Bill would erode protections
Equality Act puts women in a tough situation
Whether caffeine is good for you is debatable, whether there are only two sexes is not, yet Congress is poised to enact a new federal law that will allow people to choose whether they are male or female based on how they feel.
The bill, known as the Equality Act, will amend numerous civil rights laws by changing the meaning of the word sex and conflating it with gender identity, so that both become optional. Huge amounts of money is being spent lobbying for the bill, which passed the House in March and is slated for a Senate hearing this month.
With all the major issues we have to deal with in this country, it is curious that Congress has made the Equality Act a priority, especially given what has happened in other countries where similar laws were recently enacted.
A woman in the UK named Maya Forstater was recently punished by her university for saying there are only two sexes. Another UK woman is being criminally charged for publicly saying that sex and gender identity are different, and a law student in Australia who said out loud in a class that “women have vaginas” was investigated by her school for violating the civil rights of trans people. Both countries recently enacted versions of the Equality Act. Scratching your head yet? In most news stories on the topic, the focus is on trans men and boys participating in women’s and girls’ sports. But precious little is being written about the bigger issue of the Equality Act allowing people to change their sex regardless of their biology, whenever they like.
Congress seems blithely unconcerned about the fact that a person cannot change their biological sex no matter what the law says. People can change their gender identity because gender identity is based on how one feels and some people feel more male than female and vice versa, but sex is not about feelings, it’s about biological reality.
As the Supreme Court has said many times, sex, like race, cannot change. It is determined at birth and lasts a lifetime.
There are extremely rare cases where people are born with issues that make the determination of whether a person is male or female more difficult, but Congress did not propose the Equality Act out of concern for that handful of people; they proposed it to undermine women’s rights because if sex is optional women cease to exist as a stable political class of people.
Sex being optional would also make men’s crimes against women more difficult to measure because male offenders could declare themselves female at the time of arrest, and erase the sexist nature of the offense. It would also justify having courts subject sex discrimination to worse legal protections compared to race discrimination because the law affords greater legal protections to people with immutable/ unchangeable characteristics.
Congress could avoid these problems by simply adding the phrase “gender identity” as a separate category in the list of categories already protected by federal civil rights laws, rather than changing the meaning of sex to include gender identity. If it did this, people should support the bill because a man should not suffer discrimination because he wears a dress and lipstick, nor should a woman suffer discrimination because she drives a truck and wears overalls. But Congress refuses to make this change and insists on making sex and gender whimsically changeable categories in the same federal definition.
Imagine how the public would react if Congress proposed a law to change the meaning of the word race to include “racial identity.” This would water down the political value of racial justice groups, and give white people a right to appropriate Black culture and access the benefits of Affirmative Action laws, university admission preferences, etc. It would also make it very difficult to measure the problem of racism because white offenders who target Black victims could choose to call themselves Black, making the racist nature of the crime less visible.
How people choose to identify should be protected by anti-discrimination laws, but not at the expense of women as a class because how one feels is not more important than another person’s lived reality.
‘ ... if sex is optional women cease to exist as a stable political class of people.’