Written by Stella Morabito

As usual, tyranny comes disguised as “civil rights.”

The latest exhibit of this general rule is President Obama’s directive that seeks to force a transgender bathroom, locker room and dorm policy on the entire nation, starting with schoolchildren. Many of us are taken aback by this news, but we really shouldn’t be. The order is merely the latest incarnation of a long line of social engineering. The goal, as is always the case with such movements, is to remake humanity. What the people behind this latest version won’t tell you is that their project requires each and every one of us to deny our own humanity.

Let me explain.

The transgender movement has never been about “gender.” It’s all about sex. Sex is the real target. “Gender” is merely the politicized linguistic vehicle that facilitates a legal ban on sex distinctions. There aren’t a whole lot of dots to connect to uncover the logic of where this leads: if you abolish sex distinctions in law, you can abolish state recognition of biological family ties, and the state can regulate personal relationships and consolidate power as never before.

Let’s Review Reality

Physical reality exists independent of “gender identity non-discrimination” law—or any man-made law. Laws have no power to make reality go away, but they can change how people behave in response to reality. They can enforce disregard for reality through speech protocols, social and economic pressures, invasions of privacy, and thought policing. And that is what the effect of Obama’s executive order is all about.

It will serve to outlaw speech that identifies males as males and females as females. At the moment, it may not seem that way, since we see people striving to pass as one specific sex or the other. But, trust me, we’re all being forced to “transition” into conformity of thought. In New York, you can now be fined if you don’t re-engineer your speech (and thoughts) to align with new and ever-changing pronoun protocols.

We’re being pushed to “evolve” rapidly from laws that seem to allow male-female distinctions to laws that will categorically reject those distinctions in the not-too-distant future. Federal forms are already reflecting these changes by erasing sexed terms such as “mother” and “father.” And at every turn, we’re seeing the specific term “sex” replaced with the meaningless, ambiguous term “gender.”

This puts us on the path to banning recognition of the reality that every single human being exists through the union of one male and one female. There are no exceptions to this reality. You exist as the union of the two opposites through whom you were created.

So the administration’s action is an order for a somewhat suicidal type of behavior modification: it attempts to make us deny the reality of our humanity. In a real sense, this amounts to a denial of our very existence. All such denials of reality require heavy-handed censorship. We have already seen the governors of South Dakota and Georgia fold in the face of threats that federal funding would be withheld and big businesses would withdraw from the states if they attempted to enforce single-sex restrooms.

Without Sex, There Are No Families

What will happen when all of society is sexless in both language and law? If the law does not recognize your body as physically male or female—applying only the word “gender” to your internal, self-reported self-perception—does the law even recognize your body? Every single cell of you has either “male” or “female” written into its DNA, but the law refuses to recognize such categories. Such laws will only recognize an infinite, immeasurable “gender spectrum,” your place on which is determined only by your mind. So what exactly are you after the law has de-sexed you? In what sense is your body a legal entity?

And what happens to your familial relationships after the law has de-sexed you? Are they legally recognized? I don’t see how they could be. Certainly not by default, certainly not by the recognition that each child comes through the union of two opposite-sex parents.

In a society de-sexed by law, would the state recognize your relationship as a husband or a wife? Mother or father? Daughter or son? Those are all sexed terms. A system that does not recognize the existence of male and female would be free to ignore the parentage of any child. You might be recognized as your child’s “legal guardian,” but only if the state agrees to that. Anybody can be a guardian to your child if the state decides it’s in the child’s “best interest.” In this vision, there is nothing to prevent the state from severing the mother-child bond at will.

In such a scenario, the state controls all personal relationships right at their source: the biological family. The abolition of family autonomy would be complete, because the biological family would cease to be a default arrangement. The “family” would be whatever the state allows it to be. Again, in the de-sexed world of gender politics, all personal relationships end up controlled and regulated by the state.

Martha Fineman, a gender legal theorist, touched on this in her 2004 book The Autonomy Myth. In it, she argues for the abolition of state-recognized marriage because it allows for family privacy, writing that “Once the institutional protection [is] removed, behavior would be judged by standards established to regulate interactions among all members of society” (emphasis added).

Gender ideology is an effective statist tool. Cultural Marxists use it to corrupt language and sow confusion, especially among children. It paves the way for the removal of the institutional protections for freedom of association and family privacy that stand in the way of “regulating interactions among all members of society.”

How Could a Society Reject Its Own Freedom?

Getting free people to reject freedom may seem a tall order. How, you might ask, could people ever be convinced to let go of their families and consent to such a dystopian social structure? How do you get public opinion on board with an agenda that leads them to deny the reality of their own humanity?

There are lots of pieces to this puzzle, including the erosion of social trust, the breakdown of family, social polarization, and growing ignorance of history. But the groundwork has been laid over a long period of time.

First, virtually all outlets of communication had to be on board—Hollywood, academia, the media. Check. All medical personnel, particularly mental health personnel, had to be “educated” to comply with the transgender program or risk losing their licenses. Check. The educational establishment had to imbue schoolchildren with the ideology. Check. Large corporations had to get on board as stakeholders and enforcers. Check. And, of course, the push to legally de-sex society had to be embedded—Trojan Horse style—within a slightly less alien idea, with the slick slogan “marriage equality.” Check. Churches had to be brought on board so that even religion became a conduit for anti-truth. Check. Social, emotional, and economic pressures had to be established to censure anyone who dared to question the wisdom of it all. Check. Any such person had to be labeled a bigot, a hater, and a non-person. Checkmate.

At this point, the most primal and universal of human fears comes into play: the fear of being socially rejected. Self-censorship takes off. People start falsifying what they believe, until they eventually don’t even know what they believe anymore. Nobody can talk openly to one another. In the end, it’s as though we are each being marched into a separate solitary confinement cell. That’s what happens when free association takes a hit, when the state severs particular relationships in the name of a collective togetherness. Then, when we can’t verify reality with one another anymore—because we are so afraid of being ostracized—we end up living in an age of mass delusion.

The only way out is to affirm reality. We must reclaim our full humanity. Let’s start by reinjecting our language with one very good word that points to reality: sex. Yes, let’s revive the word “sex,” and use it generously whenever referring to the biological reality of our physical nature. (And spiritual nature too.) At the same time, let’s refuse—always—to use the word “gender” when we mean sex. It’s a poisoned and weaponized word that has been used to legally de-sex and thus dehumanize us all. We must work together to resist its deceptions.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist and blogs about relationships, power, and freedom at stellamorabito.net. Article originally published at PublicDiscourse.com.

Written by Anita Staver

The purpose of a public restroom is not to make a political statement. Sex-specific facilities were designed for male and female biological differences. Safety concerns are not bigotry.

Target recently highlighted its “inclusive” policy in an announcement, opening the door for any man, regardless of appearance, to stalk women and girls. Target’s policy will invite sexual predators to its stores, exposing women and girls to men peeking through cracks, over and under doors, or waiting for their next victim. Statistical data is not necessary.

I was traveling when the controversy heated up. Using Twitter to warn others, I retweeted an article about a boycott of Target that has ensued following the new policy. Next, I read about a 29-year-old Canadian high school basketball player, and tweeted: “Perhaps he identifies as a teen.”

Fresh from self-defense training with a rented Glock .45, en route to a Wal-Mart in gun-friendly Oklahoma, I constructed another satirical tweet: “I’m taking a Glock .45 to the ladies room. It identifies as my bodyguard.”

I added #BoycottTarget” as the trending topic. Tagging @Target on the end, I intended to draw the company’s attention to women’s safety, not to imply that I would go there. If I intended to visit Target I would have said, “I’m taking a Glock .45 to the @Target ladies room,” instead of adding @Target afterwards.

Our Facebook pages and Twitter feeds filled. Within a few days, the bodyguard tweet gained national media attention, combative commentary and an interview with Alan Colmes of Fox News.

More people agreed than not. One woman messaged me: “With how ‘social media brave’ people are lately, I admire that you keep your cool, continue to be a classy adult and don’t stoop to their level.”

Others — mostly radical leftists, sex addicts and porn-crazed perverts with vulgar profiles — painted me as a vigilante who would barge into a Target with an “assault rifle,” murder a transgendered person and terrify small children. Read my tweet. I never said I was going to Target, with or without a gun. Of course, a “bodyguard” is strictly for defense. Peace through strength.

If physically attacked, I would do as I was taught in self-defense class, and only take the action necessary to stop the aggression. Nothing in my tweet shows a violent intent, notwithstanding frequent and vigorous attempts to twist my words. But truth is irrelevant to “tweet-shamers,” Facebook trolls, smut bloggers and the complicit media.

When I share my concern about sexual predators, the bullies added snarky comments and victim-blaming rape stereotypes such as, “You don’t have to worry, honey no one would touch you!”

I will not be intimidated into silence. This issue is personal.

As a teen, I was the victim of two attempted sexual assaults by strangers in public places, but I managed to escape. In my 20s, a revolver became my constant bodyguard.

Instead of panicking over the prospect of a well-armed woman, the naysayers should be up in arms about sexual assault. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that nearly 20 percent of women in the United States have been victims of actual or attempted sexual assault. And those were just the women who admit to the attacks. I predict that number will increase when sexual predators realize they have easy access to potential victims.

Target’s policies and similar laws passed by misguided government leaders endanger lives. A quick online search for “sexual assault Target store” will bring numerous accounts of crimes already happening inside the stores. It is common sense that publicity about the company’s lax policy invites additional attackers. You may open your window for fresh air, but you wouldn’t broadcast it to potential burglars.

Special rules and laws favoring those who “identify” as the opposite sex can lead to outrageous incidents. In 2012, a middle-aged man born Clay Scott Francis, who called himself “Colleen,” insisted on using the women’s locker room at Evergreen State College in Washington. He was taking estrogen but did not undergo surgery and was attracted to women.

Mr. Francis exposed himself to girls on a school swim team who practiced at the college. Their request for privacy was rejected by the administration and the girls were forced to squeeze into smaller locker room to avoid a naked man.

There are numerous other reports of men who disguised themselves and victimized women. For the safety of women, a biological male should use the men’s bathroom due to physical differences. That is the solution that will keep some women from becoming victims. It is not unreasonable discrimination.

Company policymakers and government lawmakers must not paint a bullseye on women when we are already vulnerable to sexual predators in public places. Women just want to be safe.

Anita L. Staver is president of Liberty Counsel. Article originally published at WashingtonTimes.com.

Written by John Hayward

Welcome to life in totalitarian America, where even going to the bathroom and identifying the sex of an adult have now become intensely political acts.

Totalitarianism is about the politicization of everything, and once people’s careers can be destroyed by the New Bathroom Order if they publicly object to the once-bizarre idea of men in the ladies’ room–we’re there. Ask the now-unemployed Curt Schilling.

Totalitarianism is about using force to gain political goals. You can’t get more coercive than forcing the vast majority of people to endorse the utterly bizarre just to accommodate the allegedly hurt feelings of an almost undetectably small percentage of the population. So for the sake of each transgendered person’s hurt feelings, two thousand ordinary folk must be forced to ignore what their eyes and hearts tell them … and be publicly slandered as quasi-racist bigots if they murmur any objection.

Moreover, Americans have already solved the problem: They just politely ignore the fact that public bathrooms are quietly used by transsexuals–both those who look like the other sex and those who really don’t look like the other sex. That decent-minded, live-and-let-live compromise means Americans don’t have to pretend that men are women, and they can call the police if they feel threatened, for example, when a transsexual wants to use a changing room in a school.

But the progressives’ hostility to Americans’ civic compromises was always an element of the gay marriage crusade, as well. It was clear that the amount of coercive force unleashed upon society to make gay marriage work was far, far greater than the coercion necessary to allow civil unions to quietly operate alongside normal marriage. Sure enough, in the blink of an eye, we went from soft-focus “Love Wins” to the nation’s judges’ gaveling out legal threats: “Bake that cake, or lose your entire business.”

As my old colleague Erick Erickson put it, “You Will Be Made to Care” amid an ever-increasing level of coercion, strife, and bitterness. You will now be made to care about men who claim they “identify” as women, while pushing their way past you and into public restrooms that were once the preserve of wives, mothers, girlfriends, and daughters.

It’s going to take a great deal of money, manpower, and regulation to get the New Bathroom Order up and running.

Remodeling public restroom facilities to create more individual, lockable, unisex rooms is one way to reduce the new humiliation, but it would be very expensive.

We’ll probably need some kind of Ministry of the Crapper, where bureaucrats and judges can separate perverts and goofballs and award official-transgender permits to “authentic” transgendered and gender-confused individuals. A great deal of taxpayer money will be spent, and many new rules will be written by many well-paid functionaries. So what’s not to like, for those of a totalitarian bent?

Better still–for the totalitarians–the level of animosity in society will keep growing, as well. A populace stressed out by paranoia and angry accusations of bigotry will be less likely to cooperate, compete, and live in harmony. Instead of local civic cooperation, they’ll resort to government and police when they have to deal with the next dispute that once could be resolved quietly by a healthy civic society. The politicization of everything naturally leads to the enforcement of everything. Debates become bitter because the stakes are higher, and we cannot simply agree to disagree.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple made this point in a 2005 interview when he described political correctness as “communism writ small.”

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better,” Dalrymple said, adding:

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Eleven years ahead of the game, Dalrymple provided the perfect description of the ridiculous Bathroom Wars, in which the majority is commanded to open wide and swallow the utterly ludicrous idea of letting men-women barge into women’s restrooms, on the vanishingly small chance that a transgendered individual might not be able to find a suitable private stall. It’s so insane that it caught normal people by surprise; they thought it was a joke, until Bruce Springsteen canceled that concert they bought tickets to.

The real game here is to break the will of those ordinary people so they won’t resist even more social engineering.

It’s like the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Captain Jean-Luc Picard is tortured by an alien interrogator, who says he wants only a simple, trivial concession from his prisoner: He wants Picard to look at a bank of four lights, and say that he sees five.  As Dalrymple warned, and Picard understood, that small concession would break his will and open the floodgates to many others.

Those of more advanced years might remember a similar dynamic at play in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, where the seemingly trivial concession involved a captive spy explaining why he quit his job–an answer he refused to give, no matter how many bizarre scenarios were constructed to break his will.

We’re all The Prisoner now, which is basically what McGoohan’s show was warning about, decades ago. Instead of killer beach balls, the enforcement system consists of equally faceless, thoughtless, relentless Twitter social-justice flash mobs.

The progressives’ goal is to humiliate and marginalize the majority—to make normal people feel abnormal, to be alone, to be afraid to dissent from what appears to be an overwhelming, media-magnified, Google-approved, Hollywood-polished, Obama-confirmed, irresistible consensus. As any competent military strategist can tell you, numbers count for less than morale. A demoralized majority can be subjugated by an activist minority when it refuses to fight.

That’s why every new social-engineering crusade is framed as an attack on the moral stature of dissenters.

You’re not insisting on your constitutionally guaranteed religious liberties; you’re “anti-gay.” You’re not saying men don’t belong in the women’s room; you’re “targeting the LGBT community.” You’re not exercising your moral prerogative to refuse to fund abortion; you’re “denying women access to birth control.”

In each case, the dissenter is plainly told up front that he cannot hold his sincere opinion without him also attacking and injuring innocent people. Dissent is dangerous is selfish is criminal. What is the proper name for a political system in which dissent is criminal?

It’s no coincidence the Bathroom Wars are phrased as a struggle over “identity” because identity is the fulcrum of natural order versus totalitarian politics. Certainly, we can all agree that some aspects of our identity are subject to revision–ours to define as we please, although it’s sometimes harder than we bargain for. But some aspects of identity are physical, biological reality.

The totalitarian mindset denies that scientific reality, and insists biology can be overridden by political will–rather like the way totalitarian economic plans assume the laws of supply and demand can be revised by political fiat.

Much of left-wing social engineering is a war between politics and biology, such as the biological truths that children are best raised by their married parents, or that men and women are different. The Left promises to overrule those verdicts of Creation through compulsive force, in a grotesque inversion of the “natural law” ideal, which holds the lightest and most just burden of law flows in accordance with human nature.

Why read academic papers about the Left’s war against identity when you can watch it hilariously demonstrated by the humiliated inmates at a university? Why shouldn’t a white guy of average stature be able to “identify” as a 6’5” Chinese woman?

“It shouldn’t be hard to tell a 5’9” white guy that he’s not a 6’5” Chinese woman, but clearly, it is. Why? What does that say about our culture? And what does that say about our ability to answer questions that actually are difficult?” Joseph Backholm asks at the end of his video.

I can answer that last question: It’s impossible to grapple with difficult questions when your character has been turned to tapioca by liberals, and you lack the courage to reason your way through the most obvious questions.

This has very much been done by design–because it produces a wave of young students and professionals who can be more easily programmed with political assertions that override objective truth.

Backholm’s masquerade as a 6’5” Chinese woman seems like a harmless lark … but if he pushed the issue and really insisted on it, every hour of his life, it would be necessary to use a great deal of compulsive force against the rest of society, to make people ignore the evidence of their own eyes, and to believe his imaginary height, race, and sex.

Most pertinently, you’d have to force normal women, and the men outside who love and protect them, to silently accept his presence in the ladies’ room.

That’s why progressive totalitarians humiliate, destroy, and reassemble people’s character–now known as their identity–to gain their victory.

To make progressives appear sane, all the world must be driven mad; to make them appear noble, all the world must be humiliated by them and their fellow progressives.

Originally published at Breitbart.com.