A week ago, I was reading a news article about the spike in deaths during the summer due to the coronavirus for those who are pregnant. What I found most striking about the article was not the data regarding the fatalities, but how the writer referred to those who were pregnant. Repeatedly, the term used was “pregnant people” to refer those individuals who were dying from the coronavirus. It was the first time I had seen the term. In May, I heard a member of Congress using the term “birthing people” during a public hearing, which I thought very odd.
In a clumsy attempt to have what the Left says is “inclusive” language, we must say pregnant people instead of pregnant women, and we must say birthing people instead of mothers. This change in language is supposedly necessary, because the Left considers women (born female) who transition to men to be men; but these men still have female reproductive organs and can still give birth. In the eyes of the Left, both men and women can give birth. Very confusing.
At the University of Pennsylvania, there is a transgender woman, Lia Thomas, who has recently broken women’s swimming records. In news reports, journalist have you used the terms “shattered” and “smash” to describe the breaking of the prior records. It should be noted that the 22-year-old Lia competed at the school as a man for three years, as Will Thomas. NCAA rules mandate at least one year of testosterone suppression treatment to be eligible to compete as a woman.
In June 2018, some Connecticut parents expressed outrage when two transgender girls won the top prizes at the state championship for track and field. Terry Miller won first place and Andraya Yearwood came in second place. Parents complained that Miller and Yearwood had an unfair advantage over non-transgender students. Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference rules allow high school athletes to compete on the genders with which they identify. Its executive director, Glenn Lungarini, says that the athletes’ right to compete is no different than other classes of people not being allowed to compete together in the past.
In the mixed martial arts, a commentator described a 2013 match between Fallon Fox and Erika Newsome as follows:
Fox, a male to female transgender athlete, destroyed Erika Newsome in a Coral Gables, FL, MMA fight during which she “secured a grip on Newsome’s head… With her hands gripping the back of Newsome’s skull, she delivered a massive knee, bringing her leg up while pulling her opponent’s head down. The blow landed on Newsome’s chin and dropped her, unconscious, face-first on the mat.” That was Newsome’s last pro fight.
Fox also beat Tamikka Brents, in 2014, a fight lasting just over two minutes after the referee ended the contest. Here is some commentary on the aftermath:
Brents received seven staples to her head, and also suffered a concussion. She was overpowered by Fox to an extent that even the orbital bone inside her skull was fractured.
Fallon Fox was born male and is a transgender woman.
This is complete madness.
Title IX (of the Education Amendments of 1972) states the following:
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. . .
While the language does not reference sports specifically, competitive sports are part of education programs. There has also been a long tradition of having separate sports teams for boys/men and girls/women. That tradition is based on biology. The biological fact that credentials one to be eligible for girls/women sports teams is the absence of the Y chromosome. Simply stated, one must be female to participate in girls/women sports.
Someone who is male but feels feminine or dresses femininely or has had gender reassignment surgery and undergoes hormone therapy, does not change the chromosomal fact of being male.
If LeBron James began calling himself LaBron and began taking a steady diet of testosterone suppressors for one year (or ten years!) and then joined the WNBA, we would all see the absurdity in this.
The absurdity, however, continues and is embraced by the highest levels of the federal government. The Biden Administration’s 2022 fiscal budget replaced the word mother with birthing people.
In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), that gender identity is a protected class under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VII:
It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
To protect gender identity under Title VII makes a mockery of the entire notion of civil rights. One of the basic tenets that undergirds the idea of providing special civil rights protection is immutability. Race is an immutable characteristic because an individual does not choose his ancestry. Characteristics like color, religion, and national origin also have to do with ancestry. Since one does not get to select his sixteen great-great-grandparents, it would seem to be unfair to hold such traits against him. Sex, on the other hand, is not about ancestry, but about chromosomes, which is also an immutable characteristic.
When Congress included sex as a protected classification, representatives and senators were addressing issue of the unfairness of treating a woman differently (employment opportunities, harassment, etc.) simply on account of being a woman (this would be true for a man as well).
Transgender individuals are not entitled to special civil rights protection because being transgender is the polar opposite of immutability. Transgender individuals affirmatively select to change their gender identity.
Authoring the opinion of the Court, Justice Gorsuch wrote:
An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.
Justice Gorsuch uses tortured logic to shoehorn special civil rights protection for transgender individuals claiming that it is their sex that is at issue. This interpretation completely ignores the context of why Congress enacted the law in the first place.
It may be unwise for an employer to fire a person because he is transgender, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not provide any legal protection from such a decision. At a minimum, Congress would have to pass a separate statute to address this issue. Very likely, we would have to adopt a constitutional amendment to authorize Congress to act in this area.
The federal government has shown through gestures in language and in interpretation of the law an openness to the concerns of transgender individuals. The Administration has approved of transgender men competing in women’s sports; the Supreme Court has not ruled on the matter (yet). Still, this openness is very encouraging to the Left, which is not in the interest of women and girls who want to play professional or scholastic sports.
In order to combat this assault on women athletes, we must speak in clear language. Transgender women are not women; they are men pretending to be women. Out of good manners, our society can go along with pretense regarding which restrooms to use and with pronouns to use. We must, however, draw a line when it comes to sports. The setting of records, college scholarships, and the physical well-being of women are on the line.
Abraham Lincoln once posed this question: How many legs does a dog have? The response was four. Lincoln went on and asked: If we call the tail a leg, then how many legs does a fog have? The response was five. Lincoln stated: No, just because you call a tail a leg doesn’t make it so.
We can learn a lot from our sixteenth president.