Introduced to Mary Harrington by Bari Weiss’ Free Press, I don’t pretend to have fully researched her and have not yet read her recently published book “Feminism Against Progress.” But what I have learned from watching various interviews and reading several articles about her, has led me to see her intellectual evolution as one of tremendous significance.
Born in Great Britain and attending Oxford in the late 1990s, Mary was the very epitome of a Leftist radical, hating Capitalism, loathing Hierarchies of any kind, seeing all values and truths as mere Social Constructs, and so embracing radical Feminism that she thought any serious relationship with a Male represented a cowardly capitulation to the Patriarchy. So fully did she swallow the Postmodern notion that Objective Facts are the delusions of Western Rationalists, that she began to wonder if she really was a Female, and at one point changed her name to Sebastian. But for reasons we need not go into here, her convictions began to crumble in 2008, and while still passionately devoted to Women’s Rights, she now sees many of the assumptions informing her former “progressive” world-view as ridiculously superficial “constructs” impervious to what it means to be a Human Being. She believes, that is, that the Postmodern notion that all “truths” are politically motivated, is ironically a politically motivated lie born of the Left’s refusal to acknowledge the simple facts of Human Nature.
One Irony she could not ignore, she now says, is that in the various Egalitarian groups she supported, hierarchies always seemed to emerge, those who were more intelligent, more creative, more energetic, etc., inevitably playing a dominant role in defining and pursuing each group’s political agenda. Rather than Hierarchies being inherently evil, a belief implicit in all Leftist ideology, she seems to have concluded they are more often than not the result of the obvious diversity and complexity of Human Nature itself. Indeed her reaction against the path taken by Feminism over the last 60 years is that it simply ignores the biologically realities of what it means to be a Woman.
Married now and a licensed psychotherapist, Harrington identifies the event that most dramatically altered her world-view as the birth of her child. Her pregnancy, she says, made her realize the notion that Men and Women are only incidentally different is a brazen lie. Their biology in fact makes them psychologically and temperamentally significantly different. The “progressive” Feminist drive to incite all Women to abandon their roles as stay-at-home mothers and gain equality with Men in the workplace, she now feels, simply ignores the joys of what it means to be a mother. This is not to say she has become some sort of reactionary, endorsing the gender norms of past eras. She still fully supports a Woman’s right to live her life as she sees fit, while at the same time dismissing the “progressive” quest for statistical parity with Men in the workplace as stupidly superficial.
Her new found respect for the biological realities of the species has also led her tp part ways with those sensitive souls fully committed to Trans Ideology. An individual born Male who now identifies as a Female is not, she maintains, indistinguishable from a biological Female, no matter the surgical and hormonal procedures he may have sustained. Such individuals who insist on their right to compete in women’s sports are in fact typically “woke” in that they put their own self-interest ahead of both the rights of others and the simple facts of biological reality. Appalled that those with penises have been allowed to share prison cells and washrooms with females, Harrington fully supports British Feminists who have strongly objected to such nonsense, while being somewhat mystified that here in North America the Left in general seems reluctant to criticize any conspicuous minority. Yes, if you constitute significantly less than 1% of the species, you are obviously an oppressed minority and everything you say and do must be greeted with open-armed compassion. Hence an absurd world in which Female convicts housed with Trans Female cellmates somehow end up pregnant a few weeks after their meeting [ i.e., New Jersey, 2022]!
The essence of Harrington’s revised world-view would seem to be that “progressivism’s” obsession with Inclusiveness has led it to ignore the very real Diversity of our species, Feminists in particular invoking an arid, intellectual construct utterly at odds with the realities of hundreds of millions of Women. Ironically, she insists, these “anti-elitist” activists are in fact utterly Elitist in their arrogant disdain for females whose central joy in life entails rearing their children and supporting their husbands.