Down the Gender Neutral Rabbit Hole
The Custody Crisis IS a Gender Issue
The Gender Neutral Rabbit Hole is the fifth in our series. It is one of the many rabbit holes women go down when exploring how they could possibly have lost custody, been unable to protect their children, and/or been financially devastated via Family Court.
The first four were covered in previous Women’s Coalition News & Views columns: the Abuse, Money, Alienation, and Rights & Laws Rabbit Holes.
The purpose of the Rabbit Holes series is to shed light on the many ways women are being diverted from understanding what is really going on in Family Court. These distractions are keeping women from fighting for and achieving effective change, thus fueling the rampant oppression women face in family courts worldwide.
Gender neutrality is a key element of all of the Custody Crisis Rabbit Holes, but it is, in and of itself, the most overarching and damaging obfuscation of all. On its own it can sabotage the movement for effective change—and it has.
THE BACK STORY
Gender Neutrality is not intrinsically a bad thing, of course. It has had the noble goal of empowering women in spheres of society men have dominated forever based on supposed male superiority—especially politics, education and employment. The idea that women can perform as well as men in these areas is now accepted and gender discrimination is illegal.
However, when it comes to the litigation of family matters post-separation, gender neutrality has the opposite effect. It gives women less power by conflating gender equality with gender sameness when it comes to mothers and fathers.
In the policy realm, by disappearing the concept of “mother”, men gain power. Women naturally have power in the family via children’s primary attachment with their mother. This inadvertent power poses a threat to men who want control in the family post-separation. Custody of children represents leverage with which to control women and children after divorce, whether for financial gain, to continue abuse, or to vindictively punish women.
A main agenda of the OBN [old boy network], enforcer of all things male, is to perpetuate men’s power in the family. Keeping men happy, especially middle class white men, aids in the maintenance of their own social and financial superiority and dominance.
Some legislatures have stopped using the words “mother” and “father”, replacing them with “parent”. This effectuates the false ideology that fathers and mothers are exactly the same with regards to parenting. The disappearing of gender in family law presumes mothers and fathers are both simply parents, and one parent is just as good as the other.
This concept is untrue. Research and common sense support that children do best in the custody of their primary attachment figure, virtually always the mother. But this false narrative greatly serves the OBN’s agenda of increasing men’s power in the family by misrepresenting parenting as gender neutral and children as doing best—or at least fine—living half or full time with the father.
This agenda has led to the incredibly strong push by men to immerse the culture and legislatures in the gender neutral narrative. A key part of that program is to dupe the opposition—women—into accepting this fiction, and, better yet, promulgating gender neutral aspects of post-separation litigation.
There are two main branches of the gender neutral rabbit hole. The Men’s Camp is comprised of organizations and groups almost exclusively led by men. The Women’s Camp is comprised of organizations and groups almost exclusively led by women.
MEN’S CAMP BRANCH
Men have always known that custody of children amounts to a gender war, as children are handy leverage to get and keep women under their control. From the minute women got the power to divorce easily and get custody, men mobilized as a class to fight this mother-of-all gender wars.
At first, their main strategy was to muddy the waters with the false narrative that it was men who were being discriminated against in Family Court. But soon they added a gender neutral battalion in which their male empowering agenda is disguised. This way they pull lots of women into their fold, many through “equal parenting” groups.
The Men’s Camp draws women in by conning them into thinking that both men and women are losing custody unjustly and being routinely harmed in Family Court. They provide what appears to be support for mothers when covertly they support reforms that give men even more power than they already have to take custody from mothers—and abuse them if they so choose.
Men knew from the beginning that women gaining the ability to divorce and get custody was just a resurgence of the gender war they had won thousands of years prior. It is as if inhabitants of a territory men had colonized long ago finally had the wherewithal to rise up and retake rights they had enjoyed before the invasion. So this seemingly new gender war is really just a backlash against women trying to regain power that is rightfully theirs—to keep and protect their children.
The OBN and its right hand men, the fathers’ rights activists [FRA’s], confuse vulnerable mothers with lies and disinformation about what is really going on in family courts. The main deception is that women are not being discriminated against and the court is just corrupt in general, that it is harming both fathers and mothers by stringing cases along, giving custody to the wrong parent, and financially devastating both.
One of FRA’s main deceptions is what they call the silver bullet: judges believing mothers who falsely accuse fathers of abuse, thus wrongly giving mothers primary custody, and allowing the mothers to alienate children from good, loving fathers.
The Men’s Camp gender neutral version goes something like this: Judges are falsely finding both fathers and mothers to be alienating and subsequently allowing both fathers and mothers to alienate children from the other parent. The truth is there is only one epidemic: judges falsely finding mothers to be alienating and permitting fathers to alienate children. This is not happening in any significant numbers to fathers.
The other main deception is that the “divorce industry” is the problem. Both parents are getting screwed because the system is designed for affiliated professionals to profit off their pain. This is analogous to the Women’s Camp’s “cottage industry” explanation.
WOMEN’S CAMP BRANCH
Women are being drawn down the gender neutral rabbit hole by their own. It was not always this way. For a brief time, women were well-aware that their inability to maintain custody and protect their children was a male entitlement/female oppression issue.
Then it was hijacked in the 1990’s.
The Women’s Camp is comprised of organizations that purport to support mothers but actually mislead them, some intentionally, some not. But they all do.
This camp is led by protective/safe parent groups, along with the legal and mental health professionals who support them. Many groups use the word mother but are affiliated with the parent organizations that dominate the movement. Since these groups are led by women and professionals, they draw in a lot more mothers than the Men’s Gender Neutral Camp, hence making them much more damaging to the cause.
As the terms “protective” and “safe” imply, the focus is on abuse being a terrible thing, regardless of which parent is committing it, and children needing to be protected. True and an inarguably noble cause.
However, there is no crisis in Family Court of parents being unable to protect children from the other parent, only loving mothers being unable to protect children from abusive fathers. And the reason for this—that the system is designed to entitle and empower men, abusive or not—is obscured. [See Abuse Rabbit Hole]
Another major diversion, which MSM is covering a lot lately, is the issue of parental alienation—and its touted cure: reunification therapy. The alienation/reunification issue is a subset of the abuse sector. The focus is on mothers being accused of alienating when they report abuse, while obscuring true alienation by fathers enabled by judges. But it’s still positioned as all about abuse rather than power: the systemic entitling of men post-separation. [See: Parental Alienation Rabbit Hole]
Yet another subset of the abuse sector is the hyping of child murders by parents in custody/family court cases. Despite the incontrovertible evidence that this is a gendered crime.
The vast majority of post-separation child murders are committed by men, most as a result of their loss of control in the family or out of revenge. On the other hand, it is extremely rare for mothers to murder their children. When they do, it is usually during a psychotic episode, a result of extreme grief, or as a (misguided) means to protect their children from a childhood of sexual abuse by the father, which family courts fail to do. Mothers rarely, if ever, murder due to loss of control or revenge against their ex. These critical, gendered facts and evidence are disappeared.
Perhaps worse, these child murders are being used as hooks to push for legislation that will do nothing to end the crisis and deflects from public understanding of it as part of the slaughter of mothers. These horrific murders should be used as further proof it is men who are being enabled by family courts to harm children and it is women who need the power to protect them.
Another Women’s Camp diversion, which is also often plugged by the abuse sector, is the “cottage industry” [see Money Rabbit Hole]. The blame is placed on the profiteering by the many professionals and experts who make a living off of the crisis, analogous to the Men’s Camp’s “divorce industry”. It seems every day women complain, “It’s all about the money!” But it’s not. Really, it’s not if you look critically at the facts and stats.
And these are just the main sections of the Women’s Camp branch of the gender neutral rabbit hole—there are so many more! But enough for now.
TAKE AWAY
First, do not feel bad if you’ve been sucked down this rabbit hole! It takes most women a long time before discovering the truth about why women are losing custody in epidemic numbers.
By drawing women down the gender neutral rabbit hole, both Men’s and Women’s Camps mask the gender-specific switching of custody and endangering of children. This has caused women to go from understanding the problem as a power disparity between the sexes to simply being appalled and consumed with the abuse and profiteering aspects.
While the Men’s Camp is outwardly gender neutral, men are firmly united and organized behind the scenes to maintain and gain power for men post-separation. Not so for the Women’s Camp where those gender neutral groups really are gender neutral and, hence, prevent women from uniting as a class.
For men, gender neutrality is a war strategy used to confuse, deflect, and divide. And they are winning the war. They do not even have to work very hard because the Women’s Camp is doing the work for them, convincing women the Custody Crisis is gender neutral.
The important thing for women to remember is that the gender neutral rabbit hole deflects attention from the historical male privileging at the core of the crisis. That means it is useless to continue to fight to keep judges from giving children to abusive parents, or to stop generic corruption, or focus on any other gender-neutral diversions.
Women must begin to recognize that the lack of power in their role as wives, ex-wives, and mothers makes women a political underclass. The Family Court system is the main staging ground for maintaining this power disparity. It is designed specifically so judges have the power to falsely deem women liars and mentally ill, i.e. lie about women, the same tactic that has been used for millennia to silence and disempower women who dare challenge male authority. All the activism in the world to stop abusive parents or greedy professionals will not, can not, change that reality.
The Custody Crisis must be not only seen as gendered, but fought as a power issue—a political issue. It is only when women clearly identify the crisis as a form of oppression of women and unite as a class to regain the power to keep and protect our children—that we rightfully had before patriarchy took hold—that the crisis will finally end.
The personal is, indeed, political.
Down the Parental Alienation Rabbit Hole
Down the Rights and Laws Rabbit Hole
HOLIDAY BREAK
Women’s Coalition News & Views will be taking a short break for the holidays. We’ll see you back here in January.
Hopefully you all will enjoy the holidays as much as possible—considering what you’ve been through…
The next Sisters in Solidarity forum will be January 20th so Sisters make sure and put that on your calendar!
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Unless I missed it, no mention of the Equal Rights Amendment, which colors the crisis in a profound way from the beginning. The system is far from blind to gender, regardless of the jargon that is recorded. There is no gender neutrality in the actual context of proceedings that affect children & women. The GN language is a sham.
Family court is not gender neutral. Systemic male entitlement dominates family court.