“Indiana’s legal fight highlights the absurdity of the transgender movement,” reads the headline. The MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) agenda certainly is absurd. But did it come out of nowhere?
Or is it an outgrowth of absurdities accepted long ago?
The Washington Examiner ran the above headline, and its Zachary Faria writes:
Indiana is mired in a legal fight over transgender athletes, and every detail is more absurd than the last.
The state’s ban on men and boys playing on women’s and girls’ sports teams is being challenged in court. A federal judge ruled that a 10-year-old boy must be allowed to rejoin his girls’ softball team, not even a month after Indiana’s ban took effect. The law was passed over the veto of GOP Gov. Eric Holcomb, who ludicrously claimed back in March that the current policies put in place by the state made the law unnecessary, because no male athletes had tried to compete in women’s sports before.
Now, after just one case, Indiana’s law is being dragged through the courts. Holcomb had claimed the law wasn’t necessary; instead, it looks like the law wasn’t even sufficient.
This legal fight was picked by the American Civil Liberties Union, a left-wing activist group that thinks that all men should be allowed to play in women’s sports. The ACLU of Indiana claimed after this initial victory that it is “misinformation about biology and gender” to argue against men competing in women’s sports, and that it is “sex discrimination that has long been prohibited under Title IX.”
To offer precision, here’s what the ACLU actually wrote:
Faria is right, though, about translating this message as meaning the ACLU supports males in females’ sports; you can’t change your sex any more than you can your species. On the other side, the American Civil Liberties Union (American Confused Liberals Union?) might argue, sophistically, that a 10-year-old boy, or a MUSS adult taking testosterone suppressing drugs, enjoys little if any advantage over his female counterparts.
Yet at the end of the day, if it’s equality über alles as the ACLU claims — an idea also inherent in Title IX — on what logical basis could we exclude males (regardless of how they identify) from “women’s” sports? This is an issue. It’s also an absurdity conservatives never address.
Consider the story of another 10-year-old, a girl who in 2014 was the only female on her fourth-grade basketball team. When the organizers of New Mexico’s Southwest Salsa Slam basketball tournament said she couldn’t participate because “[g]irls can not play on boys teams and boys can not play on girls teams,” there was wide media condemnation, followed by a lawsuit threat and capitulation.
This is different, of course, many may say. A girl playing on a boys’ team is “punching up” because she’s passing muster among superior competition, not taking advantage of a lesser variety; this is much as how while we don’t allow a 14-year-old to compete in a 12-and-under category, we do usually allow an exceptional 12-year-old to play in the 14s. Yet there’s a problem.
The argument never was, and never is, “Boys are better athletically. So if a girl can make the cut, more power to her.” No, acknowledging inherent inequality would’ve been, and would be, disastrous for the feminist agenda. After all, all sorts of social innovations, destruction of tradition, and special female-specific scholarships and programs have been justified based on the “equality” supposition. If it’s thrown into question, perhaps then we’d have to reconsider, for example, why we integrated the Virginia Military Institute and Citadel (formerly men-only).
So the argument that was made, and always is, is that allowing the girl’s participation was an equality imperative that only neanderthals oppose. Yet there’s another problem — at least for those still constrained by much maligned “white male linear logic.”
What about the young boy who’s supplanted by a girl playing on a “boys’” team for which he’d otherwise qualify? He can’t try out for the “girls’” team, but is out in the cold.
Equality?
For that matter, if equality reigns, why have sex-specific athletic arenas in the first place? Just have all and sundry compete together, as the races do, and let the cream rise to the top. (Or just give everyone a participation trophy.)
What’s more, if equality reigns, why are women still exempt from draft registration?
So we could try to truly “live” equality. Or….
We could realize that “equality” isn’t actually a good guide for anything (the virtues are).
But conservatives, ever conserving liberals’ mistakes, do neither. Instead, they indulge a sort of cognitive dissonance, accepting equality dogma when it gives the feminists advantages (e.g., girls on boys’ teams) — and rejecting it when doing that gives feminists advantages (e.g., excluding MUSS boys from girls’ sports or women from the draft).
In truth, feminism and its enablers laid the MUSS agenda’s very foundation. Long before today’s fashionable “gender identity” craze (i.e., identify as whatever you want), what prevailed was “gender neutrality” theory. It held that the sexes are identical save the superficial physical differences and, therefore, if you raise boys and girls identically, they’ll turn out identical in inclinations and capacities. The feminists enforced this, socially, with an iron fist.
Yet this belief has a corollary:
Change a sex’s superficial differences — hair, clothing, secondary sexual characteristics — and you can be the opposite sex.
And this, of course, is precisely the MUSS activists’ contention. It’s logical, too — if you accept the feminists’ erstwhile convenience-born premise.
It all brings to mind Sir Walter Scott’s line, “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive.” Absurdity begets absurdity.
