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Anyone who has tried asking serious questions about transgender medicine that go beyond “kindness,” “politeness” and other such anodyne slogans, will be familiar with the stock response: Why do you care? Why is this your business? Is it your body?
This stonewalling strategy was recently deployed against Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who responded scathingly last week on X (formerly Twitter): “It’s women’s business when we’re told to surrender single-sex spaces, fair sport and sex-based rights, then threatened with violence, defamation and career loss when we protest,” Rowling wrote.
Rowling has a valid point, but she is only scratching the surface. The reality is that transgender rights and queer advocacy may be the single most intrusive or invasive modern civil rights law ever devised. When considering all the penumbras and emanations of queer advocacy, it’s hard to think of who would not be affected, either directly or indirectly, by these policies that demand third-party validation, affirmation, acquiescence and participation.
Trans rights are not merely a question of personal identity and personal expression; it is part of a political project to restructure society according to queer theory, whose raison d’etre is problematizing normativity and celebrating sexual transgressiveness. The legal and social changes rest upon a series of controversial propositions: sex is a social construct, sex is “assigned” at birth, one’s sex can change, there are more than two sexes, and sex is situated not in the body but in the mind. These propositions are now presented as settled science in medical schools, medical journals and popular media.
The downstream effects of redefining human nature are profound. One example: The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recent decision to classify “misgendering” a nonbinary person as a violation of the U.S. Civil Rights Act, potentially affecting millions of employees. One can also see the impact on untold numbers of parents, teachers and administrators in California, and any other state that would follow California’s lead, where schools are now legally permitted to conceal students’ sex changes from their parents.
Just as consequential for the public is President Joe Biden’s 2022 Executive Order proposing policies that could make it illegal for a parent or teacher to question a child’s professed transgender identity, a policy already in place in a number of states that ban “conversion therapy” of gay and transgender minors. In gender transitions, there may be no actual therapy involved; what’s at stake is a cautious a wait-and-see approach (called “watchful waiting”) to make sure a child or teen is not prescribed puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to treat autism, internalized homophobia or some other hidden problem. The Biden Administration’s ambitions don’t stop at the U.S. border; they expressly “address so-called conversion therapy around the world,” characterizing a reluctance to automatically affirm a child’s or adolescent’s belief that they’re transgender as an international human rights abuse.
Such policies govern personal relations in families, schools and employers, leaving almost no one untouched. Joe Biden has declared on multiple occasions that trans rights are the civil rights issue of our time, and vice-president Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic contender for the White House, displays her preferred pronouns (she/her) on her Twitter page. Unless the U.S. President is engaging in cynical hyperbole, a civil rights issue is by definition of monumental consequence, not a private matter that the public has no legitimate standing to question.
In the broadest sense, the concept of trans rights is anchored in the metaphysical belief that some people don’t fit either of the two sexes or are trapped in the wrong body, and it’s society’s moral duty to help children accept these ideas, and live them out if they so choose. Hence the nationwide deployment of drag queen story hours in elementary schools, public libraries and book stores, and the dissemination of sexually transgressive queer-themed books in public libraries and public schools — a rescue mission to save children from being sucked into the harmful vortex of the gender binary.
By now most people have heard of the graphic novel that The New York Times has dubbed the most banned book in America – Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer – which includes explicit imagery of teenagers engaging in sex acts. This book is not an outlier. A random sampling of kid-friendly titles displayed on the Pride Month exhibit in the entrance of public libraries in Raleigh, N.C. turned up such titles as The Tragedy of Homosexuality, which depicts straightness in such terms as coercive, dishonest and repulsive – “a sick and boring life.” Another book, The Queen’s English: The LGBTQIA+ Dictionary, defines words like cockring, cockblock, boy pussy, box, kinkster, and includes graphic depictions of BDSM scenes showing a person in a submissive posture squatting over a bowl, and humans immobilized by what appear to be torture implements from the Inquisition. Queer books indict the cisheteropatriarchy and celebrate sex changes; one picture book depicts a child wrapped in a chest-binder, declaring: “Take that boobs! Take that patriarchy!” According to the national organization Drag Story Hour, the stated goal of drag queens reading queer-themed books to children is to inspire children with “glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” The hope is to get kids to “see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where everyone can be their authentic selves!” If that’s not conversion therapy, what is?
Even in cases where the presence of trans persons is minimal, the impact is maximal. The number of transgender athletes at competitive levels is vanishingly small, granted. But over time, as they accumulate more medals, trans female (natal male) athletes will break every single record and dominate every women’s sport (except maybe women’s gymnastics), erasing women athletes from the record books. Note that male athletes face no such threat, as they will always outperform transgender males (natal females).
Such displacements are not limited to sports. The most recent Miss Universe pageant featured two trans female contestants — from Portugal and from Holland — who were crowned in their respective countries as the supreme embodiments of female beauty. By representing their countries, these trans women (who were born with penises) surpassed their nation’s most gorgeous women in female beauty — a truly staggering achievement. Sports Illustrated magazine has featured a transgender female (natal male) on its swimsuit cover, and transgender girls (born as boys) have won “homecoming queen” titles in American high schools. Trans women are beating biological women at everything, and they will beat them in every conceivable domain.
So let’s do away with the spurious claim that trans rights are a private matter, no one’s business but the transitioner’s. When we’re scolded for asking questions like misbehaving children, and commanded to be kind and to be respectful, we can be sure the policies in question will affect just about everyone.
John Murawski is a journalist in Raleigh, NC. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, RealClearInvestigations, UnHerd, Religion News Service, among other publications.