Should your daughter have to share showers with a boy and have him competing on her sports team? The Obama administration certainly thinks so, as its Education Department has just ruled that an Illinois school must allow a boy claiming to be a girl “unfettered access to girls’ facilities.” Writes the Chicago Tribune:
Illinois’ largest high school district violated federal law by barring a transgender student from using the girls’ locker room, authorities concluded Monday.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights spent nearly two years investigating Palatine-based Township High School District 211 and found “a preponderance of evidence” that school officials did not comply with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.
The student, who has identified as a girl for a number of years, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in late 2013 after she was denied unrestricted access to the girls’ locker room. District and federal officials negotiated for months, and a solution appeared imminent as recently as last week, when the district put up privacy curtains in the locker room.
But talks stalled after school officials said the student would be required to use the private area, as opposed to offering her a choice to use it. Although the student said she intends to use the private area or a locker room bathroom stall to change, the stipulation constitutes “blatant discrimination,” said John Knight, director of the LGBT and AIDS Project at ACLU of Illinois, which is representing the student.
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First note that the above article, as all mainstream media now do as policy, uses feminine pronouns to refer to what American Thinker’s Ed Straker, in an emperor-has-no-clothes moment, calls a “disguised boy.” Speaking of emperors, the media’s altered-eye habit is a bit like referring to a man fancying himself Napoleon as Your Imperial Highness.
Yet there’s something in this matter universally unnoted. Consider the Tribune’s line, “School officials did not comply with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.” The problem?
“Transgender” activists have taken pains, repeatedly, to emphasize that “gender” is not synonymous with “sex.”
They acknowledge that sex is a biological distinction. But they define “gender” as a person’s perception of what he is and claim that it often doesn’t match his biological sex. For instance, the homosexuality-activism organization GLAAD states in its Media Reference Guide on “Transgender Issues” that sex is “a combination of bodily characteristics including: chromosomes, hormones, internal and external reproductive organs, and secondary sex characteristics.” It then explains that a person’s “gender identity” is “one’s internal, deeply held sense of one’s gender,” clearly drawing a distinction between the two terms. This is why sexual revolutionaries co-opted the word “gender” — which used to apply only to language (i.e., word division into masculine, feminine, and neuter) — in the first place. In fact, the notion that human “gender” exists and is different from “sex” is the very basis, the central tenet, of the transgender movement. It is why it’s called the transgender movement and not the transsex movement.
Yet the law cited by the DOE, Title IX (unconstitutional to begin with), clearly addresses only discrimination “on the basis of sex” (law’s text here). And, of course, the “transgender” movement is a recent phenomenon, with the word not even taking on its current meaning until the 1990s. Thus, it’s obvious that Title IX’s 1972 framers intended to address sex discrimination and only sex discrimination. For good or ill, they wanted to ensure that girls had equal access to educational opportunities, not that boys claiming girlhood would have equal access to girls’ locker rooms.
To completely close the loop here, some may propose that Title IX can apply because the term equivalent to “transgender” in the ’70s was “transsexual.” Untrue. A “transsexual” was someone who had undergone euphemistically named “sexual-reassignment surgery,” not someone merely “identifying” as a member of the opposite sex, which is the case with the Illinois boy. (Of course, Title IX’s framers weren’t talking about transsexuals, either.) So, clearly, the DOE is twisting the law to fit an agenda, trying to match today’s living-document jurists with its own living-document bureaucrats.
Yet it isn’t just the feds. State authorities across the nation have in recent years compelled schools to allow “transgender” students to use the opposite-sex’s facilities and play on its sports teams. And the irony is that our language, educational standards, and culture are being upended — and those opposing this are being called bigots — based not on science but ideology.
At issue here is the “diagnosis” known as “gender dysphoria” (GD), which, we’re told, is a condition in which a person’s conception of his true “gender” doesn’t match his biological sex. But as I explained last November:
There is no blood test for it [GD]. There is no identifiable genetic marker. There is no medical exam at all. Rather, the diagnosis is made based on, as PsychCentral.com puts it, “strong and persistent cross-gender identification”; in other words, strong and persistent feelings that you actually are a member of the opposite sex.
Yet such a diagnostic standard would constitute malpractice in any other branch of medicine. Could you imagine a patient telling a cardiologist that he has a strong and persistent feeling he has heart disease and the doctor, on that basis alone, performing bypass surgery? The point is that whatever one thinks of the soundness of the “gender dysphoria” diagnosis, the basis on which it’s made certainly is not medically sound.
Yet other than having implications for remedial treatment, would it matter if there were a genetic basis for “transgenderism”? The existence of genetic disorders such as Down syndrome, sickle-cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease inform that inborn isn’t synonymous with normal or desirable. And the same social scientists claiming homosexuality is innate also tell us that psychopaths are born and not made. And if it was determined that homicidal instincts could be inborn, would this make murder “moral” for those so disposed? The “it’s okay if I was born that way” thesis does nothing less than replace morality with biological determinism. So the truth here is simple: Biology can generate mistakes — but not morality.
There’s also an irony in leftists’ citing of Title IX to defend boys’ participation in girls’ sports. The same leftists have used the law for decades to increase athletic opportunities for girls and women (often unfairly and at the expense of boys and men). Now consider: Dr. Richard Raskind, the famous “transsexual” who adopted the name Renée Richards, won the 1979 35-and-over U.S. Open women’s tennis title at age 45. “Lana Lawless,” also a man claiming to be a woman, won the 2008 Women’s World Long Drive Championship (golf) at age 55. And because of a lawsuit Lawless filed against the Ladies Professional Golf Association, the tour had to scrap its “female at birth” rule in 2010.
Yet sexual distinctions in sports exist for a reason, well illustrated by the fact that the mile record for 15-year-old boys is better than the women’s world record. And Richards, who paved his own way to compete in women’s tennis by winning a 1977 lawsuit against the USTA, now agrees. As he said some time back, “Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”
And that’s a word to the wise. Perhaps if we consider matters more carefully today, we won’t have to reconsider them amidst the cultural ashes of a dystopian tomorrow.
