National Review Online
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Conservatives have traditionally been opposed to
legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. They
have believed that market pressures, changing social views, and sub-federal
legislation could adequately address problems of wrongful discrimination, while
federal legislation would create potential harms to religious freedom. But the
Equality Act now gaining steam in Congress goes considerably further than that,
and deserves determined opposition.
The bill, introduced by Representative David Cicilline
(D., R.I.) and Senator Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), is backed by nearly 300 members
of Congress, including a handful of Republicans. Congressional hearings are
ongoing, and a vote is scheduled for the summer. It will almost certainly pass
the House. No doubt it would be a priority for any future Democratic Senate and
White House.
Under the bill, all federally funded entities, from
educational programs (college sports teams, school bathrooms) to public
accommodations (women’s shelters, locker rooms), would be forced to interpret
“sex” to include “gender identity.” In other words, to treat men as women if
they identify as such, and vice versa.
Already we are seeing the harmful effects of such
policies. In the state of Connecticut, two biologically male students who
self-identified as transgender finished first and second in an event in the
girls’ high-school track championships. A biological man asked the
Massachusetts attorney general’s office to force a women’s spa to wax his
genitals. In Palm Springs, Calif., three teenage girls encountered a naked man
showering in the women’s locker room. All of these incidents are part of a
social and legal revolution that the Equality Act would advance.
Such arrangements could clearly be easily exploited by
predators. Sex offenders across the United States have been able to get access
to women’s spaces by “identifying as female.” Women at a federal detention center
in Texas sued the government on the grounds that being housed with male inmates
put them at risk of sexual abuse. In the U.K., the Ministry of Justice
confirmed the findings of a women’s-rights group that more than 40 percent of
prisoners identifying as transgender are registered sex offenders. The inquiry
was conducted after a male rapist who self-identified as transgender sexually
assaulted several female inmates.
Another troubling section of the Equality Act is its
finding that “conversion therapy” is a form of discrimination. This is
worrisome because the term “conversion therapy” (originally used to describe
the controversial practice of trying to change a gay person’s sexual
orientation) is increasingly misapplied to tried, tested, and ethical
treatments for gender-confused youth that range from counseling to watchful
waiting. The Equality Act would set a dangerous precedent that could be
interpreted to mandate doctors and therapists to pursue “gender affirmation”
therapy, under which American girls as young as 13 and 14 have had their
healthy breasts removed.
The legislation does not even nod in the direction of
respecting religious freedom. It explicitly blocks religious believers from
invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993 with
overwhelming support, to request exemptions from its provisions.
In the United Kingdom, where activists have attempted to
push gender-identity laws with the help of the conservative government,
feminists who were opposed to this move led effective grassroots campaigns
against them. Some feminists in America, working to foster bipartisan
resistance, have nicknamed the bill the “Women’s Erasure Act.”
It is certainly an attempt to erase the reality of
biological sex, and to erase the reality of widespread and reasonable
opposition to a new transgender orthodoxy. That orthodoxy is dangerously
mistaken and should not be given the force of law.
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