Shortly before Joe Biden was sworn in as our 46th president a federal court ruled that doctors had a constitutional right to refuse to perform gender reassignment surgery, a right they had been denied under an Obamacare mandate.
This is significant for several reasons one of which is that President Biden has vowed to promote transgender rights and on his first day in office signed an executive order that would permit transgenders to serve in the military without having to conceal their sexual identity.
According to The Blaze.com. Biden's campaign website claimed that Mr. Biden is also intent on restoring "transgender students' access to sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity. He will direct his Department of Education to vigorously enforce and investigate violations of transgender students' civil rights."
Under the guidance, all schools receiving federal funds are required to comply or risk having their funding withdrawn.
How this is just and how it unifies the country remains to be explained. Justice for the Biden administration apparently flows only in one direction, toward vocal minorities.
Why, for instance, does a biological female's right to be considered a male override someone else's right to consider that person a female? Why is one's psychology allowed to trump their biology, and why must everyone else be compelled to go along, even if they're convinced that biology, not psychology, determines gender?
If a surgeon believes that he's actually harming someone by performing gender reassignment surgery, if he believes that what he's doing is immoral, how is it just to compel him to do it? And if one's gender identity were solely, or at least mostly, a matter of one's psychology why do so many transgenders believe it's necessary to surgically change their anatomy anyway?
Under the Biden administration, biological men are evidently going to be given access to women's locker rooms and compete against women in athletics, and if one believes this to be wrong then she's just revealing her bigotry. Were a transgender man who still possesses all the male accoutrements to walk about nude in front of a group of teenage girls in a public locker room we're told by the gender radicals in the Biden administration that those girls would be bigoted to react differently than if a woman did the same thing. But why would they be?
If a transgender male competed against your daughter in a sport in which your daughter excelled against other females but consistently lost to the biological male would you consider it fair and accept the outcome with equanimity? Why should you?
If a biological male who identifies as female is convicted of a crime should he/she be placed in a women's prison? Is it fair to the female prisoners to place a biological male in their midst?
If a man is convinced he's a fifteen year-old in a thirty year-old body and he sexually assaults a thirteen year old, must we accept his fantasy and find him innocent of statutory rape?
Are feminists like Germaine Greer wrong to be outraged by biological men who consider themselves women even though they have no ovaries nor uterus, they don't menstruate, conceive and get pregnant, they don't give birth, they don't lactate, they don't possess a double X chromosome, nor do they have the developmental history of living in a female body that a woman has?
Is someone a woman just because he or she thinks she is? If someone is convinced that he's Julius Caesar reincarnated we don't acquiesce to his judgment of himself. Rather we judge him to be mentally disturbed. This is not meant to disparage people who firmly believe they're "a woman trapped in a man's body." Rather, it's to make the point that a belief about oneself isn't made true simply because one is convinced that it's true.
Furthermore, consider the confusion that our contemporary embrace of transgenderism sometimes entails. This is an actual real-life scenario taken from the publication Our Bodies, Ourselves: Two lesbians had a deep relationship with each other for over a decade, but one of them decided to transition to being a man. The two remained in their relationship, so were the partners still lesbians? They were both in a relationship with the same person as before, but was it not now a straight heterosexual relationship? If the female, now strongly committed to a man, still thinks of herself as a lesbian, is she? To continue to affirm her identity as a lesbian she has to either deny the identity of her partner as a male or affirm her partner's male identity and deny her own identity as a lesbian.
This must all be very awkward, to say the least.
In a culture in which personal identity is fluid and few sexual boundaries remain, what rationale exists for maintaining bans on group marriage (polyamory) or pedophilia? With regard to the former there no longer is any logically consistent rationale for prohibiting it. Marriage is whatever people want it to be, and neither the sex nor the number of people involved matters.
With regard to pedophilia it might be replied that this should remain illegal because children are incapable of giving consent to sexual contact, but so what? Why does a child's consent matter? Children don't consent to a lot of things we make them do, like eat their spinach, go to bed early, get vaccinated, and go to school.
Indeed, there are children whose parents are pushing them to transition hormonally and surgically to the opposite gender with the evident approval of a large number of progressive Democrats, so a child's inability to give informed consent doesn't seem to matter much to these folks anyway.
And why insist that a child's inability to give consent for sexual conduct is significant when so many men identify as pedophiles and have a deep psychological need to satisfy their desire for children? Why think that sharing sex with a child is any more heinous than sharing a meal with the child? The reason, of course, is that sex is much more than just a recreational activity and the pedophile's psychological need is a completely irrelevant justification for his behavior.
But pointing out absurdities with our current attitudes toward gender and sex no longer has purchase in a culture which has made sex into an idol and personal satisfaction and fulfilment into an absolute. It doesn't matter what the consequences are for everyone else, it doesn't matter whether the policies are reasonable and just, the transgender's personal happiness is paramount and the rest of society must bow to it.
Yet isn't it reasonable and just to say that if people want to consider their gender to be other than their biological sex they should be legally free to do so, to the extent it doesn't infringe upon the rights of others, and if others wish to consider the transgendered person to be whatever their biological sex indicates they should be legally free to do that as well?
Isn't it also reasonable and just to tell those (adults) who wish to receive gender reassignment surgery that they're free to get it from a surgeon willing to perform it, but to also assure physicians that they'll not be compelled to violate their conscience by performing surgeries they believe to be morally wrong and harmful to the patient?
But what's reasonable and just is unfortunately irrelevant in our postmodern politics. There are barriers still to be transgressed and taboos still to be smashed, and the Biden administration seems determined to prove itself equal to the task, reason and justice notwithstanding.
For more see this piece at The Daily Caller.