An Illinois state appeals court recently ruled against Hobby Lobby in what will undoubtedly be a landmark case on gender, sex, and transgender bathroom use going forward.
The court concluded that Hobby Lobby’s bathroom policies, which allow only biological women to use women’s restrooms, violated Illinois’s anti-discrimination law. The case involves an employee of over two decades, Meggan Sommerville, who transitioned from male to female and lobbied to use Hobby Lobby’s restroom to no avail.
The court’s ruling portends untold debacles surrounding gender, sex, and anti-discrimination laws. “Sommerville’s sex is unquestionably female,” the Illinois Second District Appellate Court said in its unanimous opinion, “just like the women who are permitted to use the women’s bathroom.”
The court noted Hobby Lobby’s arguments that a private company has the right to allow only biological women to use women’s restrooms and found them wanting:
If this court’s logic sounds familiar, that’s because it’s nearly the same as that of the Supreme Court in deciding Bostock v. Clayton County. In that case, Justice Neil Gorsuch applied a simplistic definition of sex, finding that “if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer,” sex discrimination had occurred. While technically correct, the implications of this decision are proof that the logic is deeply flawed.
It’s clear from the Illinois court’s ruling that it, as well as the Supreme Court, view sex and gender identity through a prism that entails, as Ryan Anderson said about the Bostock case, “asexuality and androgyny.” Of course, the Illinois act does not mention that being “male or female” is “eternally fixed.” That’s because it was originally passed in 1979, when the terms male and female were distinct and distinguishable.
Furthermore, 15 years ago, Illinois added protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Anderson explained the conflict this way: “Much of what the activists contend is discrimination is simply disagreement about human sexuality, when acting based on true beliefs about human sexuality is redescribed as discriminatory.”
This court’s ruling has incredible implications: By embracing a deceptively simple view of language that feigns ignorance about what the differences between “gender identity” and “sex” really are, this logic eliminates the ability for any person, organization, workplace, or university to have sex-specific sports programs, clubs, or bathroom facilities without fear of a lawsuit crying discrimination.
If objective biology is just “sex” and fluid “gender identity” is also just sex, then everything that could fit within those terms can be twisted and contorted to be a violation of sex discrimination laws.
An all-boys soccer team your daughter can’t join? Sex discrimination. Sorority? Sex discrimination. All-female swim teams at the Olympics? Sex discrimination. Because this Illinois court has refused to acknowledge the meaning of gender identity as it relates to the classical definitions of male and female, its ruling will open up society to a bevy of lawsuits and a world in which male and female differences are banished altogether.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
