Good morning and welcome to this Thanksgiving edition of the Carnival of Fools! (I’ll get the promo out of the way up front: If you haven’t subscribed yet, at this point it’s an authentic national tragedy that only you have the power to prevent.) Yes, Turkey Day is drawing near, which puts your author in something of an odd position. You see, I typically accept the concept of “vacation time” as willingly as I do the concept of “low-sodium diet” — the sort of unpleasant imposition on habitual preference that a man undertakes only out of necessity, for the sake of his health or his family’s happiness. But for once, and in service of those worthy goals, I plan to test out the vacation concept.
No, it’s not that I’m going mad or anything — and let’s be honest: you don’t write like this without having been born slightly cracked anyway — it’s simply that while the Carnival only formally began back in September of this year, the political circus for which it was intended as a venue had been roaring along without a tent for well over a year by that point. In fact, you can relive my evolving goggle-eyed horror at every last agonizing development of it — often writing as if my eyes were pried open by the medical-grade forceps from A Clockwork Orange so that I must bear witness — here in my NR archive if you so desire. (It’s a wild, acid-infused ride. Though none would have predicted it in June 2023, whales somehow became involved several times.)
So I’m going to force myself to take a few days off and try to recover as much as possible from the past eleven months of brutal electoral punishment, which bizarrely threatened to carry all the way past the election and into the end of last week, when we finally got to sing “Happy Trails!” to Matt Gaetz. I probably won’t be writing a devoted Thanksgiving Day piece this year, for the simple reason that I can’t top what I did last year, when I laid out the entire human history of settler-colonialism in 2,300 gloriously compact and accurate words. Allow me to commend that piece to you, especially the history buffs, to chew on — defrost it and serve it as the main course, and I guarantee you nobody at the table will realize it’s been on ice for over a year — but for now I’m content to deposit one other leftover on your plate, a side dish from a week of news perhaps best left to the dogs instead of the guests.
Congress Hits the Loo
A question up front, not for the ladies but for the gentlemen of our readership: How many of you have ever used a women’s restroom? And don’t lie to me now, because I already know the answer is higher than 25 percent (this is a conservative estimate). Understand, I’m not talking about being a weirdo; this is about sheer exigency. If you haven’t — if you feel like judging me right now — then I already know that you’ve never been in a tiny and expensive urban restaurant where the bathrooms are cramped singletons, and a large sweaty man who beat you in line to the men’s room is now depositing his soul into a tiny toilet while wailing, in Spanish, to Mother Mary for salvation, and you stand there unwillingly hearing all of this through the door for four minutes while hunched slightly at the waist in agony, thinking, “I shouldn’t have drunk the third beer, oh why did I drink the third beer.” Because from personal experience, I can tell you that this is the breaking point when an otherwise completely sane, normal, non-creeper man will make a discreet Emergency Snap Decision and knock gently on that “Ladies”-labeled opposite door to make sure nobody’s inside.
I’m not proud of this, mind you. (The last time I ever tried this move was back in 2019, when I was greeted after washing up by a very elegant, very well dressed, and very perturbed woman waiting outside — which also explains why it was the last time I ever tried this move.) But as a legalist I take matters of force majeure very seriously: So if (1) you’re not actually going to invade anybody’s privacy, then (2) when you gotta go, you gotta go.
I open with that breezy and confirmation-tanking anecdote (should I ever find myself nominated for anything) because there is nothing at all pleasant about the pettiness of the newest kerfuffle in the upcoming 119th Congress: the Bathroom Wars, brought to us by Republican representative from South Carolina (and serial gadfly) Nancy Mace. Yes, after transgender Democrat Sarah McBride — a former Human Rights Campaign spokesperson who identifies as a woman — was elected this November in Delaware to an inaugural term in the House of Representatives, Mace almost immediately proposed a bill to keep McBride out of the women’s bathrooms in the halls of Congress.
Technically, of course, Mace’s proposed bill was wild overkill, for the matter could be neatly addressed by a rules change from Speaker Mike Johnson. That of course was the point all along; after an online selfie-video publicity campaign from Mace, and once several other Republican congresswomen associated themselves with the bill, Johnson announced a rules change last Wednesday to make sure that denizens of the Hill “would not be allowed into restroom facilities in the Capitol and House office buildings that do not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.”
I cannot argue with the logic of the outcome. Like Johnson and Mace, I do not think that transgender men should be using women’s bathrooms (or vice versa). I generally avoid writing about transgender issues for National Review, for the simple reason that I do not trust myself to do so without slipping my own rhetorical leash, so abiding is my contempt for a movement whose radical demands and cultural omnipresence seem to me to be playing a proudly corrosive public role in the dissolution of the (already liberal) society I grew up in.
The ever-escalating, never-desisting demands of the transgender movement require us to ignore the core tenets of physical reality, and invert a national culture of tolerance into one of therapeutic, cleansing intolerance of the majority. That movement has warped entire generations of public health research (specifically in the fields of mental health and child development) as well as our political discourse. I do not think people with Y chromosomes should be mingling among women in women’s restrooms, locker rooms, or private spaces, and I’m uninterested in carving out wildly disruptive and harmful exceptions to this rule to cater to the newly discovered “needs” of a vanishingly small fraction of a population that would be even smaller were it not given oxygen to thrive as the socially contagious mental illness and flight from reality that it is.
In summary: Mark me down as one skeptical of the transgender movement. But I am equally skeptical of bullies, and I have had a difficult time writing about last week’s to-do for the simple reason that, in all of this, Mace has come off as nothing other than a bully and an opportunist. McBride, like other representatives, was surely planning to use the private bathroom that comes with House offices. It was Mace who forced the issue, turning McBride into a prop for the convenient postelection politics of it all, riding the new anti-woke wave without McBride’s having done a thing to provoke it other than exist.
So while I don’t object in theory to the outcome as a policy, I still strongly object to Nancy Mace. As those who have read my work over the last year may know, I hold a low opinion of her. Congress is full of publicity-hungry pols, yes, but her grabs for attention have typically been notable primarily for their spectacular klutziness: Mace handles the public relations aspect of being a lawmaker with all of the grace and experience of an eleven-year-old wobbling hesitantly around the bedroom while trying on her mother’s fancy heels. (The title of my most recent piece on her captures the spirit well: “Nancy Mace Will Use Any Weapon at Hand to Fight for What Matters Most: Attention.”) There is a fundamental unkindness within Mace, one that comes through in every transparently self-interested move she makes. The time to pass this rule without its obviously singling out one specific representative was months ago, during the 118th Congress, when Mace had all the time in the world to make a thing out of it. But of course the principle was less important back then; the thought occurred to her only once Sarah McBride won office. At that point she did what she always does: spot a salient issue and find a way to act borderline disreputably as a distraction in the midst of it.
Beware Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Lavatory Inspectors
The matter being as delicate as it is, I therefore want to let Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez send us out on a high note for the week. For she has clarified the real issue here, and she did so, in her typical style, with such blazing moral force and such wide-eyed intensity that it made me laugh out loud. AOC knows the score — it’s all about avoiding the genital-inspection regime:
What Nancy Mace and Speaker Johnson are doing are endangering all women and girls. Because if you ask them, “What is your plan on how to enforce this?” they will come up with an answer that inevitably results in, are women and girls who are primed for assault because people are going to want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans and who is cis, and who is doing what. And so the idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trou — in front of who, an investigator? Who would that be? In order because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting. It is disgusting. And frankly all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt, because they think she might not look woman enough. People have a right to express themselves, to dress how they want, and to be who they are. And if a woman doesn’t look woman enough to a Republican, they want to be able to inspect her genitals to use a bathroom? It’s disgusting, and everybody, no matter how you feel on this issue, should reject it completely. What are they doing? They’re doing this so Nancy Mace can make a buck, send a text, and fundraise off email. They’re not doing this to protect people, they’re endangering women, they’re endangering girls of all kinds, and everybody should reject it, it’s gross, thank you.
I beg of you — watch it for yourself. (The hysteria level is priceless, like watching your teenage daughter throw a tantrum about her curfew.)
But listen, I want to shock my readership for a moment here by saying, I agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 100 percent. In fact, I think we can all agree as Americans that we would not stand for Republican penis-inspectors being stationed outside of every lavatory like the Indian military checking recruits for herniated testicles. I also think this is an extremely unlikely outcome, though I’d do a fantastic job of drafting a 90-minute dystopian comedy script about it if Hollywood ever feels like pitching me the $200,000 I’d require to write it up.
Until next week, when we shall all be, at least temporarily, larger by one belt hole, happily surfeited with family cheer, rest, and contentment.