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Trump’s good for women’s rights

Georgia Leigha
March 15, 2017

It's time we judged politicians by their policies rather than their often-unsavoury personalities, says Georgia Leigha.

Founded in 1909 – the same year as the American Socialist Party (coincidentally), International Women's Day has an impressive ability to adapt its agenda to match the prevailing political winds. Last Wednesday's celebration was as good an example as any. Jumping aboard the liberal bandwagon, the programme was packed full of the same fashionable defiance evident in many of their contemporary movements, particularly the same poisonous animosity toward the newly elected President Trump. The implication being that Trump represents an obstacle on the path to female liberation, and therefore should find himself as a natural focal point for the sisterhood's ire. While we're unlikely to ever plunge the murky depths of Donald Trump's mind to determine whether he truly does hold misogynist views, neither can those who are branding him as such, and nor are they able to display any concrete evidence of this apparent sexism. The same rabble who are critical of Trump's brash disposition toward anyone and everyone since the beginning of his presidential campaign, now claim that he is fuelled by a deep-rooted hatred of women.

Trump's uncouth comments about Cruz's wife, unnecessary and embarrassing references directed at Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle are cringe-worthy and uncalled for, but a demonstration of a man hell-bent on supressing women's freedoms? Give me a break. Meanwhile it is the left who waste their journalistic breathes on the nit-picking of Melania Trump, a woman 'oh so ditsy' that she has successfully mastered fluency in five languages. Then there is his eldest daughter Ivanka, whose support for plans to extend government support of maternity leave, is the embodiment of the democrat-edge the Trump administration seems to possess. Ivanka herself recently faced online criticism, from self-professed feminists, for daring to wear a dress to her father's first joint session in Congress, that revealed her shoulder – would a convent take a Jewish girl!?

The most commonly cited 'evidence' of Trump's toxic hatred toward women, is of course the 'grab her by the p***y' tapes – may I remind the reader that sexual attraction and respect are not mutually exclusive? The constant "But Bill Clinton…" reactions from the Trump aisle can get just as exhausting to hear, after all two wrongs don't make a right, but it says something about a movement when it can point fingers at a lewd comment made in private, yet not at serial accusations of sexual abuse that span decades.

However, the loudest silence of all rings in the ears of those who highlight the lack of women's marches in reaction to the widespread and legitimately devastating abuses of women's rights in developing countries. This cognitive dissonance is so diffused that darling of the modern women's rights movement, Linda Sarsour, when discussing former Somali refugee and victim of FGM and forced incestuous marriage, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, said: "Brigitte Gabriel = Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She's asking 4 an a$$ whippin'. I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don't deserve to be women".

It should go without saying that both the left and right are guilty of sweeping the transgressions of their own side under the carpet to gain partisan points, particularly in the age of the celebrity president, but the mainstream swing against Trump is often unjustified. Trump has done nothing to infringe upon the rights of women, nor will he. In fact, he has served to highlight the rape crisis in Sweden, and the legal subjugation of women in the Middle East. If Trump's hard-line attitude toward immigration is implemented successfully, evidence suggests it will help to reduce the type of threats women are currently facing in the parts of Europe where an open-borders policy is currently being pursued.

Through the many conservative appointments to his cabinet, Trump is implying that the State should make fewer decisions about the lives of US citizens, and that includes the female ones. Maybe it is time that we judge politicians by their policies rather than their often-unsavoury personalities.

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Georgia Leigha is Associate Editor of prominent Westminster think-tank, Parliament Street. Currently studying history, she frequently provides commentary on a range of political and cultural issues.
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