The transgender locker room “guidance”, power, and punishment

Here’s an article, one of many, about the Obama administration’s decree on transgender students: “Obama Administration forces transgender bathroom rules on every school in America.”  The key bit comes as a quote from the Washington Post:

The directive comes from two top administration officials: Catherine E. Lhamon, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, and Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. It will put state and local officials and higher-education institutions on notice that they risk losing federal education aid if they limit students to areas or teams based on their gender assigned at birth.

The action comes just days after the Justice Department and the state of North Carolina filed dueling lawsuits over a new law requiring individuals in that state to use bathrooms based on their birth gender.

Citing Title IX, which prohibits sexual discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funding, the two officials warn that the obligation “to ensure nondiscrimination on the basis of sex requires schools to provide transgender students equal access to educational programs and activities even in circumstances in which other students, parents, or community members raise objections or concerns.

“As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students,” reads the letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The bottom line: schools have been told they’ll have Title IX funding pulled unless they permit declared transgender or gendernonconforming students full access to restrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, and overnight accomodations and dormitories conforming to their declared gender, and protect them from any form of actual or perceived harassment, or lack of acceptance, from staff or fellow students.

All of this rests on an administration declaration that Title IX’s protection against discrimination on account of sex also encompasses protection against discrimination based on “gender identity.”  And it rests on a further understanding:  that one’s sex/gender is determined based on one’s perception, not on one’s physiology.   Hence, “transgender girls” are not simply “boys who feel like girls” but “real girls” who should be treated as such, and vice-versa, because, in the Administration’s interpretion, it’s illegal to treat one “kind of girl” different than another.

In ordinary circumstances, it’s poor rhetoric to resort to “dictionary definitions.”  It’s the classic introductory paragraph in a high school essay.  But here’s how the online Webster’s dictionary defines “woman”:

an adult female human being

and what does “female” mean?

of or relating to the sex that can produce young or lay eggs.

This, of course, has nothing to do with how one perceives onesself.  But in 2016, the claim of “identity” has become enough, according to “trans” advocates, to “become” a given gender — whether male, female, or some concept of Third Gender.

Certainly it wasn’t that way, not too long ago, when the terminology consisted of “sex changes” and “becoming male/female” as a result of hormone administration and surgery.  Now that’s been replaced by “gender confirmation surgery” and the insistence that such a person really is a girl (or a boy) regardless of chromosomes, or hormones, or genitalia, from the moment that person “feels”/”identifies” that way, or, really, from birth, on the expectation that this feeling/identiy has always been there, even if the individual was unable to understand or articulate it.  Hence, the outward appearances of such a person, rather than the inward “identity,” are the “birth defects” to be remedied with surgery, or even are irrelevant, so that we see floating around the internet claims that it’s bigoted for a man to be unwilling to date a “girlfriend with a penis.”

Fundamentally, the claim is this:  something in your biology controls how your brain perceives your gender.  If you “identify as a woman” — even if born male — then, this thinking goes, you truly are a woman, because that’s something hardwired in your brain, not a voluntary choice, in the same way as sexual orientation is determined to be hardwired — in each case due to genetics or the consequences of in-utero development.

But this is just one claim, one way of viewing what it means to be “male” and “female.”  There is nothing particularly more “right” about this than the opposite claim that one’s sex, for humans as for all animals, is based on chromosomes, and reasonably classified into which type of the species, childbearing or not, one is, with an asterisk only for individuals who are intersex due to a chromosomal abnormality, or as a consequence of in utero development.  The fact that various local governments have accepted the concept of becoming the opposite sex, legally, under various conditions (requiring surgery, hormones, or merely a declaration) is a matter of, well, law, and has to do with a balancing of interests and a creation of a legal concept that isn’t in line with biological reality.

And the treatment of children in school is a balancing of interests.  It is not as simple as a declaration that “transgender girls are girls, full stop.”  Should a preteen girl be obliged to change in locker rooms alongside (to sidestep terminology) individuals with penises?  Should a girl be assigned a “transgirl” roommate on a school trip, or, upon reaching adulthood, as a college roommate?  Is a girl a “bigot” for being unwilling to change in front of a classmate with male genitalia?  What if that girl is from a religion that is particularly concerned with issues of modesty, such as Islam, and with the (in)appropriateness of girls viewing male genitalia, and vice versa?  And, no, it is simply not practical to ask schools to undertake the massive remodeling project (both in terms of cost and added space required) to provide individual, wholly private changing and showering stalls for each student in gym class.

What the Administration has done is such a shocking overreach that it’s hard to comprehend.  This is not a matter of “rights” or a simple issue of a proper application of existing, settled law.  This is the brute-force creation of law.

And their declaration, knowing that local school districts will have to fight back, and will generally prefer to cave than fuss with the expenditures it requires, and are at risk of like-minded judges confirming the Administration’s declaration — well, it seems like nothing other than a raw exercise in power, and a punitive one at that, meant to strike back at conservatives, with the declaration that schoolchildren, and their parents, have no right to traditional sex-segregated changing spaces.

After all, why this shift, from “sex is based on physiology, but we allow legal sex changes as an accommodation” to “a transgirl is a girl and has the legal rights thereof”?  It’s not a matter of science.  Science can claim that the feeling of one’s “true sex” may be deeply hardwired, but the determination that the self-perception trumps the physiology of penis, uterus, etc., is a decision, not of science, but of society and law.

And once you shift from the notion of accommodation and decent treatment for people in difficult situations (that is, individuals who would experience real, significant, and lifelong distress if unable to undergo the set of procedures labelled “sex change” and be treated by others and receive legal recognition as the other sex), to demands of “rights”, you can access that language that says that your opponents are bigots whose concerns are not to be balanced but disregarded — which, of course, gives you power.

Image:  a generic locker room, from  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AHK_%E5%A0%85%E5%B0%BC%E5%9C%B0%E5%9F%8E_Kennedy_Town_%E5%A3%AB%E7%BE%8E%E9%9D%9E%E8%B7%AF%E5%B8%82%E6%94%BF%E5%A4%A7%E5%BB%88_Smithfield_Municipal_Services_Building_%E6%9B%B4%E8%A1%A3%E5%AE%A4_changing_room_Sept-2011.jpg; By Limysei1235 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons