The Patriot Post® · The Therapists Win in the Bathroom Debate
In light of the recent Obama Bathroom Edict and ensuing law suits by eleven states, it is a fair question to ask, “Is being a man or a woman really reduced to where you go to the bathroom?” Do external circumstances dictate internal biology? Does standing in a garage make you a car?
The reality is that sexual identity is an “inside out,” not an “outside in” issue. You are either a XX (woman) or XY (man), which is determined by biology. Sexual identity is not determined by what TV shows you like or whether you preferred Lincoln Logs or Barbie dolls as a kid.
The gender identity discussion is actually moving us backwards. I thought that the feminists were for women being allowed to be anything they want in their career. I thought feminism was all about allowing women to not just be pigeon-holed as wives, mothers, caretakers, secretaries, nurses or teachers. I thought that a young girl who liked Legos was praised as a future “woman engineer.” Now, the same young girl is questioned as a girl “transitioning to be a male.”
And, truthfully, the “Bathroom Bill” may be one of the most chauvinistic pieces of legislation in recent history. For I have noticed that most of the people who are making these subjective claims about what it feels like to be a woman are, in fact, men who have absolutely no idea what it is like to be a woman.
This creates an arbitrary rubric for what constitutes “true female” and “true male.” In other words, if you are born XX but you like trucks, the cells in your biological make-up must be confused and we need to change your biology to accommodate your preferences. What this says, however, is that it is not OK to be a girl and to like trucks. Society (or a therapist, or a judge) is deciding what a girl should and shouldn’t like. Can you think of anything more opposite of the original intentions of feminism? The whole movement was supposed to be about women being able to decide what they do and don’t like for themselves. Now the government, the therapists and the school board are deciding what it takes to be a “true” XX and a “true” XY.
And now that the terms “man” and “woman” are open to interpretation, who is the final judge of that interpretation? Is it the individual, or DNA, or a therapist or a judge?
What is the end of this great social experiment? Will this inadvertently create a sort of gender “witch hunt” where we must prove to the world that we are male enough or female enough? Or an Inquisition where we must answer our “gender questions” correctly?
If there is no absolute value of female and male, it begs the question of what makes you “female enough” or “male enough.” And how do you know if what gender you “feel like” today will be the same as tomorrow? Is this really a sustainable solution? Can we really live in a society where people decide their genders at random and change back and forth?
It reminds me of the Dr. Seuss tale The Sneetches, where some Sneetches have stars on their bellies and some do not. Then Sylvester McMonkey McBean pulls into town with a machine that puts stars on the Plain-Belly Sneetches. But the Star-Belly Sneetches get jealous. So Sylvester McMonkey McBean pulls out his star-off machine. Then the race of the star-on, star-off gets underway and by the end of the day no one knows what sort of Sneetch they were supposed to be or what was who, and who was what.
This is the end of the Sylvester McMonkey McBean experiment — and so it will be with this grand social experiment called “gender choice.” Unless we are able to draw the line somewhere and say that biology is the absolute standard for gender, it will only turn into disaster, confusion and a society that doesn’t know up from down and right from left. And the most unfortunate thing is that the collateral damage in the government’s grand social experiment are the lives of people. Young children who don’t know their right from their left are the ones who are the big losers in this game. The winners? The therapists. And that seems like the biggest loss to me.