When John Money, the 20th century psychologist, pedophilia-apologist, and all around quack, first invented the concept of gender identity several decades ago, he probably couldn’t imagine that the Democrat Party would one day enshrine his half-baked theories into law. Back when Money was running sexual experiments on young boys, having them strip on camera, simulate sex acts on each other, and forcing one to live as a girl against his will, it would have seemed like a pipe dream that, in the not-too-distant future, his ideas about biological sex and “gender” being two somehow distinct and valid forms of identity would be legislatively imposed on the American population. And when his two human experiments eventually went on to take their own lives, I’m sure Money might have feared that his theories would end up on the proverbial ash heap of history. But that is not what happened. Now the good doctor, who died 15 years ago, can look up from wherever he is — and I have some theories about where that might be — and feel proud that although the concept of “gender identity” is nonsensical and incoherent, and though his attempt to scientifically prove its validity ended with the tragic deaths of two people, still his ideas won the day and soon the entire country will be forced by law to live according to them.
The so-called Equality Act was passed by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday and moves now to the Democrat-controlled Senate. The law is a sweeping and radical assault on religious liberty, women, children, moral decency, and sanity. It is indeed the most serious legislative attack on women’s rights in American history, as it seeks to legally erase women in a way, and to an extent, that not even the most dastardly and misogynistic agent of the Patriarchy could have ever dreamed. The people who worried that Mike Pence would bring Handmaid’s Tale to life were, the whole time, working to establish their own dystopia that goes far beyond anything Margaret Atwood conceived.
The bill has other significant consequences, too. As our own Ian Haworth explains for the Daily Wire, the Equality Act sets the stage to dismantle religious liberty:
The Equality Act would expand protection against discrimination provided by the Civil Rights Act (such as employment and housing) to also cover federally funded programs and “public accommodations,” which includes retail stores, online retailers, stadiums, and transportation service providers. As an example, this would mean that businesses targeted in discrimination suits for refusing certain services based on religious objections would be impacted by the Equality Act, such as florists or bakeries. The Equality Act would also supersede the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed in 1993 which “set a higher bar for the government to defend laws if people argued those laws infringed upon religious freedom.”
The Act also obliterates conscience protections for those who don’t want to fund or perform abortions. Alexandra DeSanctis in National Review lays out the details:
Under the Equality Act, health-care professionals would be required by law to perform sex-reassignment procedures or offer related hormone treatment, even if such procedures contradicted their own best medical judgment. So too, the law would treat refusals to perform an abortion as pregnancy discrimination, which would be treated as an illegal form of discrimination on the basis of sex. The Equality Act redefines “sex” to include “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition,” and, as the bill’s opponents have noted, federal agencies and courts already have determined that the phrase “related medical condition” can be interpreted to include abortion.
This is all quite horrifying on its own, but it isn’t even the most extreme consequence of the bill. Worst of all, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be “updated” to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes, on the same level as race. The text of the bill reads, in part: “An individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.”
In fact, as already noted, this mandate would apply to all “public accommodations,” and, conveniently enough, pretty much everything counts, or can count, as a public accommodation. Your home does appear to be exempt at the moment, but the Democrats, I’m sure, will not let that loophole remain for long. What this means is that, if this law passes, it will be effectively illegal to provide any private or exclusive spaces to women. Bathrooms, sports teams, locker rooms — all of these must, by law, be opened to any man who demands access. Under the Equality Act, the government would not recognize “women” as being a necessarily distinct category from “men.” All that matters is a person’s “gender identity.”
This raises an important question: what the hell is “gender identity”? Well, it’s not really anything in particular. It’s an entirely invented, artificial concept — originating with the child-abusing quack mentioned earlier — that is probably best defined, if it can be defined at all, by the Human Rights Campaign (a fervent and influential proponent of the Equality Act). HRC says on the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Definitions page of their website that gender identity is “one’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves. One’s gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth.”
Let us try to wrap our heads around the sheer lunacy here. Your biological sex is what you actually are — your true sexual identity — as determined by immutable physical characteristics. Your gender identity is what you feel like you are, or what you want to be, or how you perceive yourself. Under the Equality Act, one’s perception of themselves — even if incorrect — takes precedence over the reality of who they actually are. Indeed, the reality is no longer legally recognized at all. Delusion and fantasy supplant truth. Falsehood wins the day.
Of course, female sports teams never had anything to do with self-perception. It makes absolutely no difference what a male thinks or how he feels about himself. None of that changes the biological features which give him an unfair advantage over females. And though the male may feel like he was supposed to have a vagina (whatever that means), the reality is that he has the same equipment as any other male, and belongs in the same locker rooms and bathrooms as those other males. The sign on the bathroom door says — or said — “men” and “women,” not “those who feel like men today” and “those who feel like women today.” That is the only sensible and coherent way to organize these things, and the only way that provides women with the privacy and protection they need. But sensibility and coherence are soon to be illegal.
It does not take much imagination to see where this goes. If self-perception is more important than reality — if, in fact, self-perception is our new reality — then there is no reason whatsoever to limit that standard to gender. What about a white man who seeks the advantages of affirmative action in college admissions on the basis that he perceives himself to be black? It might be crazy to accept that a white man is a black man just because he sees himself that way, but it’s still quite a bit less crazy than accepting that a male is a female just because he sees himself that way. And what about a pedophile who perceives himself to be nine years old? Again, it makes no sense to give his perception of his own age legal precedence over the reality of his actual age, but it’s certainly no more senseless than doing the same in the realm of biological sex. Any argument for giving gender identity protected status would necessarily apply to age identity, race identity, or anything else.
As always, the Left will scoff at what they will call a “slippery slope” argument. And then, in a few years, they will do exactly what they mocked us for predicting they would do. That is the way these things always work, and will most assuredly work in this case. The Democrats have declared total war on reality. We have not even begun to reap the consequences.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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