Bathroom Apartheid, Self-Identified Gender, And Other Progressive Solecisms
By HARLEY PRICE
(Editor’s Note: This article is based on one of the 46 essays in Price’s new book, Give Speech a Chance: Heretical Essays on What You Can’t Say or Even Think, available from fgfbooks.com and Amazon.)
- + + Such is the speed with which progressives have habitually managed to overthrow, one by one, the universal consensual norms, traditional social arrangements, and self-evident truths upon which Western civilization has been sustained for millennia, that it needn’t come as a shock to recall that it was a mere seven years ago that President Obama, America’s “hope-and-change” president, became America’s hope-and-sex-change president, when he issued his solemn directive to the effect that access to the bathrooms and locker rooms of one’s “self-identified” gender was a “civil right.”
Since then, under the nondiscrimination protections now universally conferred upon the latest victimological categories of “gender identity or expression,” this newest of entitlements has been enshrined in virtually all of the human rights codes of the West, and the mildest criticism of it is punishable in the courts as another “hate crime.”
(In Scotland recently, a serial rapist’s request to be sent to a women’s prison was duly granted, his discovery that he was a “she” having expediently occurred in the interval betwixt conviction and sentencing.)
A once-serious liberalism has thus descended yet again into self-parody. There is no conceivable “civil right” for the transgendered, transgendering, or thinking-about-transgendering to expose their non-conforming members to the opposite sex in the bathrooms or change-rooms of the nation. On the contrary, civilized societies have from the beginning recognized and enforced a right to sexual privacy and modesty for their citizens, especially women and adolescent children.
But then, enrolling tinier and more arcane victim-groups as clients, and manufacturing “rights” out of thin air, have become the expedients by which modern progressives have bestowed upon themselves the exclusive privilege of accusation: denouncing those who disagree with them as racists, sexists, misogynists, fascists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes, transphobes, biphobes — the list of phobias grows daily — thereby turning dissenters from progressive orthodoxy into moral pariahs, and effectively shutting down debate.
It is, of course, a defining trait of progressivism that its adherents refuse to argue about ideas, preferring instead to impugn the character and motivation of their opponents. The supplementation of the old “isms” with the new “phobias” in the heresiological lexicon of the Left makes it clear that non-progressives are not merely viewed as pernicious, but in need of psychiatric counseling.
In fact, whenever the priests of the Church of Progress come up with a new “phobia” by which to question the mental health of anyone with the effrontery to disagree with them, you can be sure that the real phobia is the paranoiac fear suffered by themselves and their victim-groups that the white-European-male-heteronormative-Christian “power structure” is once again plotting to get them.
The invocation of the legacy of American slavery and racism, no matter how trivial the context at hand, has similarly become a ubiquitous prop of progressive melodrama. Whether the affront is under-representation of women in the boardroom, moral disapproval of abortion or homosexual “marriage,” or little Joseph-wanting-to-be-Josephine having to line up at the urinals with the boys, it’s always the 1930s Deep South all over again, women and homosexuals are still laboring in the brickyards of Goshen, and any opposition to the progressive social agenda is dismissed as the sputum of irrational prejudice.
The legal strictures enacted by the progressive establishment against “conversion therapy” — i.e., any attempt by parents, priests, or psychotherapists to advise gender-dysphoric pubescents to pause for a moment or two before undertaking irreversible genital mutilations — might lead one to believe that there is an existential crisis facing America’s transgendered population.
But no transgendered youths have been force-marched back to the operating tables for restorative surgery. And if the occasional transgendering male student has really set his heart on — or been indoctrinated into setting his heart on — urinating in the girls’ washroom or showering with them after gym class, whatever psychological trauma he might incur by being asked to perform his ablutions in the company of his biological brothers is inconsiderable. (He can hardly affect shock at the sight of the same membra virilia as have been his constant companions since birth.)
Quite another thing, one would have thought, is the embarrassment and confusion suffered by entire cohorts of pubescent and prepubescent schoolgirls. But then, when faced with the antithetical desiderata of their various client groups, progressives merely suspend the logical principle of non-contradiction.
For the past three decades, the great anxiety of radical feminism has been sexual harassment, and many male workers, especially teachers, have been witch-hunted out of their jobs for the crime of glancing (for a few seconds longer than permissible) at young girls in swimming pools, or the décolletages of their female co-workers. But that was then. Liberalism has since added another victim-group to its hierarchy of concern, and the prospect of habitually predatory males exposing their genitalia in girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms is now insouciantly dismissed.
Way back in 2016, when the idea of transgender bathrooms was still regarded as controversial if not unthinkable by a majority of the population, an editorial in the liberal Charlotte Observer telegraphed the rhetorical strategy by which the benighted recalcitrance of the normal and the sane might eventually be overcome:
“Yes, the thought of male genitalia in girls’ locker rooms — and vice-versa — might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort — with blacks sharing facilities, with gays sharing marriage — then realizing that it was not nearly so awful as some people imagined.”
The adjuration to fusty conservatives is always to “get over it,” just as they have been forced by history to get over their endemic addictions to racism, sexism, homophobia, and other atavisms, along with their bourgeois opposition to such liberal benefactions as abortion, same-sex “marriage,” epidemic illegitimacy, and multi-generational welfare dependency. From the sunny uplands of liberal moral superiority, the Observer here perfectly sounds the progressive note of sneering condescension.
It is generous of progressives to concede that parents might reasonably fear that their daughters will be sexually molested, violated, or at least traumatized when one of their transgendering but as yet surgically unreconstructed male classmates enters the girls’ washroom; yes, enterprising voyeurs might even take advantage of the situation and use the, “Well, Your Honor, I was feeling like a girl at the time defense” (cf. the Scottish serial rapist mentioned above).
But what are the sensitivities of privileged straight persons (now, paradoxically, including women) by comparison to the ongoing humiliations suffered for aeons by the LGBTQ2+ — the letters and digits proliferate as fast as the phobias — community?
Surely it must be disorienting for high school girls to learn that male culture is rape culture in social studies class, and then have to confront the instruments of their oppression in the locker room. It is in any case always entertaining to observe the intellectual contortions performed by progressives to balance the mutually irreconcilable demands of their various client “minorities,” whose position on the victimological wheel of fortune is constantly in flux, and subject to a calculus as arcane as that which determines the world rankings in tennis or golf.
How can one insist that the safety of women be society’s highest priority — a foundational principle of paleo-feminism — and at the same time legally guarantee access for anatomical males to women’s bathrooms? How, besides, can one be in favor of women’s and homosexual equality, and at the same time regard “Islamophobia” as a mortal vice? It’s on the order of being in favor of sheep’s rights, while condemning shepherds for their irrational fear of wolves.
There is a certain intellectual consistency, at least, between the expedient fluidity of leftists’ positions on women, homosexuals, and Islam, and their affectation that gender is a matter of personal fiat. For progressives, neither words nor states of being are ever objectively fixed. Thus marriage is not a union between a man and a woman as determined by immemorial custom or law, but a gauzy and malleable concept to be defined and redefined in accordance with the evolving opinion of the sneering elites.
The civilized revulsion evinced by humanity for thousands of years against abortion and infanticide are now anaesthetized when these are re-imagined, not as crimes against innocent human beings but emancipating “choices,” and the “victims” are no longer the aborted children but the mothers who were invariably “driven by circumstances” (poverty, abuse, the demands of career, etc.) to make their “choice”: not to kill their baby, mind you, but merely to “terminate a pregnancy,” to remove a “mass of protoplasm,” a “parasitical growth.”
To progressives, tone-deaf as ever to irony, this is all within the purview of women’s “reproductive health,” even though reproduction is the last thing abortion fosters, and pregnancy is anything but a disease. In their inventiveness, the euphemisms and verbal inversions of today’s progressives are scarcely inferior to the Orwellisms of Soviet propaganda.
With their neoteric concept of “self-identified gender,” progressives have in fact undone thousands of years of genuine human progress. Since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, it has been recognized that knowledge, science, indeed, all intellectual, moral, and political advancement, depend upon the distinction between subjective feeling and objective truth. In his own eyes, an observer might “self-identify” a stick immersed in water as crooked, but as Socrates pointed out in the fifth century B.C., that hardly alters the fact that objective reason knows it to be straight (no pun intended here). In paying his debts to his tutor, the student of arithmetic might prefer to think that two plus two obols equals three; but self-identified mathematics has never been on.
Nonetheless, fresh from their victorious campaign to confer upon homosexuals the “human right” to self-identify as married (by redefining marriage to suit them, that is), the Church of Progress has inevitably moved on to the right of self-identified gender. Self-identification is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. For as long as the race has existed, lunatic asylums have been filled with little old ladies who self-identified as the Empress Anastasia, or men who self-identified as Napoleon; but the dominant majority of the sane has always responded, “No you’re not!”, and essayed to nurse them back to health.
When in the early Sixties I was a prepubescent of the same age as the young boys who are apparently today waking up en masse to discover that they are really young girls, any number of my friends self-identified as Ringo Starr, and proceeded to annoy the hell out of their parents and neighbors by banging a-rhythmically on their drums at two in the morning in order to prove the truth of their delusion.
In most cases, with responsible parenting, professional counseling, and societal adjurations to normalcy, these fantasies proved transient, and the imperial posturing and autistic banging have ceased.
That gender is elective and fungible (another “social construct”) is both the latest and greatest confabulation in a progressive fairy tale that seeks to prettify social and psychological pathologies as normative and healthy. As recently as ten years ago, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-V still identified “gender dysphoria” as a relatively rare psychological disorder of adolescence, which had been successfully treated in the overwhelming majority of cases. And in a paper released in April of 2016, the American College of Pediatricians warned:
“Conditioning children into believing a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse. Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education . . . will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to ‘gender clinics’ where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will “choose” a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.
Today, of course, less than a decade later, the longstanding consensus of psychiatrists and physicians on gender dysphoria and the immutable reality of biological sex has peremptorily evaporated, and under pressure to conform to LGBTQ orthodoxy, the “experts” have completely reversed themselves. Yet again, that is, the holy “science” that progressives are always adjuring us to “follow” has betrayed itself as a craven camp-follower of ideological fashion.
Even still, it is odd in the extreme that progressive parents would want to do to their children what the Communist government of the former East Germany once did to its Olympic athletes.
Surely, as despisers of everything “man-made” and lovers of everything “organic” and “natural,” progressives ought to take a step back and reflect for a moment upon the brave new world they have wrought. In their sanctimonious campaigns against artificial fertilizers, genetically modified foods, and anthropogenic global warming, progressives have always presented themselves as the altruistic defenders of a defense-less and wholesomely innocent Nature.
In truth, they have waged war on nature on practically every front: aborting natural, healthy reproductive processes, normalizing contra-natural sexual relations, arbitrarily fixing the term of natural human life by the same “heroic” — one should say, anti-heroic — medical methods they deplore when used to extend it, and now, abolishing natural gender by injecting healthy adolescents with synthetic hormones, amputating working members, and replacing them with industrially manufactured prostheses.
While the traditional iconography depicts Dame Nature as a matron suckling an infant at her breast, the Nature of modern progressives is a monstress in a hazmat suit, brandishing syringe, scissors, and scalpel. Yet, the same gastronomic puritans who are terrified by genetically modified crops are blithely phlegmatic about chemically modified human beings. The modern progressive’s Walden Pond has turned into a Monsanto laboratory for the ideological re-engineering of human biology.
