Boycott Is Making a Difference Despite CEO’s Claims
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Written by Buddy Smith
On a media call last week, Target CEO Brian Cornell was asked if the boycott had an effect on their sales or stock price. He responded by saying “To date we have not seen a material or measurable impact on our business. Just a handful of stores across the country have seen some activity and have been impacted.”
Did you catch that? Target’s CEO wants you and me to believe the boycott has had little or no effect at all on the bottom line.
Don’t let his arrogance fool you. The AFA sponsored boycott of Target is most assuredly having an impact and is absolutely making a difference!
Since we launched the Boycott Target Pledge April 21, over 1.26 million people have signed on. Another interesting fact, Target has remained silent on Facebook and Twitter. The most recent post on Target’s Facebook page came April 23, and their Twitter has only had one tweet since April 19.
According to Breitbart News “Target’s stock has fallen 20 percent – from $84 per share to $67 per share – since it imposed the pro-transgender policy on its customer base of families. That loss has chopped roughly $10 billion from the overall shareholder value of the company, according to a chart produced by Yahoo.com.”
AFA’s reason for boycotting is to prompt Target to reverse its policy thereby sending a message to other companies that it’s bad business to embrace the LGBT political agenda over common sense and safety.
In comparison to other major retailers, Target’s stock has dropped three and four times more than the stock of its competitors. While there are many factors at play in the stock market, we do believe the boycott has played a role in the company’s public image and ultimate stock decline the past four weeks.
All of this suggests that your efforts are making an impact.
Here are a few specific things we encourage you to do:
NEW! Urge everyone you know to sell their Target Stock.
We’ve learned several things since President Barack Obama dictatorially demanded that public school restrooms now be co-ed or risk federal funding. The first thing we learned is that in spite of well-intending parents saying their school is “different from all the other schools,” we now know they will all be the same with regard to restroom and locker rooms practices. Follow the money to D.C.
Second, regardless of how sincere Christian teachers are in their desire to bring Christ into the classroom, they are spiritual eunuchs, who were long ago emasculated and their message muted. To give true testimony of Christ in their classroom is to suffer termination, a risk that is too great for most to take.
Third, local school boards are powerless as Washington D.C. controls every facet of education down to dictating bathroom policy.
Finally, Christian parents are in a showdown with the state with regard to whose will is absolute in the raising of their children, as they seek to answer, “How important is eternity for our children?”
One upset public school parent recently declared, “Obama’s mandate won’t stand!” Of course, this is the same sentiment embodies in an earlier claim that Christianity could not be taken out of the classroom, Obama could not get re-elected, and Mrs. Clinton had no real chance at the White House. And here we are. Naïveté is a luxury we can no longer afford. The price is way too high.
The Scriptures make it undeniably plain: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). Statistics bear out this truth as the church is losing between 64% – 88% of her professing youth after their first year in college. Others studies reveal that the compromise which leads to this departure begins as early as junior high.
Public school students receive around 15,000 hours of indoctrination in the religion of secular humanism, while Christian parents seek to counteract this avalanche with pizza parties at youth meetings and a thirty-minute weekly sermon. Our children are leaving the faith by the tens of thousands, and we can’t figure out why?
Sadder yet, many will go into eternity unprepared. How long can we Christians elicit the grace of God for our children while sending our children into a culture that we know is spiritually destructive?
How much spiritual carnage do we have to witness before we say, “Enough is enough. This is the last straw. There must be an alternative!”
Not only is there an alternative, it’s been proven to work experientially, statistically, and historically. It’s called homeschooling.
While homeschooling is not a silver bullet, 94% of homeschooled children do keep the faith of their parents, and 93% stay active in their local church after graduation. These numbers alone should motivate parents to train their impressionable children at home in accordance with Deuteronomy 6.
While many parents feel overwhelmed at the magnitude of this task, there are innumerable resources to help, not the least of which is God. Ignorance and feelings of inadequacy are no longer justifiable excuses, especially since a parent’s level of education has been found to be a non-factor in their children’s academic success.
I was a public school teacher as was my wife. When we started to homeschool twenty years ago, I shared that I was not anti-public schooling, just pro-homeschooling. That is no longer the case. I know far too much. The public school system is not broken. On the contrary, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: indoctrinate the next generation into a socialist perspective of voluntary slavery. Consider what educational leader John Dewey wrote:
The moral responsibility of the school and of those who conduct it is to society. [A]part from participation in social life, the school has no moral end or aim. [In religious terminology] the moral trinity of the school [is] the demand for social intelligence, social power, and social interests.
Can the point be made any clearer than that?
I call on all parents who profess the name of Christ to reevaluate their decision to send their children to government schools. We will each stand before God Almighty and have to give an account for the stewardship of our children’s souls. What will we say on that day when we knowingly sent them into a system that rejects His name and teaches doctrines that are diametrically opposed to His Word?
For those of you who feel this tug but don’t know where to start, I want to personally invite you to attend the Illinois Christian Home Educators’ Annual Convention in Naperville, June 2-4. For the past 17 years, my wife and I have made the five-hour trip north in order to be encouraged, instructed, and equipped to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. For more information and to register, go to www.iche.org and click on the convention icon.
Kirk and Joely Smith have been married since 1991. Kirk graduated from Greenville College, teaching and coaching for two years at the high school level before founding the House of Prayer church in Albion, IL, which he pastored for almost 25 years. Joely graduated from the University of Southern Indiana and taught first grade for two years before the birth of their first child after which she stayed home.
The Smith family live in southeastern Illinois with their 11 children who range in age from toddler to young adult. They are looking forward to building new relationships and spreading the home discipleship vision of ICHE to all corners of Illinois.
Loretta Lynch’s Abuse of the Law
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When Loretta Lynch succeeded Eric Holder as U.S. attorney general a year ago, some harbored the tiniest hope that she wouldn’t be quite as radical.
After all, Mr. Holder had done his best to gin up racial resentment, dismiss a clear case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party, attack voter photo ID laws, refuse to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, threaten a congressman trying to get to the truth of the Fast and Furious Mexican gun-running scandal, and ignore the Internal Revenue Service’s mob-like persecution of conservative groups.
Mr. Holder also managed to sidestep or slow down any action regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, or the massive irregularities of the $2 billion Clinton Foundation, the golden cash cow of open graft by the Clintons and their cronies. Meanwhile, Mr. Holder staffed the Justice Department civil rights division with hard-core leftists, as amply documented in J.Christian Adams’ book “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.”
The partisan corruption under Mr. Holder was so patently obvious that his departure made some folks cautiously optimistic that Ms. Lynch would put “justice” back into the Justice Department.
No such luck. She’s not only buried that hope but driven a monster truck over it.
In February, for example, Ms. Lynch’s Justice Department sided with radical groups that sued to overturn requirements for proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and Kansas. The DOJ attorneys’ conduct was so outrageous that it drew a rebuke from a federal judge.
Last Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed that it won’t seek the death penalty for terrorist suspect Abu Khattala if he’s convicted of orchestrating the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012 that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens.
This past week, Ms. Lynch outdid herself, proclaiming that forcing schools and cities to grant transgender males access to girls and women’s restrooms and locker rooms is right up there with the noble claims of the black civil rights movement. Seriously.
So, Ms. Lynch filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against North Carolina and its Republican governor, Pat McCrory. Their offense? Enacting and enforcing a “bathroom” law that requires people to use facilities that match their sex at birth. The state law came in response to the city of Charlotte’s wacky statute opening up all facilities based on feelings rather than objectively defined sex.
Immediately, many corporate America titans like PayPal, General Electric, Pepsi and Dow Chemical joined Hollywood leftist bullies, the NCAA, and even the National Basketball Association in threatening to boycott the state.
Citing the nation’s “founding ideals,” which now apparently include protecting the “right” of certain males to enter women’s restrooms, Ms. Lynch compared their plight to Jim Crow laws and school racial segregation. Anyone opposing the transgender agenda is by her definition a hater and a bigot.
In a spectacular case of reverse logic, she said, “None of us can stand by when a state is in the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not.”
Say what? Isn’t it the men who are pretending to be women and vice versa who are forcing the issue?
“If there is no more difference between men and women than there is between blacks and whites — as Ms. Lynch seems to think — then why not eliminate all single-sex restrooms, locker rooms and dressing rooms everywhere?” asks Illinois Family Institute writer Laurie Higgins, an astute critic of cultural trends. “Why not allow all men and all women to use the same restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, showers and shelters? After all, blacks and whites do.”
The answer, of course, is that unlike skin color, the differences between male and female, rooted firmly in biology, including DNA, brain and body structure, are profound and meaningful. The distinction between male and female is at the heart of marriage, family life, morality and social order.
For Ms. Lynch to suggest that anyone who recognizes these differences and understands the need for privacy and modesty based on sex is a hateful bigot reveals her own contempt for nature and nature’s God, upon which the legitimacy of our laws rest, as stated in the Declaration of Independence.
Fortunately, Gov. McCrory and the legislature are standing firm, with Mr. McCrory and Republican General Assembly leaders filing countersuits in federal court over Lynch’s “baseless and blatant overreach” and “radical reinterpretation” of the Civil Rights Act.
Pundits who dismiss all this as a silly distraction miss the point. This is about far more than bathroom access. Beneath the economic wars, the left is using this issue as a spear point to test how far the average American can be pushed by government into relinquishing not only our God-given rights but our grasp of reality.
As the nation’s chief law enforcer, Loretta Lynch is putting the weight of the federal government against millions of Americans who just want to maintain some level of decency — and normalcy. God help us.
Progressive Illinois Lawmakers with Time on Their Hands (yikes)
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Illinoisans might think that state lawmakers elected to fix the mess they created would be drowning in real work with nary a moment to surface for air. Allow me to disabuse you of that quaint, naïve notion.
Our “progressive” lawmakers have found time—actually a fair amount of time—to write, assign to a committee, discuss, and now reassign to another committee a resolution the likes of which I’ve never seen.
“Progressives” have written a partisan resolution specifically to express their self-righteous disapproval of a law passed by citizens in two states halfway across the country. You heard that right. Our “progressive” lawmakers, who by all objective measures have done a disastrous job of running Illinois and can’t figure out how to solve the problems they created, have decided it’s time to take a shot at running other states as well.
Senate Resolution 1752 calls on citizens of Mississippi and North Carolina to repeal their laws requiring restrooms to correspond to objective, immutable biological sex.
On May 3rd, SR 1752 was assigned to the Illinois Senate State Government and Veterans Affairs Committee for a hearing. The committee has nine members, so five “yes” votes were necessary to pass this self-righteous, presumptuous resolution out of committee.
A few days before the hearing, IFI’s lobbyist Ralph Rivera met with the committee members who would likely vote “no.” During the committee meeting last Thursday, a courageous Illinois mother testified effectively against the resolution. Subsequently the bill’s sponsor, Illinois Senator Emil Jones III (D-Chicago), was informed that he didn’t have the five votes, and he chose not to call the resolution for a vote.
The celebration of this success was short-lived because the very next day, Illinois Senate President John Cullerton’s office took SR 1752 out of the Senate State Government and Veteran Affairs Committee and re-referred (i.e., reassigned) it to the Senate Human Services Committee, a committee which the resolution’s sponsors view as a more, shall we say, sympathetic committee.
While under the Illinois Senate rules this kind of committee-shopping is permitted, it undermines the purpose of the committee process and further undermines the public’s trust in Springfield (is that even possible?).
If SR 1752 has hit the committee jackpot and gets out of committee next week, it still must be approved by the full senate sometime in the next two weeks.
As you write to express your opposition to this resolution, remember that State Representative Tom Morrison’s Pupil Physical Privacy Act, which had more sponsors and bipartisan support in the Illinois House, was sent—not to an education committee where, as an education bill, it belonged—but to the Human Services Committee where it was then assigned to a subcommittee that everyone knew would never even meet.
Perfect illustration of Illinois’ leftist lawmakers: arrogant, deceitful, and manipulative.
This proposal is cosponsored by Senators Heather Steans (D-Chicago), Daniel Biss (D-Skokie), Laura Murphy (D-Park Ridge), Linda Holmes (D-Aurora), David Koehler (D-Peoria), Michael Noland (D-Elgin), and Iris Martinez (D-Chicago).
Take ACTION:Click HERE to send a message to your state senator, asking him or her to reject this futile resolution which not only seeks to ridicule duly elected lawmakers in other states, but also to normalize gender deception in our culture.
You can also call the Capitol switchboard at (217) 782-2000 and asked to be transferred to your state senator’s office, where you can leave a comment with his/her legislative aide.
Bathrooms, Biology and Federal Overreach
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The last two weeks have been, of all things, about bathrooms. First, the U.S. Department of Justice notified the state of the North Carolina that HB2, or the bathroom law, violated the Civil Rights Act. Now to be clear, HB2 requires people to use public bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to the sex listed on their birth certificate. Note the word “public.” The law allows businesses to determine their own bathroom policies. And, individuals who have undergone sex reassignment surgery can have their birth certificate changed to reflect their transition.
But according to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the common sense protections of HB2 is akin to Jim Crow laws. Sex specific restrooms are like segregated restrooms, water fountains, entrances, and lunch counters of the racially segregated south.
North Carolina responded to the DOJ’s threats to withhold federal funding by filing a lawsuit. And the DOJ responded by filing a lawsuit back of its own.
Then on Friday, lest we think North Carolina is an isolated case, Obama administration officials — specifically the assistant secretary of education for civil rights and the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department — directed schools, including “all public schools and most colleges and universities that receive federal funds,” to — as the Washington Post described it — “provide transgender students with access to suitable facilities — including bathrooms and locker rooms — that match their chosen gender identity.”
Schools that fail to comply with this edict from on high are, the officials announced, in violation of Title IX, the federal sexual anti-discrimination act, and would therefore — you guessed it — risk losing federal funding. Comply or you don’t get the money. It’s ideological extortion, not policy making. Please visit BreakPoint.org and we’ll link you to a legal analysis of this decree from our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom.
So how should Christians respond? We have to start by understanding the issues at stake. Did you catch all the references to civil rights in these stories? Transgender rights, like gay and lesbian rights before them, have been placed in the historical narrative of overcoming discrimination and bigotry. We aren’t dealing with just a policy issue; we’re dealing with a fundamental view of what it means to be human.
Also, many have long pushed to separate concepts of sex and gender. Sex is how you were born, they say, but gender was self-determined and therefore flexible. But in citing the Civil Rights Act, the administration is saying that the right of self-determination is sacred, akin to non-chosen traits such as ethnicity and race. And by citing Title IX the administration is going even a step further, saying that sex discrimination legislation now applies to gender. In other words, our biological sex should be considered as malleable as our conception of our genders.
Now if all of this sounds like a strange exercise in denying reality, well, it is. That’s the power of worldview. Like prescription glasses, worldviews will either clarify reality or distort reality. The ideas at work here are reality-denying.
Here’s an example of what I mean by reality-denying. Again quoting Attorney General Lynch, “None of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone they are not.” Now in light of Friday’s edict, who exactly is legislating identity and insisting that persons — now school children across the nation — pretend to be something they’re not?!
You’ve heard us say on BreakPoint ideas have consequences, and they certainly do. But we must also say ideas have victims.
In this case, an edict advancing the sexual revolution will make victims by granting special rights to the few while trampling the rights of the rest. And those who resist will be victims of name-calling and public shaming. And precious, gender-confused children, taken deeper into their confusion, will be made victims of our illusions of moral progress.
In my eight years with IFI, I have had good experiences with journalists, including even leftist journalists. They have largely treated me graciously and chosen comments from our interviews that accurately represented IFI’s positions on issues. Last week, however, that streak came to a screeching halt. I had an experience that bore out the charges of bias leveled against the mainstream press.
After reading my article on the Chicago Public Schools new “guidelines” that permit gender-dysphoric students and teachers to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms, Bettina Chang, a writer for Chicago Magazine, interviewed me for some twenty minutes on IFI’s views of the guidelines. When her article came out two days later, I was, to put it mildly, surprised.
The bias of Chang is evident not only in the space allotted to quotes from leftists but also in the particular quotes from our 20-minute interview she chose to include and in her remarkable defense of her bias.
Amount of space allotted to leftists vs. conservatives
Chang included quotes from one conservative organization: Illinois Family Institute.
She used 33 words from The Center on Halsted, 101 words from the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, 86 words from the Chicago Gender Society, and 75 words from Howard Brown Health. She also paraphrased additional ideas from these organizations.
From our 20-minute interview, Chang used 8 words.
The 8 words she chose from our interview represented two points, one of which had nothing to do with the substance of the arguments against the use of opposite-sex restrooms by gender-dysphoric students, and the other misrepresented what I said.
Interview comments to Chang
To better understand the problems with her article and her defense of it, it’s important to know more about my initial answers to her questions.
I explained that IFI believes restrooms and locker rooms should correspond to students’ objective, immutable sex rather than their feelings about their sex because physical embodiment as male or female is profoundly meaningful and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy.
I asked rhetorically why gender-dysphoric boys should be permitted to go to the bathroom, change clothes, or shower with only girls but girls should be denied that right.
I suggested that if curtains and stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate objectively male students from females, then there remains no reason to maintain any single-sex restrooms for any students.
I asked how the Left can be sure that if there is a mismatch between mind and body, the error rests with the body and not the mind.
Chang asked me to respond to the Leftist belief that prohibiting gender-dysphoric students from sharing restrooms with opposite-sex students is equivalent to prohibiting blacks from sharing restrooms with whites, which I did both in our initial conversation and an email that followed. Here was my response:
The only difference between blacks and whites is skin color, which is analogous to eye or hair color. So, would skin color (or eye or hair color) be relevant to restroom, locker room, shower, or shelter usage? Of course not. Even whites have diverse skin, eye, and hair colors. No one suggests that any of those color differences are relevant to feelings of modesty or the desire for privacy. So, any imposed separation was generated not by feelings of modesty or the desire for privacy. Rather, imposed separation of races in restrooms was motivated by racism.
Now with regard to sex, virtually everyone—including gender-dysphoric persons and homosexuals—acknowledge that men and women are substantively and significantly different. When homosexuals claim they are attracted only to persons of the same sex, they are implicitly and necessarily saying men and women are different, and those differences include bodily differences. When gender-dysphoric persons say they don’t want to use restrooms or locker rooms with persons of their same sex, they are saying there are fundamental and significant differences between men and women, and those differences include bodily differences. In fact, the intense desire to have an opposite-sex body is the central desire of virtually all gender-dysphoric persons. They are necessarily saying that their desire to use opposite-sex restrooms is based on those physical differences. They are demanding privacy based on sex differences while denying that privacy to others.
And if the demand for privacy based on objective sex differences is equivalent to racism, then why is the demand of gender-dysphoric persons for privacy based on sex differences not equivalent to racism? If separate restrooms for men and women are analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites, then are separate restrooms for gender-dysphoric males and non-gender-dysphoric males analogous to separate restrooms for blacks and whites as well? They are acknowledging sex differences and demanding to have those desires accommodated. So, why are sex differences meaningful only for those who have gender dysphoria but not for those who don’t?
So, from all those comments, here is what Chang wrote:
But acknowledgement remains an obstacle for conservative groups. Suburban-based Illinois Family Institute posted a blog this week decrying the CPS policy. The author, Laurie Higgins, says she does not believe the medical consensus that transgender people are mentally healthy, adding that “physical embodiment” of a sex should dictate bathroom use—though the group has no plans to petition CPS for changes to the policies because “that’s for community members to do,” she says.
That’s it.
While she got IFI’s position correct that we believe restroom use should correspond to physical embodiment as male or female, she conveniently omitted the reasons we believe that. She also omitted the points about the incoherence and inconsistency of the CPS guidelines that I raised through rhetorical questions. She did, however, manage to include six words about the unimportant point that IFI is not getting directly involved in efforts to overturn the CPS guidelines.
Chang’s defenses of her bias
Even more interesting are Chang’s defenses of her imbalance.
First she told me “Sadly my editor has cut down the portion where I quoted you because he wanted me to focus on Chicago-only groups.”
Then she told me this stunner, which oddly has nothing to do with the location of IFI’s office:
[I]n writing the story, I could not ignore that your opinion is based on factual inaccuracies.
We address the question of balance by looking at accuracy as well as representation. It is your personal belief that transgender people are mentally ill, which is why you are against the policy. I think that’s important for our readers to know, and I included that in the article. I asked follow up questions to get a better view of how you came to that conclusion, but the reasoning you provided was too far outside the facts to responsibly report. [emphasis added]
Her rationalization of bias is remarkable for two reasons, the first of which is that I never said that “transgender people are mentally ill.”
Second, Chang is factually and absolutely incorrect when she claims that my opposition to gender-dysphoric persons using opposite-sex restrooms is based on my “personal belief that transgender people are “entally ill.” In point of fact, I told her specifically that IFI opposes gender-dysphoric persons in opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms because we believe objective, immutable physical embodiment as male or female is deeply and profoundly meaningful and is the source of the desire for privacy and feelings of modesty.
Here’s what I said when she went fishing for a statement from me about the mental health of gender-dysphoric persons: I asked how leftists can be sure that if there’s a mismatch between mind and body, the error rests in healthy, normally functioning bodies. And I said that the highly politicized mental health community is prescribing protocols that do not advance health.
What’s more remarkable still are the opinions of leftists that Chang evidently believes are based on factual accuracies and, therefore, suitable for print:
From the Center on Halsted: “It’s a great day for gender-diverse students in CPS.” What is the “fact” on which this opinion is based? Gender-diverse students may have the opinion that it’s a great day, but what is the objective and accurate fact upon which that opinion is based? What is the objective factually accurate definition of “great”?
From the Center on Halsted: “This is an affirmation of their viability as human beings.” What does this even mean? And what is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that affirmation of viability of gender-dysphoric persons as “human beings” requires allowing them in opposite-sex restrooms? What is the objective factual accuracy supporting the implicit opinion that people who oppose opposite-sex persons in their restrooms view gender-dysphoric persons as not viable human beings?
From the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance: “Obviously it’s helpful when people have the support of their parents, but if it’s not possible, it’s great that a student can still be who they are in school.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that it’s “great” that a student can pretend he or she is the opposite sex at school? What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that parental support requires affirmation of the desire to be the opposite sex is based?
From the Chicago Gender Society: “You’re not born with hate. You have to be taught hate. Like we’ve seen in North Carolina and Mississippi in recent months.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that people who oppose opposite-sex persons in restrooms hate them?
From Harold Brown Health: “So for kids to have the option to be in a safe environment…it’s a new day. A clean slate.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that allowing gender-dysphoric girls in boys restrooms and locker rooms enhances school “safety.” What is the objective factual accuracy on which the opinion that allowing gender-dysphoric students to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms creates a “clean slate”?
Apparently, leftists believe that opinions must be based on “factual accuracies” as defined by them. Hint: These factual accuracies are actually assumptions with which leftists agree.
So much for fair and balanced reporting and intellectual diversity.
Stunning Announcement from Attorney General Lynch on NC Law
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There was good news from North Carolina Monday morning, when Governor Pat McCory announced North Carolina would be suing the Department of Justice (DOJ). That news was followed by bad news from the Department of Justice, announced in a stunning statement from Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who compares those who believe that restrooms should correspond to sex to racists who supported separate restrooms, restaurants, drinking fountains, schools, libraries, and parks for blacks and whites.
Here is an excerpt from the ignorant, bigoted, and demagogic statement from Lynch:
Today, we are filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state of North Carolina, Governor Pat McCrory, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina….
This action is about….the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we… have enacted to protect them–indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country–haltingly but inexorably–in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans.
This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education…. Some of these responses reflect a recognizably human fear of the unknown, and a discomfort with the uncertainty of change….This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, diversity, compassion and open-mindedness. What we must not do–what we must never do–is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. This is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not, or invents a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment.
…This law provides no benefit to society–all it does is harm innocent Americans.
Instead of turning away from our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, let us instead learn from our history….[S]tate-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight. It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference….Let us not act out of fear and misunderstanding….
Let me also speak directly to the transgender community itself. Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead….[T]he Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that ….history is on your side.
Just a few thoughts about her remarkable piece of sloppy and insulting thinking:
Lynch’s pernicious comparison of Americans who believe that objective, immutable sex matters and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy to hateful, ignorant bigots is both morally indefensible and intellectually vacuous.
Neither inclusivity, fairness, equality, diversity, compassion, open-mindedness, dignity, nor respect requires humans to ignore the objective, immutable sex of others. None of these qualities requires humans to treat objective, immutable sex as if it has no meaning. None of these requires women to share restrooms, changing areas, or showers with persons of the opposite sex. None of these requires Americans to make restrooms, changing areas, and locker rooms co-ed. None of these requires Americans to accept the view that restrooms should correspond to the feelings of people about their sex rather than their sex.
Equality demands that we treat like things alike. It does not require us to treat unlike things as if they are alike. Men and women are substantively different as even gender-dysphoric persons and homosexuals acknowledge.
Lynch urges Americans not to “turn” on friends, neighbors, and colleagues for “something they cannot control.” In her view, requiring restrooms to correspond to objective sex constitutes “turning” on gender-dysphoric persons. Does Lynch apply that odd principle consistently? Does she believe that a compassionate society must accommodate all behaviors impelled by powerful, persistent, unchosen, and seemingly intractable feelings, including those feelings that deny objective reality? Being loving and welcoming does not require women to share restrooms with objectively male neighbors, friends, and colleagues or vice versa. In fact, a case can be made that it is profoundly unloving to facilitate a desire to be the opposite sex.
Lynch asserts that not allowing men in women’s restrooms is tantamount to denying “what makes them human.” Her claim is based on an arguable assumption about what makes a person human, which seems to stand far outside her professional bailiwick. Many would argue that physical embodiment as male or female is central to humanness—indeed, more central than feelings about physical embodiment.
Lynch rightly states that separate facilities for blacks and whites were based on a “distinction without a difference,” implying that the difference between men and women is similarly insubstantial. This statement reveals a profound ignorance. Blacks and whites are distinct by virtue of their skin color, which is, indeed, a distinction without a difference. But men and women are substantively and significantly different. They’re so different, in fact, that gender-dysphoric men insist that they must use restrooms, changing areas, and showers with women only. If the difference between men and women constitutes a “distinction without a difference”—like the difference between blacks and whites—then why must gender-dysphoric men share private facilities with women only? Surely the differences between objectively male persons and objectively female persons are more significant than the differences between objectively male persons and objectively male persons who experience gender dysphoria.
If there is no more difference between men and women than there is between blacks and whites—as Lynch seems to think—then why not eliminate all single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms everywhere? Why not allow all men and all women to use the same restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, showers, and shelters? After all, blacks and whites do.
Since Lynch suggests that the unwillingness of women to share restrooms with gender-dysphoric men is evidence of fear, disrespect, misunderstanding, closemindedness, unfairness, lack of compassion, unjust regressive discrimination, and the denial of equality, how would she characterize the unwillingness of gender-dysphoric men to share restrooms with non-gender-dysphoric men?
How can Lynch possibly know that those who experience gender dysphoria were “born” to lead lives pretending to be the opposite sex? How can she possibly know with certainty that when there’s mismatch between one’s objective sex and one’s feelings about his sex that the error rests with his healthy, normally functioning body?
America’s founding ideals did not include a commitment to deny objective ontological distinctions that have profound meaning.
North Carolinians and Americans everywhere better not treat this issue like they have treated every other incremental advance of a sexual ideology corrosive to truth and thus to human flourishing. They better be prepared to fight this with every fiber of their objectively male and female beings.
DOJ Joins ED to Redefine Sex and Rewrite Law
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The federal government through its highly partisan Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to make law—again—by attacking North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom bill.” Last Wednesday, the DOJ sent a letter to NC governor Pat McCrory demanding that he rescind the law within three working days or face legal action and loss of federal funds.
The DOJ letter erroneously states that the NC law violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination based on sex. In its infinite ignorance and hubris, the DOJ, has proclaimed that the word “sex” includes “gender identity.”
By attacking North Carolina’s law that requires restrooms in government buildings, state colleges and universities, and highway rest stops to correspond to sex and which does not apply to any private sector entity, the DOJ seeks to make law for the entire country.
This is the same stratagem the Department of Education (ED) is using to blackmail public schools into allowing gender-dysphoric students into opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms. While the DOJ is using the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the ED is using Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Both departments—neither of which have law-making authority—have unilaterally redefined the word “sex” in such a way as to make law.
If successful, the DOJ’s effort will be even more profound and destructive because of the scope of the applicability of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Whereas Title IX applies only to schools, Title VII applies to every business in the private sector with over 14 employees; every government entity; and every religious organization, including private elementary, middle, and high schools, private colleges, and churches.
Religious organizations and churches are exempt from Title VII only with regard to the prohibition of religious discrimination and only in hiring practices. Churches, synagogues, and mosques and religious organizations may discriminate based on religion in hiring. In other words, churches, synagogues, and mosques may not be forced to hire persons of other faiths. But how would this redefinition of “sex” in Title VII affect restroom or locker room usage in religious organizations or businesses owned by Christians like Hobby Lobby?
Would the redefinition of the word “sex” to include “gender identity” and “gender expression” require religious organizations, colleges, and churches to allow gender-dysphoric persons to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms? Would this fanciful reinterpretation of Title VII require that a gender-dysphoric father visiting his daughter at a Christian college or a gender-dysphoric woman attending a wedding in a church be allowed in opposite-sex restrooms?
Don’t let deceivers distract you with mocking arguments about how few gender-dysphoric people will be using opposite-sex restrooms; or how few incidents there are of gender-dysphoric men assaulting women or are likely to assault women; or how few predators are pretending to be gender-dysphoric in order to access women’s restrooms, locker rooms, showers, dressing rooms, or shelters.
And certainly don’t be distracted by the stupid comparison of separate restrooms for blacks and whites to separate restrooms for men and women. While there are no substantive differences between blacks and whites, there are substantive differences between males and females, which even gender-dysphoric persons and homosexuals acknowledge.
The central issue is with the meaning of physical embodiment as male and female.
Policies and laws mandating that gender-dysphoric persons be allowed to use opposite-sex restrooms embody and teach the lie that objective maleness and femaleness do not have objective meaning or value.
These policies and laws teach that it is not one’s objective, immutable sex that matters but one’s feelings about one’s sex (“gender identity) that matter.
These policies and laws teach that modesty and privacy have no intrinsic link to objective maleness and femaleness.
Leftists dismissively claim that anatomical parts are irrelevant when it comes to “gender identity,” modesty, and privacy. They’re demanding that everyone in society treat gender-dysphoric persons in all contexts and ways (including grammatical ways) as if they are in reality the sex they wish they were. So, what are the logical out-workings of this pernicious ideology?
Ultimately, if this view prevails, society will be unable to maintain any separation between men and women—including between normal men and women—in any context. If sexual anatomy has no intrinsic meaning, if privacy and modesty have no connection to objective sex, if objective males must be allowed in women’s showers and restrooms, then there remains no rational justification for separate facilities for men and women or girls and boys.
Since, in the mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world of lunatic leftists, all that matters are feelings about one’s sex, there is no need for surgery, cross-sex hormones, or cross-dressing. So, that “transwoman” (i.e., an actual man) walking naked past your 14-year-old daughter in the health club locker room just might have a chest full of hair, a wooly beard, and a penis. Remember “gender identity” has no fixed meaning, and sexual anatomy is only important if people feel it’s important, so that “transwoman” in the locker room may even have a penis and furry breasts.
Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. representative, urging him or her to rein in the unelected, leftist federal bureaucrats in the Departments of Justice and Education. Demand that the federal government remove itself from issues of local control and stop misusing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972.
Federal Lawsuit Filed Against District 211 and DOE Over Student Privacy
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On Wednesday afternoon, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit in federal court against School District 211 and the Department of Education (DOE) on behalf of 51 district families who rightly claim that the district and the Department of Education “trample students’ privacy” rights and create an “intimidating and hostile environment” for girls who are being forced to share the girls locker room and restrooms with a boy who wishes he were a girl.
The lawsuit claims that the DOE’s reinterpretation of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, is unlawful. The DOE through its Office for Civil Rights claims that the word “sex” in Title IX actually includes “gender identity” and “gender expression,” thereby prohibiting schools from maintaining separate restrooms and locker rooms for boys and girls.
There’s only one wee little problem with that fanciful interpretation. Title IX specifically states the following:
[T]itle IX of the Education Amendments of 1972…is designed to eliminate (with certain exceptions) discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program….A recipient [of federal funds] may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex. [emphasis added]
For those who may not remember, several months ago the ACLU represented a gender-dysphoric boy in District 211 who was seeking the right to use the girls locker room and restrooms. Actually, he was seeking the right to unrestricted access to the girls locker room and restrooms. Though he and the ACLU lost the right—for now—to unrestricted access, he won the right to use the girls restrooms and locker room, which has been fitted with a privacy changing area.
While this boy—and he is a boy—demands the right to change clothes and go to the bathroom with only girls, he seeks to deny actual girls the right to change clothes and go to the bathroom with only girls.
According to the Chicago Tribune, ACLU spokesman Ed Yohnka waxed indignant over opposition to a boy in the girls locker room and restrooms and to the conventional and proper use of pronouns to denote objective, immutable sex:
Ed Yohnka…called the lawsuit a “sad development by groups opposed to fair and humane treatment of all students, including those who are transgender.”
He also bristled at the lawsuit’s repeated reference to the transgender student as “he.”
“It’s pretty offensive that they don’t even fundamentally acknowledge that our client is a girl,” Yohnka said.
I regret being so graphic, but Yohnka’s idiotic statement makes it necessary: Girls don’t have penises.
The Left takes umbrage if anyone dares to dissent from their doctrinaire notions about sex and grammar. Tyrannical Leftists demand that biological males who wish they were female be treated as if they are in reality female—even in womens showers. The Left demands that everyone join them in their delusional charade.
District 211 superintendent Daniel Cates said “students have shown acceptance, support and respect of each other,” evidently meaning that students don’t object to sharing restrooms and locker rooms with opposite-sex students. If true, is that a good thing? Has the culture successfully indoctrinated all our young people with the lie that acceptance and respect of those who suffer from gender dysphoria require sharing restrooms and locker rooms with opposite-sex persons? Doubtful.
Should the delight of teens in sharing restrooms and locker rooms with opposite-sex students determine policy? If physical embodiment matters and if modesty is a virtue derived from physical embodiment, shouldn’t schools create policies that reinforce those truths?
And does anyone believe that in this cultural climate, teens who don’t want to share restrooms and locker rooms with opposite-sex peers would feel comfortable admitting it? Or to use Leftist jargon, does anyone believe it is “safe” for students to express opposition to sharing restrooms and locker rooms with opposite-sex peers?
The issue of objectively male students using girls private facilities is not solely about the risk of assault—though that risk exists. The central issue concerns the meaning of physical embodiment as male or female, particularly as it pertains to modesty and privacy.
Virtually everyone—including gender-dysphoric persons and homosexuals—acknowledges that men and women are substantively and significantly different. When homosexuals claim they are attracted only to persons of the same sex, they are implicitly and necessarily saying men and women are different, and those differences include bodily differences.
When gender-dysphoric persons who wish they were the opposite sex say they don’t want to use restrooms or locker rooms with persons of their same sex, they are saying there are fundamental and significant differences between men and women. Further, they are necessarily saying that their desire to use opposite-sex restrooms is based on objective bodily differences. They are demanding privacy based on objective sex differences while denying that privacy to others.
Questions Leftists must answer:
Why are sex differences meaningful for those who have gender dysphoria but not for those who don’t?
Do the desire for privacy and feelings of modesty derive from objective sex differences or from desires about one’s sex?
If gender-dysphoric persons are allowed to use restrooms with only those whose “gender identity” they share, why shouldn’t non-gender-dysphoric persons be allowed to use restrooms with only those whose sex they share?
If there is a mismatch between a person’s sex and their feelings about their sex, why would anyone assume the problem is with the healthy, normally functioning body and not the mind?
How refreshing and encouraging it is to see parents boldly challenging the incoherent and indecent actions of “progressives” in government schools. Please pray for these families and the success of their lawsuit.
Leftist NY City Mayor Wants to Put Christians Out of Business
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is urging New Yorkers not to eat at Chick-fil-A because owner Dan Cathy believes that homoerotic acts are not moral and has donated money to organizations that share that belief. Although Mr. Cathy has donated money to charitable organizations that espouse the view that homoerotic acts are immoral and that marriage is an intrinsically male-female union, his beliefs affect neither whom Chick-fil-A franchises hire nor whom they serve.
In de Blasio’s perverse world, people who believe homosexual acts are immoral necessarily hate those who engage in them. Of course that’s an absurd and pernicious charge, but Leftists hurl it often and everywhere. I wonder if de Blasio applies that principle consistently. I wonder if de Blasio hates everyone who engages in acts that he believes are immoral.
Mr. Cathy’s beliefs on the moral status of homoerotic activity and the nature of marriage derive from his Christian faith. Both the Old and New Testaments teach clearly that homoerotic acts are immoral and that marriage is a male-female union, as does, by the way, the Quran. Therefore, it’s not just Mr. Cathy who holds those beliefs. It’s all theologically orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims.
Does de Blasio seek to shut down every business in America whose owners are theologically orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Muslims? If so, would this goal comport with the free exercise of religion? Are these groups allowed to freely exercise their religion so long as they don’t own businesses?
Maybe de Blasio can tell all people of faith which religious beliefs they must abandon in order to own a business in America. May people of faith believe that consensual adult incest is immoral and still own a business in America? What about bestiality, adultery, fornication, polygamy, drunkenness, covetousness, pride, blasphemy, or idolatry?
What if a Christian believes that the only path to eternal life is through Jesus Christ? That would mean Christians think non-believers are destined for eternal damnation. Many Leftists erroneously think such a belief represents the desires of Christians. As a Leftist, de Blasio may think this Christian belief about salvation is downright hateful. Should those who believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life be allowed to own a business in America?
Do tell, Mayor de Blasio, which religious beliefs may people of faith hold and still own a business in America?
If you would like to send a message to the New York City mayor, fill out the webform on this website. And above all, please vote with your wallets and continue to patronize Chick-fil-A restaurants.
7 Troubling Questions About Transgender Theories
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Written by Trevin Wax
In case you’re just tuning in, Bruce Springsteen, Target, and bathrooms are at the center of controversy these days, as Americans learn more about the T in the LGBT acronym – Transgender.
Broadly speaking, transgender refers to people who believe their gender identity does not correspond to their biological sex. The psychological description, which applies to a narrower slice of those who identify as transgender (and some who do not so identify), is “gender dysphoria,” defined by Mark Yarhouse as “a deep and abiding discomfort over the incongruence between one’s biological sex and one’s psychological and emotional experience of gender.”
With Caitlyn Jenner’s appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair last year, and books and shows like Transparentfinding an audience, there is a societal push to celebrate transgender experience as an expression of human diversity or as the next stage in extending human rights.
But this push has run into pushback. Access to bathrooms and locker rooms may be the battleground, but the bigger debate concerns the nature of humanity and, by extension, the best way to approach (or treat) gender dysphoria.
These newfound controversies are complicated, at least in part because of transgender theory itself. The unmooring of “gender identity” from “biological sex” leads to a number of unresolved questions, as well as troubling inconsistencies among advocates of transgender rights. (I realize that not every transgender person or LGBTQ activist agrees on every point or holds to the same ideology. Still, there is broad agreement on a number of important issues.)
In my reading of articles and books about gender identity in the past year, I’ve come across seven issues that challenge the coherence of transgender theories.
1. Do transgender theories undercut or contradict the idea that sexual orientation is unchangeable?
The LGBT’s success in pushing for civil rights legislation on the basis of sexual orientation has relied heavily on the assumption that sexual orientation is “fixed,” or genetically determined. But more and more scholars today argue that sexual orientation is “fluid,” not fixed (especially in females). And these two perspectives are colliding in real life situations involving transgender persons.
Last year, NewYorkmagazine’s article “My Husband is Now My Wife” by Alex Morris featured the stories of several spouses of transgender persons who transitioned later in life. Morris describes the women who witnessed their husbands’ transition as feeling pressured to not voice any disapproval, to avoid the accusation of being “transphobic.” They were expected to be “celebratory” and helpful,” no matter how their spouse’s transition would affect the rest of the family.
LGBT theory rests on the assumption that sexual orientation is determined by biology and that it is misguided, even hateful, to seek to change one’s orientation. But, as Morris points out, the spouse of a transgender person is expected to remain and support a partner during and after their transition. And for a wife to celebrate her husband’s transition means she must face questions about her own sexual orientation.
The article quotes from a woman perplexed about what it means for her, a heterosexual woman, to suddenly be the spouse of a woman. She says, “I don’t know how comfortable I would feel in a group of lesbians…Because here I am doing the very thing that they’re trying to prove is not possible” — change the gender to which she is attracted. Such an expectation destabilizes some of the foundational elements of LGBT theory on homosexuality.
2. If gender identity is fixed and unchangeable, why do many children who experience gender dysphoria lose these feelings after puberty?
The next wave of societal controversy is likely to involve one’s approach to children. Studies show that a significant number of people who experience varying degrees of gender dysphoria as children choose to identify with their biological sex after puberty.
New Jersey currently forbids any change or direction given to a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression. A similar bill in Canada assumes that sexual orientation and gender identity are the same – determined at birth.
But, as Alice Dreger in Wired points out, “by ‘affirming’ a ‘transgender’ identity as soon as it appears—the clinician might actually be stimulating and cementing a transgender identity… Maybe the child who is ‘affirmed’ will be just as well off with a transgender identity as she would have been without, but the fact is that being transgender generally comes with non-trivial medical interventions, including hormonal and surgical.”
3. When a person feels a disjunction between one’s sex at birth and one’s gender identity, why is the only course of action to bring the body into closer conformity with the person’s psychological state, rather than vice versa?
If the disjunction a transgender person feels between their gender and their body is psychological, why should we recommend invasive surgical procedures to make the body more closely match the mind instead of seeking treatment that might help move the mind closer to the sex they were assigned at birth?
In other words, why do many transgender advocates claim that the only loving response to a transgender person is to support their desire for a surgical procedure? The most extensive studies of people who have undergone sex-reassignment surgeries (in Sweden, over a period of thirty years, in a culture that celebrates transgender persons) delivered disturbing results, including a much higher suicide rate.
Furthermore, how do these surgeries fit into the broader medical tradition in which the purpose of treatment is (usually) to restore bodily functions and faculties that are ordered toward certain ends? Why is it acceptable to oppose a “transabled” person’s desire to undergo surgery that would blind them, or leave them without a limb, but it is “hateful” and “transphobic” to oppose surgeries that damage body parts that are in no way dysfunctional?
4. Is the higher rate of suicide among transgender persons due primarily to the inner tensions of experiencing gender dysphoria as a disorder, or are these acts motivated primarily by societal rejection?
In the past six months, I have noticed the same trend among many transgender advocates: that questioning a course of treatment or wondering out loud about the significance or meaning of gender in a way that dissents from transgender theory is responsible for transgender suicides. According to this way of thinking, gender binaries are inherently oppressive and damaging to the mental health of transgender persons.
I recall reading a columnist last year who was sympathetic to transgender concerns and who asked for patience on the part of transgender activists as he and others learned how to adopt the new linguistic guidelines and avoid causing unnecessary offense. A transgender woman fired off a response claiming that such a request is impossible because people are killing themselves due to these kinds of verbal mistakes.
It is difficult to make the case that transgender persons exhibit no signs of mental disorder while at the same time saying that the wrong pronoun can lead a person to suicide.
5. Why are the strongest critics of “gender binaries” the most likely to support gender stereotypes on display in transgender celebrities?
Feminist writerElinor Burkett explained in the New York Times last year her surprise at seeing our society’s idea of womanhood return to the stereotypes she had long fought against.
“Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side — people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination — are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us.”
I have seen LGBT activists decry the notion that one can, by visual representation only, determine the gender of a person, and at the same time question the legitimacy of someone’s claim to being transgender based on the visual perception (or lack thereof) of their desire to transition.
Why do those who demand empathy and acceptance toward the transgender experience dismiss feminist critics who believe the movement fails to properly understand the female experience?
Burkett goes on to write:
“People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us. That’s something men have been doing for much too long… Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails. For me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist on, the notions of femininity that they’re articulating, and their disregard for the fact that being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one. The ‘I was born in the wrong body’ rhetoric favored by other trans people doesn’t work any better and is just as offensive, reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas.”
6. Why must one’s declared gender identity be accepted without question, while other forms of self-identification can be dismissed?
In making her point about women embracing men who transition, Burkett writes:
“Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.”
Something similar took place last year with Rachel Dolezal, the former president of a chapter of the NAACP. One columnist described Dolezal’s claim as “perverse and pathological,” a version of “identity theft” that fails to consider the cultural significance of the African American experience.
“For me, Black-identifying was not a choice so much as a fact. I am Black. Rachel Dolezal is not.”
This categorical rejection of Dolezal raises interesting questions about people’s freedom to self-identify. Unmoored from biology, what reasons can we give to oppose a white man’s decision to identify as a Chinese woman, or a man in his forties who decides to identify and live as a seven-year-old, or the tragic cases of otherkin – people identifying as animals? Please note: I am not claiming that these other modes of identification are on the same plane as gender dysphoria, only that there is no established consensus for why certain experiences are embraced and celebrated while others are considered outrageous or the sign of a mental illness.
7. Without a settled definition in our legal system for transgender, how can we avoid all sorts of problems, including bathroom access?
“Presumably, post-transition transgender people look like the gender they identify with. Who, exactly, is going to stop someone who looks like a woman from walking into a ladies’ room? Or someone who looks like a man from walking into a men’s room? The American nanny state may be out of control, but we still don’t have bathroom police.”
So why the uproar? Because, without clear definitions and markers of transgender beyond “I am what I say,” we are left with unclear guidelines and chaotic standards. Carl Trueman pointed to the incoherent regulations proposed by his local school board:
“On the one hand, it asserts that a student’s asserted gender identity has to be accepted, and must not be questioned or disregarded by staff. Moreover, the only exception is if staff have a ‘credible basis’ for believing the student is ‘improperly’ asserting a gender identity, vague and undefined terms that are open to abuse. Yet, the policy also claims that a student’s transgender status may constitute confidential medical information that should not be disclosed to parents or others, suggesting it is a medical condition. Which is it?”
Conclusion
The debate over the T in LGBT is likely to get louder in coming years. Yes, there are some in our society who would scapegoat people with gender dysphoria who would cast them as predators and “freaks.” Meanwhile, there are others who believe societal evolution depends on the abolishing of gender altogether and see the transgender experience as a way of moving beyond oppressive structures of “male” and “female.”
For Christians, however, neither of these options is available to us.
We believe God’s design of male and female to be structurally good, but we also understand gender dysphoria to be another symptom that reminds us we live in a fallen world. For this reason, we must extend love and compassion to anyone who experiences this kind of distress, even as we reject society’s efforts to establish a fluid understanding of personhood.
This article was originally published at TheGospelCoalition.com.
Latest CPS Outrage Violates Rights of Students, Staff, and Faculty
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The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) just issued guidelines that allow gender-dysphoric students and teachers to use restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to the sex they wish they were rather than the sex they actually are. In public schools, staff and faculty regularly use student restrooms, so adult men who wish they were women may now use girls’ restrooms, and adult women who wish they were men may now use boys’ restrooms.
These new guidelines apply to all schools from elementary through high school, and they apply not just to restrooms and locker rooms but to overnight school trips as well. Now boys who wish they were girls will be able to stay in rooms with girls and vice versa.
These morally and intellectually incomprehensible guidelines also apply to “gender non-binary” students who don’t “identify” as either male or female and to “questioning” students who aren’t yet sure which sex they would like to be. In other words, these students may make their restroom, locker room, and hotel room selections in accordance with their fluid, unfixed sexual confusion.
The CPS guidelines also require faculty and staff to use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric students. Since pronouns correspond to one’s sex–not to feelings about one’s sex–this means that the government is requiring staff and faculty to lie.
CPS erroneously believes that these guidelines are necessary to create “an environment of complete tolerance and respect” for every “student and adult” and promote “safe and inclusive schools.”
The CPS is decidedly not, however, tolerating or respecting those who believe that physical embodiment as male and female is profoundly meaningful and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy. These guidelines will not ensure the inclusion of those students, parents, staff, and faculty who believe it’s immoral to share restrooms, locker rooms, or hotel rooms with persons of the opposite sex.
If safety is defined as the absence of uncomfortable feelings, then these guidelines do not ensure the safety of those who don’t want to do their business with an unrelated person of the opposite sex doing his or her business in the stall next to them.
CPS needs to explain why gender-dysphoric persons have the right to use restrooms with only those who share their “gender identity,” but other students have no right to use restrooms with only those who share their objective, immutable sex. Why should restrooms, locker rooms, and hotel rooms correspond to feelings about one’s sex rather than one’s actual sex?
In the service of inclusivity, why not make all restrooms, showers, and hotel rooms completely co-ed? Why not allow all boys and girls to make these choices? Why should only students who wish they were the opposite sex or aren’t sure if they want to be a boy or girl be allowed in opposite-sex restrooms? Isn’t that discriminating based on “gender identity”?
The truth is it is not the feelings of students about their sex that make girls and boys not want opposite-sex students in their restrooms, showers, and hotel rooms. It is the actual sex of students that makes girls and boys not want opposite-sex students in their restrooms, showers, and hotel rooms. What possible difference does it make to girls if the boy in their restroom, shower, or hotel room wants to be a boy or not?
Parents of CPS students are once again ill-served and disrespected by the Chicago Public School system.
The Hidden Dualism of Transgenderism
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Written by Andrew Mullins
A few days ago Australian papers ran a Washington Post story about Bill/Kate Rohr under the heading: “It’s not about the gender. It’s about the soul: Transgender at 70”. Despite a happy marriage to a childhood sweetheart, two adopted children and prestige as an orthopod, Bill finally found a never-before-experienced sense of fulfilment when at seventy years of age he opted for reassignment surgery.
The article argues that early life conditioning as an explanation for the transsexual phenomenon is old hat — the real reason is hormones, or rather the feelings that hormones give us:
“Today, an overwhelming number of doctors and scientists dismiss the idea that environment, or behavioural conditioning, causes a person to be transgender. Most agree that sexual anatomy, sexual orientation and gender identity are the result of three distinct developmental processes in the fetal brain. Yet only recently have researchers begun to tease out how that brain is masculinised or feminised. Hormones, it appears, play an essential role.”
I find this remarkable, palpably wrong, and in the interests neither of persons who identify as hetero nor of those who identify as trans. Gender is being defined as a hormone induced feeling, totally separate from anatomy, as if the development of sexual anatomy were distinct from those hormones in the first place.
Further, we are asked to believe that one’s life project should be guided by such feelings. Yet feelings are fickle, we all know that. Emotions enrich, and they can empower us to act, but they can also be dead wrong. Who has not unleashed his or her passions and then had to humiliatingly apologise? If we reduce our sexual identity to a mere feeling of gender, we betray the central importance of gender in who we are.
This is the old lie of dualism wrapped up in another cloak. We are not simply our minds. There is more to personality than thoughts and feelings. Persons are a complete body and soul package, not reducible to body or psyche, at least if the person is healthy and mature.
Descartes, probably the most famous dualist of them all, thought otherwise, regarding matter and spirit, body and mind, as irreconcilable realities. It is fascinating to read in his Meditations on First Philosophy his account of personhood in terms of consciousness, with his famous “Cogito ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am.” For him, persons are identical with their minds but not with bodies. “I have a body that is closely joined to me,” he wrote (ii, 54) — joined, but not an intrinsic part of him.
Let us be implacable foes of dualism in all its guises.
Our psyche is embodied. Anatomy, perception, and behaviour are integrally united. Dualism is a dead end because it cannot explain the interaction between body and soul. Practically every neuroscientist in the world now agrees that mental life correlates to the material neurobiological signature.
In his major teaching text, Nobel prizewinner, Eric Kandel, insists:
“The break with the tradition that mind and consciousness arise from a mysterious interaction of spirit with body actually focused the problem of consciousness for the 20th century neuroscientist. Philosophically disposed against dualism, we are obliged to find a solution to the problem in terms of nerve cells and neural circuits.”
This is good news, as long as we think of a person as the complete package, and not just body or spirit. This view of the person is confirmed by scientists who now report that the good habits that constitute character are embodied habits. See for example the marvellous work by Ann Graybiel of MIT who has published extensively on the neurobiology of voluntary, good habits. Demonstrably we are able to consolidate our wiring, so to speak, so that we are more cheerful, more resilient, less lazy, and have more self control.
When we wrench humanity out of its body, mischief ensues. What we do in our bodies affects us as persons and, conversely, our choices bring bodily consequences. One of Aristotle’s greatest insights about reality, turning the history of western civilisation away from Platonic idealism, was his insistence (in the Nicomachean Ethics) that our behaviours, in our bodies, change us as people.
You may have seen the dramatic images of brains atrophied through substance abuse. A habit of lies, makes one, even neurobiologically, a liar. Aritotle writes that an act of infidelity may be overcome, but a habit of infidelity makes one a different person. So what does a habit of anger, or a habit of pornography do? These are profound insights into how our moral makeup depends on our own choices.
A friend told me recently that his marriage took a major turn for the better when he stopped snapping back at his wife and instead changed his own behaviours. He tells me he has discovered an important secret in relationships: be positive and you help those around you be positive as well. He feels so strongly about this he wants to give marriage talks to couples in crisis. He has been there.
Feelings cannot become the yardstick by which we measure our actions. They may spur us to do good — to help the poor derelict we are walking past — but to run one’s life on feelings will be totally unhelpful. To change one’s body to suit them must be a false remedy for whatever troubles the soul.
Dr. Andy Mullins, author of Parenting for Character and an occasional contributor to MercatorNet, is past headmaster of two Sydney schools, Redfield and Wollemi Colleges. In his doctoral thesis he investigated the neural substrates of virtue. He is currently working in Melbourne. He holds an adjunct professorial position at University of Notre Dame Australia
This article was originally posted at Mercatornet.com
Gender Dysphoria: When Feelings Replace Fact
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America is suddenly the upside down kingdom: our culture daily calls “evil good, and good evil.”
One symptom of our values turned on their heads is the bathroom skirmish, which has become a full-scale battle. Many pundits snort and wave it off as passing nonsense. After all, what’s the big deal if a man wants to use the ladies room or a genetic female wants to use the men’s room?
And why is this occurring?
Politically correct terms are being forced on society in a tsunami of messaging from the mainstream media, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Human Rights Campaign, Hollywood and others. We simply must move forward, we’re told, and accept “transgenderism.”
Never mind that “transgenderism” contradicts science and DNA.
Interesting that the very arguments touted by the left concerning God and Christianity, “You Christians just rely on faith and feelings, not science!” are now the cornerstone of gender dysphoria.
What is “gender dysphoria”?
Gender dysphoria is a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there’s a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity. It’s sometimes known as gender identity disorder (GID), gender incongruence or transgenderism.
Gender dysphoria is a very recent term–the American Psychiatric Association changed the condition known as “Gender Identity Disorder” to the milder and more accepting “Gender Dysphoria” in December of 2012. Suddenly the APA redefined normalcy.
A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least six of the following (one of which must be Criterion A1):
1. A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
2. In boys (assigned gender), a strong preference for crossdressing or simulating female attire; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing.
3. A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make believe play or fantasy play.
4. A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.
5. A strong preference for playmates of the other gender.
6. In boys (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play; or in girls (assigned gender), a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities.
7. A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.
8. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.
B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, school, or other important areas of functioning.
The American College of Pediatricians released a report, “Gender Ideology Harms Children” in March 2016 that dissents from “progressive” beliefs [emphasis added]:
1.) Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health–not genetic markers of a disorder.
2.) No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.
3.) A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.
4.) Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous.
5.) According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.
6.) Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.
7.) Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT-affirming countries.
8.) Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.
3.) A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V).The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved [emphasis added].
Gender dysphoria is another symptom of a culture that has traded transcendent truth for the dogma of secular humanism, wherein man is the center of the universe and “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Cut loose from the moorings of God’s righteous and life-affirming truth it’s no wonder our culture is adrift.
Common sense should tell us that any ideology that calls truth a lie and lies truth and which often leads its believers to suicide should be condemned.
Gender-dysphoric boys and girls, men and women, have biological sexes, immutably written in their DNA. Denying that biological fact is both physically and spiritually harmful. We should treat those with gender dysphoria with compassion and God’s grace. But acquiescing to a culture of lies helps no one–not the culture and certainly not the confused individuals seeking help and peace.
We would do well to remember that truth alone, borne out of love, is healing. The Great Physician, the one who made us male and female, also instructed, “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
Bathroom Wars’ Goal: Humiliate the American Normal Majority
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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.
