The sexist rage against Nancy Mace

A prominent woman in American public life was openly threatened with death last week. A man posted a sick video on Instagram in which he fantasised about grabbing her by her ‘ratty looking fucking hair’ and repeatedly bashing her face into the floor until ‘the blood’s everywhere and you’re dead’. How did the right-on respond to this vile act of misogynist rage? Did they offer the woman in question their solidarity, damn the man who menaced her, promise to stand firm against the scourge of violence against women? Nope. They went after the woman herself. They called her a bully, a ‘cunt’, ‘hormonal’, a pox on the republic and ‘one of the worst people in the country’. I guess #MeToo’s over then?

It was Nancy Mace, the Republican representative for South Carolina’s first congressional district. She has caused a stir by introducing a bill insisting that the women’s bathrooms in the US Capitol should be used by women only. Real women, that is, not men who think they’re women. Her bill has been brilliantly effective. First, for promising to preserve the privacy and dignity of women in the Capitol. And secondly, for dragging into the sunlight the cant and simmering bigotries of those who pose as virtuous. Courtesy of congresswoman Mace, we now know the woke are the kind of people who look the other way when a man threatens to reduce a woman’s head to a bloody mush for the crime of being an uppity bitch.

Mace doesn’t hold back on the trans question. She has pasted labels saying ‘biological’ above the signs for the women’s bathrooms in the Capitol. ‘Women’s restrooms are for BIOLOGICAL women. Not men’, she says. When a trans activist interrupted her during a talk at Georgetown University last week, saying ‘dozens of trans people’ have died as a result of the ‘lies you’re spreading’, Mace fired back: ‘God loves him, I love him, but his penis isn’t gonna be in my bathroom.’ Ten years ago, before the West went nuts, everyone would have agreed there should be no cocks in the women’s restroom. Now women who want to be considered ‘good’ must meekly agree to mingle with the shrivelled appendages of every delusional bloke.

What used to be called indecent exposure is now called trans rights. The bourgeois left fights tooth and nail for the right of men in dresses to do what we used to condemn men in dirty macs for doing – show their knobs to women who don’t want to see them. And woe betide the woman who says ‘Get that thing out of here’. The Guardian rained fury on the African American woman who complained about the man with a stiffy in the women’s changing room in an LA spa. An 80-year-old granny was banned from a YMCA in Washington state for asking a ‘transwoman’ in the locker room if he had a dick and telling him to ‘Get out right now’. And now Mace is branded a ‘bully’ and a ‘troll’ for saying there should be no penises in women’s restrooms or locker rooms. Quit whining, ladies, and just look at the weird man’s balls.

Mace is accused of bullying Sarah McBride, a ‘transwoman’ who this month was elected as a Democratic representative for Delaware. It is specifically McBride’s penis Mace doesn’t want in her bathrooms, say the Mace haters. She’s ‘harassing’ McBride, they say. She’s waging a one-woman ‘culture war’ against his kind. Tell me this: why is it only a ‘culture war’ when women tell men to get out of their bathrooms but not when men barge in? Why is it ‘harassment’ when women say they don’t want to see a penis at their spa but not when the creep whips his penis out?

The doublespeak is crazy. The true ‘culture warriors’, surely, are the men who swagger into the ladies’ changing room, upending centuries of social decorum, all in order to validate their hallucinatory identities. To call these men ‘women’, and the women protesting their presence ‘bigots’, is moral inversion on steroids. It turns truth upside down. The intruding male becomes the hero, the complaining woman the villain. Greater worth is accorded to men’s feelings than to women’s dignity. Their right to poop wherever they want and undress wherever they please trumps the right of women to enjoy freedom of association and a cock-free day. The bald truth is that elevating McBride’s access to the Capitol’s female bathrooms over Mace’s desire for a women-only zone represents a historic victory for men’s rights.

The only person being ‘bullied’ here is Mace. There’s that man who said he hopes he encounters Mace in a women’s bathroom one day so that he can use extreme violence to murder her. One of Mace’s members of staff received an anonymous voicemail calling her a ‘dumb, degenerate bitch’ and saying she should commit suicide. Far from standing with Mace against such woman-hating hysteria, the woke commentariat has joined in the demonisation of her. The Daily Show called her a ‘transphobic Cruella de Vil’. TLDR: she’s a witch. The Independent condemned her ‘rage bait’ while others say she has ‘no shame’, is ‘disgusting’ and ‘hateful’, and is straight up ‘one of the worst people in the country’. It seems it’s okay again to fume about ‘nasty women’.

One woke comic says Mace will never have to prove anything when she goes into the women’s bathroom because ‘there’s no doubt you’re in the presence of a cunt’. Geddit – she has a cunt and she is a cunt! Honestly, these people make Bernard Manning sound like Betty Friedan. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Mace probably wants women and girls to ‘drop trow’ – ie, expose their genitals – as they go into the bathroom, to prove they’re female. Eh? All Mace wants is for men to not drop trow in these places. No one’s asking women and girls to expose themselves – we’re asking men to stop exposing themselves. We’re saying these men are not women and thus should not be in women’s spaces. It’s not rocket science.

The Mace hate confirms something many of us already knew: that trans activism is misogyny in drag. It also shines an unforgiving light on the phoney virtue of the correct-think clique, who spent years wearing pussy hats and posing as feminists and yet who now shrug as a woman is threatened with violent death for defending women’s rights. We’re witnessing the rage of an activist class that feels its cultural power waning. Trans is falling out of fashion. The sea of reason is crashing on the shores of their bullshit. And how are they dealing with it? The same way every dogmatic fruitcake in history dealt with such revolts – by burning a witch.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy