Lancet Decries Conservative ‘Backlash’ Against Gender Ideology

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Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

The once prestigious Lancet medical journal has launched a series of articles on “gender equality, norms, and health” that denounces a conservative “backlash” against the global LGBTQ agenda.

“The progressive agenda that demands gender equality for girls and women and gender norms that promote health and wellbeing for all, including gender minorities, is highly visible,” a team of Lancet writers note, describing that agenda as including “advocating against toxic masculinities” and “promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) justice.”

That’s the good news, the Lancet proposes — but not everyone is enlightened enough to see it that way.

“Simultaneously, a backlash is growing against this progressive agenda,” the UK-based journal warns. “Conservative voices continue to use arguments, often couched in cultural, economic, or religious terms, to justify discrimination against women and gender minorities, while upholding the traditional foundations of male privilege.”

The authors appear especially miffed at conservatives for daring to try to take back “language”, which has been the exclusive domain of the left.

“Co-opting the term gender, powerful forces are pushing against hard-fought gains in human rights and health by rallying against the so-called threat of gender ideology, a term created to indict a range of progressive views, such as LGBTQ rights, access to comprehensive sexuality education, and accommodation of diverse family forms,” the writers lament.

“In the struggle for gender equality, this tension between progressive and conservative forces is well known,” the text reads, which includes, of course, the very important area of “women’s empowerment and reproductive rights,” meaning, of course, abortion.

For “gender minorities,” on the other hand, a more accepting attitude in necessary to overcome conservative prejudice.

“Stigma toward transgender populations might make them susceptible to stress and poor mental health outcomes,” the authors assert, claiming studies have shown that “the commercial exploitation of masculine norms and stereotypes has resulted in increased acceptance of tobacco and alcohol use as masculine behaviours, leading to increased incidence of lung diseases in men.”

Meanwhile, health institutions have been slow to fully embrace gender equality and gender norms, the authors complain, because they are victims of “organisational plaque, thickly encrusted with traditional, male-dominated values, relationships, and methods of work, that make it difficult to alter institutional policies and norms.”

As a result, such institutions “have rarely invested in staff capacity, data collection, monitoring systems, and changes in workplace culture, human resource management, and business processes to make gender equality objectives and norms part of the institutional DNA,” the article states.

In its analysis, the Lancet got at least one thing right: conservative resistance to gender indoctrination — that dreadful “backlash” — will continue unabated. The bad news for the Lancet is that conservatives have both nature and science on their side.

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