The West must stand up for the classic liberal values that allowed women to thrive

Democrats dismissing the men-in-women’s-sports issue missed how it served as the most easily recognizable symptom of an underlying disease. Voters knew that candidates insisting “transwomen are women” when faced with displaced and injured female athletes were infected with a radically woke political agenda that had subsumed common sense. Voters could safely assume such candidates were also disconnected from reality on crime, open borders, inflation, and about everything else — and vote accordingly.

The women’s sports issue also speaks to how the anti-colonialist, woke political movement sacrifices women’s interests for their cause. Women have thrived in Western democracies committed to the rule of law, equality, free speech, and economic liberalism. Academia and leftist political leaders have worked to tarnish these classic liberal ideas as colonialist and therefore illegitimate, and women’s rights and opportunities are degraded as a consequence.

It is easy for American and most European women to forget this, but through much of human history, and still today in many parts of the world, women cannot safely live alone. They require men to protect them from other men. Western democracies developed laws to punish violence and cultural expectations about women’s equality and nonviolence that created a strong enough sense of security to allow women to freely participate in all aspects of society.

Recognizing women’s equality does not mean that women and men are interchangeable. Feminists fighting for Title IX in 1973 did not want women to have the right to try out for men’s sports teams; they wanted leagues of their own. Physical differences mean that women’s safety requires separate spaces such as female prisons, women’s shelters, showers, and locker rooms. Raising alarms about the risk to women of forcing them to share such intimate spaces with men is not based on the idea that trans-identifying individuals are disproportionately sexual predators. It merely recognizes that men are physically different — generally stronger and capable of rape — leaving women uniquely vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.

Americans overwhelmingly understand that, which is why the battle to ensure that single-sex spaces remain legal is being won in the United States. Yet, ensuring women’s rights and equality will require more than that. We must also re-instill a public understanding that classic Western values — a commitment to the rule of law, equality, free speech and economic liberalism — are an essential force for good and that without them women will and do suffer.

Afghani women’s rights constrict with each passing day. First, they could not show their hair, then their faces, and eyes and now they cannot even be in a room in their own house with windows to the outside world. It is not just in Afghanistan, but in large swaths of the globe: Women are treated as chattel, and rape and sexual abuse are tolerated. The West may not be able to stop this mistreatment of women, but we can recognize it for what it is: evil.

Cultures that deny women basic rights, that require women to hide their faces, force them into marriage, and tolerate their sexual exploitation are not ones that we want to integrate into our own. This is not a xenophobic or racist impulse. We can welcome legal immigrants who want to come, assimilate, and embrace Western values, but we cannot allow the importation of cultures and customs that see women as subhuman.

Throughout Europe, anxiety about influxes of migrants is fueled in part because they have been coupled with a diminished willingness to stand up for Western values, which include women’s rights and the rule of law. Thanks to Elon Musk and X, more details are emerging about the massive system of child sexual abuse, including rape and torture, that was swept aside and tolerated in the United Kingdom for fear of inflaming racial tensions. Millions are wondering how a once-great country allowed its daughters to be brutally exploited. One suspects that other European countries have similarly sought to minimize crime — including violence against women and girls — because it challenged the anti-colonialist, multicultural political narrative.

This cannot continue. The West must once again find the courage to stand up for the classic liberal values that once allowed diverse countries and cultures — and especially women — to thrive.

Carrie Lukas is president of the Independent Women’s Forum.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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