Four bits of news from the front lines of World War T in the last week or so.
The first is the continuing news of Hollywood and Silicon Valley virtue signalers saying that they’re happy to do business in countries that countenance horrible crimes against homosexuals—but that their moral codes just won’t let them do business in North Carolina, where a new law is trying to keep men out of women’s bathrooms.
The second was the firing of Curt Schilling from ESPN for posting an internet meme on his Facebook page which, like the North Carolina law, is pointed not at “transgenders” but at men who want to use public women’s restrooms.
Taken together, these two items signal something quite alarming: Transgender bathroom use is the new gay marriage.
You will recall that back in the dark, benighted days of our Republic—say, the year 2011, when Barack Obama believed that gay marriage should never be legalized—the people who promoted gay marriage insisted that it could never lead to other societal revolutions. Well, that didn’t take long. The line from gay marriage to trans bathrooms is about as straight as they come. Partly this is the logical philosophical progression of worldview that sees identity as wholly plastic. Partly it’s the result of the creation of a grievance-industrial complex which now needs endless culture war to feed its maw.
Either way, like gay marriage, we once again have an idea that ten years ago no one would have thought even the subject of possible discussion. And now it has become an Official Stance of Good-Thinking People that you disagree with it at the peril of your livelihood. Schilling may be the first person in America to lose his job for publicly disagreeing with the transgender bathroom regime, but he will not be the last. There will be plenty of Brendan Eichs in World War T.
Item number three from the week was a Twitter contretemps between David Marcus, of the Federalist, and Zack Ford, the “LGBT editor” at Think Progress. Marcus wrote a piece arguing that if we’re going to come to some sort of societal accord on the trans-bathroom question, we need to have an actual definition of what “transgender” actually is.
This is a sensible point. The thinking behind laws such as North Carolina’s is not a concern that men who believe they are women—someone such as, say, Caitlyn/Bruce Jenner—are going to head into women’s bathrooms and harass/bother/assault women. No, the concern is that once you open up women’s bathrooms to anyone, then you have no mechanism for keeping any men out of them. And there are a lot of creepy, cretinous men out there who would be happy to claim to be “transgendered” if it allowed them access to women’s facilities to get their rocks off. And that there needs to be some mechanism to keep these men out of the same bathroom your 9-year-old daughter uses.
Anyway, after Marcus published his piece, he got into a back-and-forth on Twitter with Ford, who was upset about the photo the Federalist used with the piece, which pictured a person of indeterminate gender sticking his/her head through a hole in a wall. I’ll spare you the details of the fight, but what it boiled down to was this: Ford insisted that the guy/girl in the photo must be a cis-man because he/she had facial hair, arm hair, a short haircut, and wore a man’s watch. To which Marcus correctly pointed out that once you strip away objective norms for determining gender (meaning: science), there is simply no way for any person to reliably determine anyone else’s gender based on body hair and the watch they wear. Their gender simply is whatever they say it is.
You could see your way to a world where there’s a fair and compassionate bathroom regime that gives a post- or mid-operative transgender man permission to use a women’s rest room. (Or vice versa.) Or maybe you could come up with some other fair-minded criteria: Say, grant restroom rights to men who have been living as a woman for X-number of years, or have gone to the trouble of having the sex on their driver’s license changed. Perhaps there’s a better place to draw the line—I’m just spitballing here.
But the problem is that entire idea of transgenderism abhors a line. The transgender project insists that you cannot have any lines other than the ones drawn by the self, which are constantly subject to revision. And we are inching up on the moment when anyone who flinches from all that the transgender worldview entails will be labeled a bigot and driven from the public square.
As I said: transgender bathrooms are the new gay marriage.
Which leads us to the fourth development of the week: Donald Trump coming out against the North Carolina law and in favor of transgender bathroom use.
A couple things to note here. First, Trump is taking the maximalist position on what transgenderism is: He says people should be free to use the bathroom “that they feel is appropriate.” Emphasis on “feel.” Second, Trump is against any sort of third-way accommodation that would put in separate bathrooms as a way to make all parties comfortable. He says this “would be discriminatory in a certain way.”
So Trump’s position is all the way out with the hard-core LGBT activists. He doesn’t want an accommodation that makes everyone comfortable. He wants the rest of society to simply sign on with the transgender project. Or else. (See items #1 and #2, above.)
Of course, when it comes to what people actually think, voters have been remarkably skeptical about the transgender bathroom project. It’s one of the issues where the left is, at least temporarily, out over its cultural skis. It’s an issue where traditional Republicans are totally in sync with the country, but Democrats cannot agree with them for fear of crossing their activist base.
And yet the man who would lead the Republican party in 2016 is as far to the left on transgender bathrooms as most transgender activists. He would abandon the defense of women’s bathrooms and locker-rooms when the issue is still winnable.
In short, if Donald Trump is elected president, World War T will be over. The transgender project will run roughshod over the culture, through every school, gym, and public bathroom in the land. Because, as he has made clear over the course of his campaign, under a President Trump the Republican party will no longer be a vehicle open to conservatives who wish to make the case for their values in public policy.
Which is bad enough. But remember this: There is no peace in the eternal culture war. The day after the transgender project wins, the left will be on to the next cause.
