Why Conservatives Need Traditional Gender Roles | The American Spectator

In response to the Left’s assault on the reality of sexual differences and its subsequent promotion of transgenderism, the default tactic of many conservatives is to point to biology. Opposing gender confusion, conservatives have emphasized the reality that biological sex is innate and immutable, and males and females are distinguished by reproductive systems and XY/XX chromosomes. They’re right, but sexual differences encompass much more than that.

One of the more culturally impactful responses to transgenderism, Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman?, concluded with the answer that a woman is “an adult human female,” the standard dictionary definition.

Likewise, President Donald Trump’s day one executive order restored precisely this definition to federal laws and policies: “‘Women’ or ‘woman’ and ‘girls’ or ‘girl’ shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.” The HHS implemented this order, defining a woman as “an adult human female” and a female as “a person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs.”

Emphasizing the reality of biological sex is of course correct. Trump’s executive order is a significant win, and this answer is miles better than caving to the Left’s assertions or trying to seek some supposed middle ground between truth and falsehood. Men are not women, and in no way should conservatives give in to the Left’s false anthropological delusions.

However, conservatives shouldn’t stop there. While affirming biological reality, we shouldn’t make the mistake of reducing the differences between men and women to only biological or chromosomal differences. What a woman is entails much more than just XX chromosomes (even though being a female is a requirement for womanhood).

In other words, conservatives need to revitalize our defence of traditional gender roles.

The word “role” is key. Feminists and gender activists frequently point to the concept of gender roles or gender expression to claim that sex differences are a social construct. For instance, the feminist Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” to argue that gender identity is constructed by society.

However, while de Beauvoir is wrong to say that sexual differences are a social construct, the statement that one must become a woman is spot on. She is right to say that being a woman involves something that you act out.

Becoming womanly entails developing virtues such as nurture, grace, and charity. Our biological gender does assign us a role, but one that is natural and not arbitrary. We are born males and females, but there is a real sense in which we must actually grow to become men and women.

What Is a Man?

As conservatives assert the truth that men can’t become women, we shouldn’t forget that men actively need to become manly, which takes effort and sacrifice.

You could say, in the spirit of de Beauvoir, that one is born a male, but becomes a man. To acquire manliness entails practicing the virtues of courage, fortitude, honesty, and selflessness. Everyone intuitively knows that a man protects and provides for his family.

The attributes that make a man are famously described in Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” a poem of fatherly advice to a son. The poem begins:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

The conclusion shows the fruit of developing the character described in the poem, which is that a son becomes a man:

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Character marks the essential difference between a male and a man.

American men have historically displayed this manly character in abundance. The American founders frequently praised their countrymen’s “manly spirit,” which according to Hamilton  “actuates the people of America, a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.” In the founders’ view, manliness is a virtue; it must be cultivated and fought for, and it’s necessary for free government.

Of course, the word “virtue” itself derives from the Latin word for “man.” To be manly is to live virtuously.

Women Have Roles Too

I don’t think the claim that men should actively endeavor to acquire a manly character, despite whatever personal hindrances they may have, is all that controversial. But, just as men have an obligation to rise to fulfill their gender role corresponding to biological reality, women do too.

Just as men need to work and sacrifice to become truly manly, women may even need to sacrifice personal preferences and desires to acquire womanliness. One of the quintessential womanly characteristics is motherliness, and one of our society’s chief debates is whether or not motherhood should actually be the center of family life.

In modern society, it has become unfashionable to say that women should pursue the virtues associated with womanliness and femininity. Even many people on the Right believe that society’s aim should be to maximize women’s personal choice rather than encouraging them to treat motherhood as central and to subordinate other pursuits. “Women can have it all,” they say — holding up the “conservative girl boss” as the ideal. 

Increasingly, the Left’s extreme position of gender confusion appears to have exposed the deeper question which the Right must answer: Are men and women truly different? The Right must decide whether it will actually affirm the traditional view of marriage and gender roles, or whether it will adopt the same feminism championed by the Left a few decades ago.

For example, Emily Wilson, a self-proclaimed MAGA Republican, recently went on a tirade against “young girls on the right promoting this like tradwife bulls**t.” She argued that the chances are “slim to none” that being a married homemaker “is going to work out for you or quite literally anyone you know.”

Her post’s caption contends, “YOU. CAN. DO. BOTH.” Women should focus on their careers and shouldn’t pursue traditional roles within marriage because they’re going to “be trapped by a man,” according to Wilson. “It’s cringe. You guys are cringe,” she concluded.

The fact that Wilson’s response to traditional family life is so harsh is quite telling.

And of course, the problem with the position that women can have it all is that it simply isn’t true. Life always involves making sacrifices, one way or another, even if “girl bosses” try to deny it.

If a mother spends 40 hours a week away from her children, that is a real sacrifice. If a woman delays marriage and family life until her thirties, that is a real sacrifice. Likewise, traditional roles within marriage also require sacrifice: Mothers and homemakers sacrifice money and career ambitions in exchange for the demanding but sacred responsibility of raising children.

Due to a variety of circumstances, many families can’t make the traditional ideals of marriage and family life a reality, and that’s unavoidable. Families may simply need the money from two incomes, or sometimes a wife’s career may be so significant that it arguably justifies making sacrifices of their family. But make no mistake, those sacrifices are real.

The question is not whether many mothers will continue to work outside the home, because some inevitably will, but whether motherhood traditionally arranged will reclaim a place of honor and first priority — whether it should be the ideal for family life.

Supposed conservatives who decry women’s roles in family life have utterly lost their way. They may know what a woman is made of, but they have forgotten what a woman is.

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