrative from their supporters and try to silence their critics and even more so their female critics: the one by calling them transphobic and filing criminal charges, the other by framing any skepticism as an expression of so-called anti-Muslim racism.
Last but not least, those who are supposedly protected are the first to suffer. For homosexuals or diagnosed transsexuals, gender identity theory does not bring recognition, but rather hostility. For moderate or entirely secular Muslims, fundamentalist Islam brings back the restrictions on freedom from which they fled to Germany/Europe at some point.
The outcry should actually be huge. But instead, even radical feminist women are holding back on criticizing the increasingly offensive calls for the Islamization of Germany. When I recently raised the topic in a radical feminist group, I was told: “As radical feminists, we see all monotheistic religions as problematic and an outgrowth of patriarchy.” I replied that I did too, but that we in Germany now had a problem with fundamentalist Islam. And the problem would not get any smaller just because Christian men also raped women and visited brothels. They said that they understood this, but were worried about appearing anti-migrant or anti-Muslim with public statements.
Now, Christianity and Judaism are also monotheistic Abrahamic religions — and in their fundamentalist form they are an imposition and a deprivation of freedom for women. However, in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia, the two religions are currently largely restricted by the law. Secularism and women’s rights, which are often even enshrined in the constitution, protect women from patriarchal, religiously motivated desires. With exceptions — such as the restriction of the reproductive right to abortion — this even applies to the evangelical US states: Even if the elementary right to decide on a pregnancy is effectively nullified here, there is still a separation of church and state, and (alleged) adultery is not punished with lashes or stoning. But wherever fundamentalist Islam is on the rise, this separation no longer works because the Sharia law with its misogynistic content forms the legal system. Of course there is progress, for example in Tunisia, but overall Sharia law dominates in Muslim countries to the detriment of women. The Islamists are now also demanding its introduction in Germany. And they emphasize this demand with a high birth rate in order to bring the hated “West” to its knees numerically
Not saying anything about the disenfranchisement of women for fear of appearing anti-Muslim seems similarly short-sighted as refraining from criticizing transgender ideology for fear of appearing anti-trans.
What is inexplicable among many woke people and those who sympathize with the left spectrum is their blindness to the fact that their way of thinking would no longer have any room if a caliphate really were to be established. In fundamentalist Islam, it is life-threatening to form an opposition. Women who tear the hijab off their heads in Iran, for example, are risking their lives. “Left-wing” values such as diversity and variety or human rights are generally not to be found in Islamic countries. Nevertheless, newcomers from these cultures are treated with kid gloves, even if they openly display and live out their misogynistic values. This can only be due to an unconscious? Unlike Islamic fundamentalists, right-wing extremist Germans of German origin are — rightly — condemned and persecuted in the strongest possible terms by the same people. This remarkable double standard can be found at all social and political levels.
On Saturday, May 11, a short video clip from the news portal NIUS gave a faint impression of the contempt for women to be expected in a caliphate.
In it, the young reporter Zara Riffler tried to ask the Hamburg demonstrators questions and was met with icy silence and angry looks. The few men who answered her in monosyllables were immediately harassed by stewards. The fact that they were not simply pushed away was probably only due to the very present police, who did a good job, but not to the respect of the mostly bearded men for women. Their women stood far away, fully covered under veils or disrupting the counter-protests.
When their rights were threatened by gender identity ideology, many women and lesbians first had to pluck up the courage to speak out. When it comes to the Islamist threat to their rights, there is an almost inexplicable void for many people, which this article has hopefully filled a little
