What You Need To Know About Gender Politics' War On Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights
ABOUT THE BOOK
This anthology bears witness and exposes the current trend of gender identity politics as a continuation of female erasure and silencing as old as patriarchy itself. Forty-eight voices celebrate female embodiment while exploring deeper issues of misogyny, violence, and sexism disguised today as progressive politics. These perspectives comes at a time when gender identity politics and profits from an emerging medical transgenderism industry for children, teens, and adults inhibit our ability to have meaningful discussions about sex, gender, changing laws that have provided sex-based protections for women and girls, and the re-framing of language referring to females as a distinct biological class. Through researched articles, essays, first-hand experience, storytelling, and verse, these voices ignite the national conversation about the politics of gender identity as a backlash to feminist goals of liberation from gender stereotypes, oppression and sexual violence.
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The contributors to Female Erasure know that their views are controversial, and many people will oppose their work. But they refuse to be silenced by critics, striving instead toward deep, meaningful discussion with readers about the biases of modern society and the future of women’s rights.
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ABOUT THE ANTHOLOGY CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors to this anthology come from a wide variety of backgrounds of race, class, religion, sexual orientation, and age (ranging from twenty to eight-three years old), and live in the United States, South Africa, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They are lesbian feminists, political and spiritual feminists, heterosexual-womanist women, mothers, scholars, attorneys, poets, medical and mental health providers, university educators, environmentalists, and women who chose to de-transition, all providing perspectives that are ignored, silenced, vilified, or underrepresented in the popular media and disregarded in discussions promoting legal protections for transgender persons at the expense of women and girls. Some contributors wrote under pseudonyms to keep their teaching jobs in universities or to protect their children from harassment. The content is presented in a variety of writing styles, including personal stories, essays, articles, poetry, current studies, and research. These women all boldly vocalize their unique perspectives and universal experiences.
About the Cover
In my introduction to the anthology, I suggest that origins of female erasure in Western culture was propagated by the framing myth of Adam and Eve, and continues to affect a majority of people on our planet, regardless of whether an individual practices a religion based on this mythology.
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The cover image is intentionally complex and multi-layered in its meanings. This classical image of Eve in the Garden of Eden is consistent with her portrayals in Renaissance art as a white European female. Our understanding of genetics today confirming human origins evolving out of Africa, the original “Eve” would surely have been a dark skinned female. Clearly the image does not represent all women in our glorious diversity of color and size. There is a double meaning intended in the cover image as the “white” Eve in the Renaissance portrayal has already been erased of her African origins, and continues to disappear even as she reaches for the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
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In the Genesis 2 myth, a male God gives Adam, the first man, the power to name all the creatures of the earth, including Eve, the first woman. Adam is given the power by God to name her, and thus given power over the female sex, and given the power to define the very nature of woman. The male's empowerment by God to name the female is intentional and significant. The woman does notname, and thus define, herself. Her nature is literally man-made. The power of naming is a magical act with cultural significance. The power to name ourselves has been historically usurped from women, and over time we have forgotten that we ever had this power to begin with. Female erasure continues to be propagated through gender identity politics today and continuing efforts to define and enforce oppressive gender constructs on the female sex.
The cover for this anthology was created as a gift from my oldest and dearest friend, renowned photographic artist Claudia Kunin.
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- Ruth Barrett, editor