We’ve lost, I regret to inform you, yet another civilization-shattering battle.  I mean the one over your daughter’s right to use a public restroom without worrying whether there is a dude doing his business in the stall next to her.  This would be the same as the battle over your wife’s right to undress and shower in the ladies’ locker room at the YWCA without fearing that she’ll be confronted by a gender-confused humanoid, sans codpiece, with nothing between his membership and her eyes but fetid, musty air.

As I said, this is a done deal.

Wait, what?  Close the barn door, Jeremiah!  Let us not get ahead of ourselves!  Aren’t we just now seeing these city ordinances and mandatory guidelines arise in silly places like New York City?  We still have time to get organized, and exert pressure, and surely it won’t happen here . . .

I repeat: We’ve lost.

This theater of the absurd, at which we find ourselves the unwilling audience, has moved off-Broadway and is coming to your town.  And while the plot is utterly predictable, we continue to be shocked by its denouement.

The same elements appear in every one of these productions.  The easiest to spot is the Tyrannus ex Machina, whereby the feds swoop in to save the day by threatening to remove federal grant monies.  To wit: As I write, the Obama administration is considering whether the state of North Carolina is violating Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments (1972), which reads as follows:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

That statute is now part of the drama in the Tarheel State that followed Gov. Pat McCrory’s signature of HB2 on March 23.  Affectionately known as the “Bathroom Bill,” this legislative act states that local governments and other public entities (schools, universities, e.g.) in North Carolina are forbidden from enacting policies that discriminate against common sense and decency when it comes to the john.  Plain and simple, throughout the state, the ladies’ room is for (actual) women only.

Mere weeks before HB2 was proposed and passed, the city of Charlotte had gone the opposite direction, insisting that any person may use any restroom or locker room he pleases, based on whatever “gender identity” or “gender expression” he wishes to assert.  It’s the trendy thing these days to stride manfully into the legislature in order to force the public to participate in the delusions of mentally ill people.  But the North Carolina legislature wasn’t having it, and so they put together a top-down anti-discrimination bathroom bill that, like all anti-discrimination bills, discriminates against someone on behalf of someone (in this case, a normal person).

When Governor McCrory signed the bill, protestors descended immediately, and within a few hours the ACLU entered, stage left, briefs in hand.  Over Easter, the governor bade North Carolinians fear not, for a similar ACLU challenge in eastern Virginia had withstood federal-court scrutiny.  He neglected to mention that the aforementioned litigation is now awaiting a ruling by a federal appeals court, and that President Obama’s Education and Justice Departments had filed briefs on behalf of the plaintiffs.  Furthermore, the Obama administration has already threatened both Illinois and California schools with federal defunding over the same issue, and that was enough for them to knuckle under.

Washington gives the Tarheel State $4.58 billion annually for educational purposes, over which hangs the sword of Damocles called Title IX.  Having seen the text, you likely didn’t notice any language concerning gender expression, because it isn’t there.  Back in 1972, when Title IX was written, the trannies were still known as perverts in polite society.  Nonetheless, anticipating the debut of E!’s I Am Cait, the Department of Education opined back in 2014 that Title IX should be interpreted to read that “All students, including transgender students and students who do not conform to sex stereotypes, are protected from sex-based discrimination . . . ”  Originalism, you see, is on the wrong side of history, even when the original intent was “equal rights” for women.

On Easter Monday, Janesville, Wisconsin’s city council voted 6-1 to adopt “File Ordinance No. 2016-636 prohibiting discrimination against certain classes of individuals in public accommodations and employment.”  It’s the same sort of legislation that Charlotte adopted, a fact that was duly noted by Janesville City Councilhuman Sam Lie bert when he introduced it.  In defense of his transpotty ordinance, Mr. Liebert touched on other elements that are common to our off-Broadway tragicomedy: It wasn’t so long ago that blacks could not use white people’s facilities; we should be ashamed that we haven’t already passed this; all of the protestors’ objections are unfounded in reality; transgender people are routinely harassed and subjected to brutality; everyone else is doing it; we must (I jest not) “get on the right side of history.”

Batting leadoff for the protestors was a nice young mother of several children who was careful (as were all others, save one) to insist that she didn’t believe in discrimination, that she felt deep sympathy for the transgender community, etc., and that she was concerned only about child molesters lurking in restrooms.  She cited a local case in which a concerned citizen witnessed a man entering a women’s restroom and called police, who (with cause established) confronted the man and discovered that he was, in fact, a pedophile taking nude photos of little girls.  Would police respond to a similar call after this ordinance is passed?  And would she be accused of discrimination if she had made it herself?

Mr. Liebert’s advice for her was simply to be more vigilant as a parent.  This was echoed by other councilpeoples, and the city attorney assured her that the wording of the measure did not provide him with the means to charge her for making such a call.  Of course, the part about police responding to such a call went unanswered—as did a question as to whether Janesville churches (public places) would be forced to transgenderify their bathrooms.

Once again, finito.

Why is this movement unstoppable?  Why are seemingly sane people unbothered by the potential for child rape and/or horny middle-aged men deciding they feel feminine just moments before entering the girls’ locker room?  Logic, folks.  Logic.

When we as a society accepted the notion of transgenderism itself, we lost the bathroom battle.  One of the pet arguments of the LGBT activists is that, bahaha, the transgendered are already among you, in your public bathrooms, changing in front of your daughters, and you didn’t even notice it.  Sadly, this is true.  Through the miracle of “hormone replacement [sic] therapy,” whether or not it is combined with what is now called “gender confirmation surgery” (all of it, sic), women are losing their shape and sprouting chest hair.  Men are growing breasts and Nairing away at themselves.  Are some of these disturbed individuals easily recognized?  Sure.  But not all of them.

LGBT activists cleverly surmise that your daughter or wife would be horrified to see a bearded, muscular humanoid waiting for the next stall in the ladies’ loo.  They are correct.  And the fact is, the time-tested truism “when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go” applies to mentally ill men and women.  Society cannot tell them that their contra naturam obsession is perfectly fine, so long as they don’t hit the head.

Nor would our society wish to tell them that their obsession is contra naturam.  For Americans, nature is whatever you want.  Human reason abstractly applied to the observable workings of the human body is no longer guided by any prior truth—certainly not by Scripture or Church tradition, but also not by human tradition.  In the recent past, a Christian might have concluded that a boy who shrieks and writhes at others’ insistence that he is not a girl is subject to diabolical influence.  But even adherents of yesterday’s scientism would have witnessed the behaviors of the so-called transgendered and concluded that something was wrong.  In fact, they did just that, looking for chemical imbalances, asking the nature versus nurture question, and formulating treatment plans.

What “causes” it?  I have no idea, and that is irrelevant.  The real question is, What allows us to leap from the possibility of an organic antecedent, a biological inclination, to a moral affirmation of a debilitating delusion?  The answer is the Sexual Revolution, whose anything-goes ethic informs and guides not only the research done on the transgendered but the treatment plans offered them—which are actually treatment plans for society.  The same was true of the normalization of homosexuality, which made “gay marriage” inevitable.  Most Americans prefer to imagine that there is no external authority to govern our sexual entertainments, so we bind ourselves as a society to a kind of absurd determinism.  We protest that we are already perfect just the way we are whenever we chafe at preexisting moral standards, then insist that, because existence precedes essence, our hedonistic choices are somehow special.  We accept a perverse behavior, transform it into an identity, then sue our way to that identity’s legal protection, and damn anyone who thinks the way everyone (ourselves included) thought five minutes ago.

So forget jurisprudence: The courts simply cry “Equal Protection!” and follow the cultural trend.

The question is not whether we can stop the done deal of transgendered toileting.  The question is, What’s next?  Let your imagination run wild, and then be certain that the groundwork is already being laid.

In the meantime, conservatives need to regain their own minds so they can speak and think clearly about sex and “gender.”  In many ways, conservatives and Christians are just as disengaged from reality as the liberals who pursue these ridiculous societal realignments.  Instead of appealing to people’s innate (though sup pressed) sense of right and wrong, we hallow our ability to choose, demanding equal protection for our universal human right to “religious freedom.”  We are moved by statistics.  We argue about outcomes, and not on the basis of transcendent, essential morality.  I’m not for discrimination, but what’s to stop a child molester?  The left simply counters this with its own phenomenological argument about crucified trannies whose only crime was to use a public restroom, holds up posters of Matthew Shepard and Caitlyn Jenner and gay ISIS victims (the LGB is always attached to T), throws out some cooked-up statistics about the unlikelihood of child rape in the New Toilet Order, and the majority thinks of how silly—nay, bigoted!—it is to object to the possibility of America’s daughters seeing a hairy chest or penis in the ladies’ room.  Why, frankly I’m a little ashamed of myself.    

 

[Image credit: By Javier Robles (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]