World War T continues apace, with the latest action being the Battle of the Bathrooms. Once again, the Left is applying its trademark obfuscatory misdirection. The issue of adult transsexuals in public bathrooms is a complete non-issue, but it is being used to give a façade of respectability to something much more subversive.
Consider for a moment the position of the transsexual—the person who wants to change sex and actually goes through the various procedures to make that possible. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, sex change procedures can transform a person to the point that their original sex is more difficult to discern. Furthermore, transsexuals are typically not eager to advertise their distinction—that is, after all, the whole point of going through those quite drastic procedures—and so use discretion, not harassing or disturbing the ordinary users of public facilities. For those in transition, who are caught in an uncomfortable half-way point as far as appearance goes, discretion resolves many issues and their small numbers keep unresolved issues rare. In short, transsexuals use whatever facilities most closely match their appearance and don’t cause any trouble, so virtually no one even knows that they’re there.
The merely transgender—utterly contemptible individuals who insist that everyone else respect their self-image but do nothing to actualize it themselves—are more of a problem, but one which would resolve itself in fairly short order were it not part of a larger agenda.
As far as adults go, the battle of the bathrooms consists entirely of empty signaling. North Carolina has officially required people to use the facility corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates, but they are not checking birth certificates at the door; Target has announced that they will allow anyone to use to facility corresponding to their gender identity, but they are likewise not checking gender identities at the door. All these organizations have done is plant their standards on one side or the other of WWT: those who consider trans people to be pathological cases vs. those who consider them completely normal.
The true targets in the latest pro-trans offensive are the children. President Barack Obama’s strong suggestion to schools that they make special accommodations for trans students as well as moves by a variety of localities and activist groups specifically seek both to inculcate trans acceptance in the most intellectually vulnerable among us and to undermine parental authority.
Sure, turning all public bathrooms into unisex facilities is a necessary condition of normalizing transgenderism, but a both necessary and sufficient condition, in the long run, is to convince children that trans people are perfectly normal. Young people are already more accepting of gender and sexual deviance than their elders—if children are told by their teachers that there are fifty-seven or more different genders, they will believe it, accept it, and consider it perfectly normal. And when these children grow up, they will teach their kids the same thing, and so on.
Additionally, by using the school system to teach transgenderism to children, the Left is also subverting parents and families. No longer are parents’ beliefs to be considered in the education of their children—only the ideology of the educators matters. This is not exactly news, but if you have children of your own, you should be looking into homeschooling or at least finding an alternative to public schooling.
Promoting trans acceptance among children also undermines the family order, such as it is these days, in the traditional, leftist fashion: by giving children a voice. When women were given the vote, they were at the same time encouraged to consider their own, individual interests, as opposed to those of their husband, their children, or their family as a whole. If a wife decided she disagreed with her husband on politics, she would break with him and vote her own way. The divorce between husbands and wives on matters of politics sowed the seeds for normalization of more extensive marital divergences later on. In the same way, telling children that they can be trans, that it’s okay to want to change your sex, and to assist them in doing so, with or without their parent’s knowledge or consent, can only serve to divorce children from their parents even more than they already are.
That encouraging transgenderism among children amounts to child abuse will soon become the main line of argument for those opposed to trans normalization, and it’s a powerful argument. After all, young children make all sorts of extravagant claims—boys claim to be knights or dragons; girls claim to be unicorns or princesses—that we don’t take seriously, so why should claims of being trans be given any more consideration? And children are routinely barred from making important decisions, especially ones that could be deemed harmful, such as driving, consuming alcohol, or consenting to sexual relations. It makes little sense that people who are not considered responsible enough to have sex should be given permission to choose their sex.
Indeed, it would be very easy for pro-trans parents to subtly force their child down the trans route based on a few crazy utterances he or she made when merely five-years-old. And considering the drastic physical changes undergone by transsexuals and the psychiatric problems often experienced by trans people in general, such a road should not be tread lightly and the decision should be made only by a person having reached the age of majority. This approach combines compassion for trans people while preserving traditional gender norms, and so it will be very popular in the future.
The Left will not accept this transphobic bigotry, of course, because their goal is precisely to undermine traditional gender norms. If children are not permitted to choose their sex, if changing one’s sex is considered a serious and even dangerous matter, then the basic dichotomy of man and woman will remain largely intact. People who change sex will be looked upon as abnormal, and people who are more “gender fluid” will be considered especially insane. There will still be women, and most intolerably, there will still be men.
More concretely, if sex changes are delayed until after children leave school, then the project of coercing recalcitrant transphobes becomes harder. Schools have great power of children, and nearly every child in the country goes through the public school system. When children leave school and enter either college of the working world, the Left’s control over them diminishes. Adults have both greater freedom than children and greater responsibility. Additionally, adults are more mature and more inclined to dismiss their earlier notions of sex change and focus on working, paying bills, and raising families of their own. The notion that transgenderism might just be a “phase” that some people pass through will be resisted as viciously as the same notion for homosexuality was, however true it may be.
The position that trans people are not normal is one of the most easily defendable positions imaginable, being grounded in obvious facts of biology and psychology. The Left has its work cut out for it undermining this notion. The issue of trans adults on which the Left is presently focused, however, is a pure distraction; the real fight is over children. The line has to be drawn here: this far and no further.