There was a time when boys of easy virtue had to content themselves with sneaking a peek at the girls’ swim team during practice. But social engineers may make this passé with a proposal to allow boys to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.
No, this isn’t the plot of a decadent B movie.
The story comes out of Maine, with a state proposal that would grant boys claiming to be female the right to use the aforementioned girls’ facilities. It may even give such boys the right to compete on girls’ sports teams.
In fact, a boy in the state had already been allowed to use a girls’ bathroom, creating a controversy that led to the current guidelines. Bob Unruh reports on the story at WorldNetDaily.com, writing:
A fifth-grade boy at Asa Adams School had been given permission to use the girls’ restroom. He then was subjected to “harassment,” according to the Maine Human Rights Commission.
The school tried to reach a compromise by designating a special restroom for the boy, instead of allowing him to continue to use the girls’ restroom. But the move brought a determination of discrimination from the state agency.
The Maine Human Rights Commission proposed a set of guidelines that would require schools “to allow young children to have access to facilities of the opposite sex. Under the proposed guidelines, boys who self-identify as female will have access to girls’ sports teams and cheerleading squads, girls’ bathrooms, and girls’ locker rooms.”
Shocking though this is, it’s nothing new. WorldNetDaily.com had previously reported on similar measures/laws in Tampa, Fla.; Montgomery County, Md.; and Colorado, all of which may or will allow men access to women’s bathrooms.
Yet this is part of a wider problem still: the sexual confusion characterizing our time. For example, last year I wrote about a Swedish couple that refused to reveal the sex of their two-year-old, believing that “gender” is a “social construction.” Then there was the story of Caster Semenya, the South African runner whose masculine appearance and wide-margin victories over female competitors sparked suspicion that the track star was a hermaphrodite (yes, I know it’s an outdated term, but I’m an outdated guy). Subsequent sex tests proved this to in fact be the case, but what was even more remarkable were the comments left by website respondents prior to that determination. Many actually expressed the idea that if Semenya believes “she’s” a woman, then “she” is. Well, tell that to the female opponents the runner left in the dust.
There was also the story of German Tim Petras, who, at age 12, became the youngest of what society calls “transsexuals.” Not to be outdone, Britain served up two similar cases: a 12-year-old boy and a 9-year-old boy who showed up for school appearing as girls. Moreover, the authorities expected them to receive special treatment and placed the onus on the other children to be “sensitive” to their preference.
If you think these are isolated social accidents, know that there is method to this madness. And to introduce this, I’ll say something about the Swedish couple who maintain that “gender” is a social construction.
They have a point.
This is why I don’t use the word “gender” in today’s usual sense.
Unless you’re quite young, you probably remember a time when only “sex” was used to refer to the quality of being male or female. And while you probably assume that replacing it with “gender” is a rather innocuous language innovation, this is far from the truth.
If you look in an older dictionary, you’ll see that “gender” is always defined as it is in my seventh printing, 1975 American Heritage School Dictionary, which states the following: “In grammar, one of a number of categories, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter, into which words are divided.” It says nothing about people, and for good reason: The term never referred to people — only words.
Do you smell an agenda? Keep reading.
While I don’t exactly know who first applied “gender” to human beings, a great proponent of such usage was a now discredited psychologist named Dr. John Money. A professor of pediatrics and medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, he invented terms/concepts such as “gender role” and “gender identity.” He advanced the idea that while your “sex” was inborn, “gender” was something else entirely: your perception of what you were. (Money also originated “gender neutrality” theory, which he stubbornly applied in the infamous David Reimer case, an example of malpractice which ultimately led to the death of Reimer.)
Money’s gender-identity theory — which stated that a child could be raised as a member of the opposite sex and be perfectly well-adjusted as long as he truly viewed himself as a member of it — has been discredited. But the idea that perception is reality has only gained currency. Where Money believed that a person’s “gender” could be determined by those raising him, psychologists and many others today embrace the idea that a person’s “gender” can be whatever he wants it to be. Furthermore, they say that a child can be born in the body of the wrong sex — they even have a name for it: “gender dysphoria.” Thus, by their lights, it’s perfectly legitimate for a boy thus disordered to believe that he really is a girl. This is the thinking that gives us Johnny in Mary’s and Suzy’s restroom.
Yet the category of “gender” has been expanded far beyond male and female identity. Some of the more bizarre examples of “gender” are: autosexual, intergender, bigender, third gender, soft butch, and eunuch.
Of course, not everyone agrees on what belongs in the category, which, mind you, is burgeoning. How could it be otherwise? Feelings have been made the arbiter here, as one’s perception is simply what he feels he is. And, remember, there are people who feel that certain limbs don’t belong on their bodies (and certain doctors have actually performed amputations on this basis), a disorder the psychologists label “body dysmorphia.” There are also individuals who claim to be animals, such as the wolf girl in Texas. So you can just imagine the creative genders people can fancy themselves to be.
And the gender agenda has been translated into policy. There are numerous governments — local, state, and even national — that have made gender a “protected” (read: specially favored) category under hate-crime and anti-discrimination laws. Then there was the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Seeking to define what could constitute a family, the organizers identified five different genders: male heterosexual, female heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual. The language was ultimately stricken from conference documents, but only because of Vatican contingent protests.
Why has the word “gender” been redefined? A major reason involves, no doubt, an effort to legitimize homosexuality. After all, if you want to normalize something, it helps to lump it in with that which is normal. But you couldn’t very well convince people that homosexuality was a third sex, as it is already cemented in people’s minds that there are only two sexes. But, gender, now, that’s a different story. Remember, the dictionary definition stated that it referred to multiple categories, such as masculine, feminine, and neuter. All you had to do was apply it to people.
We should completely reject the concept of gender. And we can start by saving the word for grammar. Remember, the side that defines the vocabulary of a debate, wins the debate. You cannot combat an agenda if you use its language.
