A federal court and Target agree: Sorry, but your right to physical privacy doesn’t extend to public restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — unless you’re transgender.
It seems like it was less than a year ago that the LGBT movement was saying all it wanted was the right to peaceably marry, to be treated just like everyone else . . . oh wait: It was less than a year ago. But now, being treated like everyone else isn’t enough. The movement wants more. It wants to elevate some people’s rights above others’, and — for all its “protect the victim” narrative — the way it has chosen to do it opens the door to devastating consequences for some of the most vulnerable among us. It’s the next chapter in the dystopian novel that is modern American culture.
On Tuesday, the Fourth Circuit Court ruled that a Virginia school cannot accommodate a transgender student by providing a single-occupancy restroom and changing room. The student claimed that using the single-stall restroom was psychologically distressing. In a concurring opinion, a judge wrote that forcing the student to do so could cause “irreparable harm.” The student, he wrote, “experiences daily psychological harm that puts him at risk of long-term psychological harm.”
A female student is so psychologically fragile that she is allegedly experiencing daily psychological harm from using a single-stall bathroom while insisting on dressing like a boy. And presumably, no one thinks to check whether there’s a co-morbid disorder going on.
Instead, the court ruled that the school must tell all of its male students that their physical privacy isn’t as valuable as that of a single transgender student, and that they must be okay with a biological female using their restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms. They must immediately and without complaint surrender a right to physical privacy that has been assumed for centuries because of the objective differences between male and female bodies. And they don’t even get a “Sorry.”
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On the same day, in a blog post with the saccharine title “Continuing to Stand for Inclusivity,” Target rededicated itself to the cause of giving people different rights in the name of “equality.” The post says, “We believe that everyone — every team member, every guest, and every community — deserves to be protected from discrimination, and treated equally.” In practice (because Target executives believe that they, unlike religiously motivated businesses, have the right to conduct their business according to their conscience), this means that anyone can use whatever bathroom they want to in Target stores. The post says, “We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.”
The mother who sends her seven-year-old daughter in to use the restroom while she waits outside with a loaded cart may find herself having to do a lot of explaining on the drive home.
#share#Today’s national conversation about transgenderism (if we can call this media-fueled ideological carpet-bombing a conversation) features some incredible linguistic gymnastics around the terms “biological sex” and “gender identity.” The court claimed that Title IX, which exists to protect students on the basis of sex — by ensuring that schools offer, for example, separate restrooms — extends to gender identity, a mind-boggling equivocation. How can “sex,” as in biological sex, suddenly mean “gender identity,” which we’ve been told all along isn’t related to biological sex? But people — and corporations — accept this without batting an eye.
Today’s national conversation about transgenderism features some incredible linguistic gymnastics.
But even more significant is how the Left has been able to pivot from the body-consciousness of the early Sexual Revolution to today’s total rejection of the significance of biology, without losing the moral high ground. The Left’s rhetoric used to be about liberating us from the moral and cultural limits on bodies, so that we could do whatever we wanted with them. Presumably that didn’t make us happy, because today, it’s about liberating us from our bodies altogether, by telling us that we can define ourselves however we want regardless of our biology. But because the movement keeps banging the gong of some twisted form of “liberty,” it has so far escaped widespread cultural criticism.
We’re just beginning to delve into the devastation wrought by the Sexual Revolution’s dismissal of moral parameters for the use of the body — devastation for everyone involved, men, women, and children. But instead of asking serious questions about the significance of the body, mainstream culture is working to eliminate even more of the mores surrounding our bodies. If anything speaks to the intellectual — no, the moral – poverty of our culture, it’s this.
RELATED: Hands Off the Ladies’ Rooms
We can expect a lot of shouting about how “this is the law” now that the courts have gotten in on the act (though the courts aren’t supposed to make laws, something many have forgotten). And I mean the act, the elaborate pageantry of the Left — in which defending “liberty” has come to mean the gradual stripping away from huge numbers of Americans of the right to make basic choices, and “freedom” means being able to call upon political orthodoxy to silence anyone who disagrees with you. But as two keen-eyed dissenting members of the United States Commission on Civil Rights wrote, “It’s about truth. And truth cannot be pro- or anti-LGBT. It’s just truth.” We mustn’t get tired of telling it.