Admittedly, the Bill 34 kerfuffle in Quebec annoyed me. Et voila. The results of an annoyed Andrea and Rebecca, in today’s Post.

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Brigitte is laughing her his little head off: Check this out, from Paul Tuns’s excellent blog (I enjoy most everything except the baseball/football stuff, which I do not get at all):

I read the column this morning at home and when I was standing on the subway I noticed a woman sitting near me reading the Post who glanced toward that article, rolled her eyes and turned the page. I should have gone back to reading my magazine but I decided to open my mouth. I said to her that she when she got the chance she should read the “well-written and thought-provoking article on the ‘abortion distortion’,” to which she replied that “Andrea and Renita [sic] are funny names for men.” I corrected her, “Andrea Mrozek and Rebecca Walberg are co-founders of the ProWomanProLife blog.” The woman said they were a front for men or perhaps men using female pseudonyms. I said it was sexist to believe that political views are determined by biology and returned to my Economist. Further discussion would be fruitless.

I suppose now is as good a time to confess as any: I, too, am secretly a man. The name, the long hair, the reasonably feminine features, the inability to understand why adults should care about baseball? That’s just a front.

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Andrea/Andrew adds: Why should it matter? Gender is a mere construction anyway, a vestige of the patriarchy. Male/female: Cumbersome and unnecessary distinctions.

On a different note, it was bold of Paul Tuns to engage on the topic with her.

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Tanya balks: You’re all dudes? I feel so betrayed. All this time I perceived you both as enthralling, educated, articulate women with a solid foundation for your points of view. And all this time, you were just enthralling, educated, articulate men with a solid foundation for your points of view. I’m outta here!

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Rebecca says: Thank you to Paul for defending our honour. This sort of behaviour highlights one of the ugliest aspects of identity politics: reading out members of a group if they don’t toe the party orthodoxy. It’s not enough to dismiss us as mistaken or unconvincing; we are in fact not really women if we don’t support abortion at the drop of a hat.

In the US, where identity politics are even uglier, black conservatives are described as Oreos, black on the outside but white on the inside, and similar epithets exist for other groups, the intent of which is to put unpopular ideas beyond the pale, and thus avoid engaging them seriously.

Meanwhile, of course, the half-white Obama, who was raised by his white grandparents, is the hailed as the soul of African American authenticity …

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