How would President Obama “feel about a disguised boy sharing a locker room with Sasha and Malia at school”? So wonders American Thinker, writing about a Jefferson County, Missouri, high-school boy (shown) allowed to use the girls’ locker room — because he claims he’s really a girl.
Whatever the answer, how a great number of Hillsboro High School students felt about the boy, senior “Lila” Perry, is not in doubt: Approximately 150 of them, almost 15 percent of the student body, staged a two-hour walkout on Monday to protest the pandering to Perry. Writes MRCTV.com (note that the cited sources use feminine pronouns when referencing the boy):
The controversy began after a transgender student, “Lila” Perry, (Perry’s birth name was not listed in any news reports.) told school administrators that she was no longer comfortable using a unisex faculty bathroom that she had been given access to and wanted to be able to use the women’s bathrooms and locker room facilities.
The protest came following a School Board hearing last Thursday, during which parents complained that Perry was being afforded special rights that would make their children and other students uncomfortable.
During the protest, Perry was locked in the principal’s office for “her” safety.
According to reports, the overwhelming majority of those protesting opposed Perry’s use of the women’s facilities, although there were a few counter-protesters present protesting in support of Perry.
And further bucking today’s politically correct climate, many in the moral majority did speak up. As the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reports:
“The girls have rights, and they shouldn’t have to share a bathroom with a boy,” said Tammy Sorden, who has a son at Hillsboro High. It is fine to be different, she said, but it is not right to give Lila special treatment “while the girls just have to suck it up.”
… Several people interviewed outside Hillsboro High on Monday argued that a student who still has male genitalia should not be allowed into a changing room with teenage girls.
“I’m not comfortable with it,” said Britney Heimos, a 2008 Hillsboro graduate who was at the school to pick up her brother. “There is nothing wrong with being different. But when you are different, there are sacrifices.”
Shortly after the protest, Jeff Childs, 47, and his son, Blayke, 21, both of Farmington, drove onto the high school parking lot with “Girls Rights Matter” painted on the sides and tailgate of the Ford pickup.
… “This needs to stop before it goes too far,” said Childs, who has a niece and a nephew who go to an elementary school in Hillsboro. “I’m not trying to be ignorant, but (the transgender student) is bringing it out in public for everybody else to deal with.”
And many would say this is the point. Doesn’t the good of the many outweigh the desires of the few? There have been stories out of Britain about entire elementary-school student bodies being given “sensitivity training” in deference to one boy who chose to attend class dressed as a girl. But while modern republics — and our constitutional framework is an ideal example — are designed to provide equal rights for all, this has been twisted into special privileges for a few, where minority preferences trump eternal principles. If an individual has a problem, he may deserve help and compassion, but this isn’t what’s happening with the “transgender” phenomenon; rather, the abnormal is celebrated, and society and normality are turned upside-down to accommodate one person. The kicker is that the troubled individual isn’t even helped, but enabled. It’s much like dealing with an alcoholic student by mandating that the school cafeteria must have a full bar and every classroom strategically placed vomit bags.
Of course, the Left will say that “transgender” agenda (TA) opponents are unscientific, but what is the science behind the TA? We hear that not everyone’s chromosome configuration is XY or XX, that there are abnormalities (or, should we say, “genetic diversity”?); we hear that intrauterine hormonal anomalies can perhaps cause a boy to have a “feminized” brain. So surely then, “gender dysphoria” (GD) — “the condition of feeling one’s emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one’s biological sex” — must be diagnosed via genetic testing or a brain scan.
Actually, no.
Any such scientific test would almost invariably indicate that the person diagnosed with GD is the sex he outwardly appears, that he is normal. Only his feelings are abnormal, and that’s precisely how GD is diagnosed: The person must have strong and persistent feelings, lasting for at least six months, that he’s trapped in the body of the wrong sex (details here). Would such a diagnostic standard be accepted in any other branch of medicine? If a medical test showed you had a healthy heart but you nonetheless had strong and persistent feelings, lasting for a half a year, that you had heart disease, would your doctor say, “Alright, I’ll cut your chest open and perform a triple-bypass”? It would invite a malpractice suit. Yet such a diagnostic standard is routinely applied with GD.
Also note that a “symptom” of GD can be a strong desire to get rid of one’s genitals. This is reminiscent of another condition, Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), in which sufferers are convinced that other body parts, such as the arms or legs, don’t belong on their bodies. Some have been so distressed that they’ve even tried to self-amputate. But do we consider BIID a legitimate “identity” or a psychological problem? Would we view a doctor whose “remedy” was to amputate healthy legs a healer or a butcher? And if the latter, why is he thought the former when amputating a different body part in the name of GD? Why are “feelings” supreme in one case but scoffed at in the other?
One could get the feeling (and maybe even the thought) that the GD diagnosis isn’t about science, but politics. Despite this, and the prominence of the GD diagnosis being a relatively recent phenomenon, the TA has become a fashionable bandwagon to mount. While it’s unlikely that Obama’s daughters would ever have to suffer the direct effects of his policies, his federal government foists the TA on everyone else, compelling school districts to allow GD students to use their preferred bathroom. Then there’s the media. When reporting on Bruce Jenner wannabes, news organs reference them using opposite-sex pronouns — seemingly without exception. This is striking. It’s a testimonial to the media’s ability to act as a left-wing social-engineering monolith. It’s an example of how their much-touted diversity only pertains to the superficial; insofar as ideology goes, conformity is the order of the day.
But since the media believe identity is reality and have resolved to respect a person’s feelings on the matter, I have a message for the New York Times et al.: You are henceforth to refer to me as The Great One. As for the rest of us, we’d do well to develop MD — Media Dysphoria. This is the strong and enduring feeling that your media doesn’t belong on the body politic. The remedy is amputation.
Honorable mention: Under an article on Perry at the Blaze, commenter “BumsNightmare” posted the following personal testimonial:
I am a man that used to be trapped in a woman’s body…
…then she gave birth to me.
Thanks, mom!
Photo of “Lila” Perry: AP Images
