If that headline shocks you, it shouldn’t — at least not according to President Obama. He took an astounding step Friday, issuing a decree about the washrooms schoolchildren should use. Without any constitutional authority or plausible legal basis, he ruled that boys who say they are girls and girls who say they are boys should be allowed to use the public school locker rooms of the gender with which they claim to identify.
The diktat comes in the form of a letter from the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights stating that “when a student or the student’s parent or guardian … notifies the school administration that the student will assert a gender identity that differs from previous representations or records, the school will begin treating the student consistent with the student’s gender identity.” Schools are forbidden from seeking to verify a student’s “gender assertion.”
In short, there will no longer be any single sex locker rooms or showers in America’s public schools. You could not have found a conservative fever swamp in 2008 in which anyone would have predicted a slide so far and fast into such absurd relativism within the short (but seemingly endless) span of a single presidency.
But President Obama, now is in his final year, is pushing radical goals as far as possible. Norms that accord with the facts and have been the foundation of shared understandings since the beginning of our civliziation are being swept aside. Truth is set at nought, radical theory must reign, the will of the people be damned.
It’s all dressed up in the language of tolerance and acceptance, but it’s the opposite. It represents not just an explicit indifference toward natural bodily modesty described as far back as Genesis, but a disdainful rejection of it on pain of legal sanction. “Others’ discomfort,” as Justice insouciently puts it, is to be disregarded.
But here’s the truth. Boys and girls are different, and the difference does not depend on their self-conceptions. This is not a controversial statement about what roles they should play or what sort of personal relationships they should have. It is a simple statement of fact, and one on which people with vast disagreements about those other issues can agree.
The male-female divide is real, and it is more than just the subject of most art and literature, handed down through the ages of all cultures and peoples, including ones with vastly different ideas of sexual ethics.
Moreover, sex is not just a cultural or societal phenomenon. It is hard science, in contrast to the subjective classifications that underlie claims about gender self-identification. The X and Y-chromosomes are a molecular reality that pervades every cell of every human body.
Sex becomes a crucial identifier in your life even before you are given a legal name. (“It’s a girl!”) Later in life, sex appears on driver’s licenses and passports, not to make a political statement, but again, to identify.
Sex also arises in the specific case of men’s and women’s bathrooms, which has unfortunately become the issue here. Until now, people did what they had to, and problems were rare. In our litigious society, perhaps it was inevitable that a bright line would have to be drawn at some point. But all exceptional cases aside, most Americans continue to understand that biological differences between men and women matter at least enough to justify bathroom privacy from members of the opposite sex.
Either way, it is not the purview of the president to adjudicate bathroom use. Obama’s letter not only treats his presidency unseriously, but it also attempts to usurp constitutional power in the absence of a law or legitimate rulemaking process that could confer seriousness to it.
This will be the legacy of the “hope and change” president. During his final days in office his foot will be pressed hard down on the gas pedal, powering the vehicle of the federal government toward the social disruption that the Left craves more than anything else.
