Because a male freshman student (W.C.) at Conant High School in District 211 joined the girls volleyball team a month ago and uses the girls locker room and bathrooms, another community is embroiled in a controversy as I wrote on Monday. While W.C. has, thankfully, quit the team, the problem of “trans”-identifying students, including W. C., using opposite-sex private spaces and being free to join opposite-sex sports teams remains.
Two days ago, a special board meeting was called at which community members for and against the assault on girls’ rights spoke. The comments by those who oppose the “trans” superstition need no analysis. Their comments were informed by common sense, fairness, logic, and decency.
The comments of those who support “trans”-cultic superstitions and policies that violate the dignity, privacy, and rights of girls provide a tutorial in bad argumentation and demagoguery.
First up was Kristin Wagner who claimed her son is “non-binary.” Unless he suffers from an intersex disorder, he is not non-binary. He is objectively male. His subjective, internal feelings about his maleness are irrelevant to anything school related. When it comes to sports participation, undressing, or engaging in private bodily functions, all that matters is a student’s biological sex.
Wagner claimed that if community members knew “one gender non-conforming kid,” they would change their beliefs on the meaning of biological sex and the rights of girls. But mature adults don’t approach ontological and moral beliefs like mercurial adolescents do. Knowing someone who identifies as polyamorous won’t change the views of mature adults on the intrinsic disorderedness of polyamory.
Wagner believes that people who hold different views than she does on the meaning of sex are bigots. Maybe she can explain why the widely accepted belief that biological sex matters in private spaces and sports is bigotry, but her belief that feelings about biological sex are all that matter in private spaces and sports is not bigotry.
Why is it bigotry to expect W.C. to use locker rooms and restrooms with peers whose “gender identity” he assumes he doesn’t share but not bigotry to expect girls to use locker rooms and restrooms with peers whose sex they don’t share?
Wagner asserted that every child “deserves to be able to fully participate in their high school.” All students are able to fully participate in their high school. W.C. is able to try out for the boys volleyball team. As a boy, however, he should not be permitted to change a girls team into a co-ed team.
Wagner made the absurd but commonplace leftist claim that “Trans boys are boys. Trans girls are girls.” “Transboys” are not boys. They’re girls. “Transgirls” are not girls. They’re boys. No amount of Newspeak can change reality or compel those tethered to reality to submit to leftist fantasies or diktats.
After Wagner came Ishaan Srivastava, a young leftist activist and self-promoter who has his gimlet eyes focused on politics.
Srivastava claimed that in joining the girls volleyball team, undressing in the presence of female peers, and using girls bathrooms, W.C. “has done nothing wrong at all.”
That’s a moral claim, an unproven assumption, and a wild one that just emerged on the cultural scene a few years ago driven by the anti-science “trans” cult.
Like other leftists who spoke, Srivastava thinks those who believe boys don’t belong in girls private spaces is a hateful, bigot who is “humiliating, targeting and challenging the existence” of W.C. How ironic, then, that anti-targeting warrior Srivastava tried to humiliate his ideological opponents by hurling epithets. So much for tolerance, diversity, and inclusivity.
Asserting that W.C. is male is not a denial of his existence. Everyone knows he exists, that he’s male, and that he wishes he were female. Denying that W.C. is a girl is affirmation of his objective existential reality.
Homosexual Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison butted in the line of people waiting to speak to say that he believes gender-confused minors are dehumanized if they hear anyone say that humans can’t change their sex, that biological sex matters in private spaces and sports, and that girls have rights that are not nullified by the feelings of cross-sex impersonators.
This was yet another demagogic attempt to silence the expression of ideas leftists hate by reframing all dissenting ideas as pernicious. But if conservative ideas about the immutability and meaning of biological sex and the privacy rights of humans are true, they are not dehumanizing no matter how much “trans”-cultists and their collaborators hate them.
Next was Judy Janes who identified herself as a “clinical social worker who has worked in public schools for over thirty years.” It was helpful to know that she has worked for three decades in two of the institutional communities that have so greatly damaged children: public schools and the credentialed mental health communities.
These communities have introduced leftist beliefs about sexuality to children at ever younger ages, destroyed their innocence, facilitated confusion, and ignored science.
Janes claimed that W.C. “is just struggling to be his authentic self.”
There is nothing less authentic than humans masquerading as the sex they are not. There is nothing less authentic than doping cross-sex hormones, butchering bodies, and taking voice and movement classes to more successfully impersonate persons of the opposite sex. Passing is the antithesis of authenticity.
What leftists like Janes, Morrison, and Wagner mean when they refer to “authenticity” is “strong desire.” Nothing more.
Janes claimed that “identifying as transgender is not a choice.” Yes, “identifying” as “transgender” is, indeed, a choice.
While gender dysphoria is not a choice, it is a choice to claim to be the sex one is not and never can be. Cross-dressing is a choice. Hairstyles are a choice. Wearing makeup is a choice. Doping cross-sex hormones is a choice. Using opposite-sex private spaces is a choice.
Janes believes that preserving the dignity of this boy requires “respecting” his gender delusion and allowing him in girls sports and private spaces. Word to Janes, no human is obligated to respect—that is, to hold in esteem—the beliefs, feelings, or volitional behaviors of any other human.
No word from Janes about the dignity and rights of girls. Clearly, leftists don’t respect the identities, feelings, or beliefs of conservatives who know that biological sex has meaning.
Up next was no-nonsense Jerry Freda who was all Dragnet-y, telling the board just the facts: “The Illinois Human Rights Act … prohibits discrimination based on gender identity.”
Question for Just-The-Facts Jerry: If Conant doesn’t allow all boys in girls bathrooms and locker rooms, isn’t the district discriminating based on gender identity? If the district allows one biological boy in the girls private spaces, how can it justify prohibiting other boys from using girls private spaces? If the district claims other boys can’t use girls spaces because they’re “cisgender,” then the district is engaging in discrimination based on gender identity.
My dream is that dozens of “cisgender” boys would ask to use girls private spaces, claiming they can’t be their authentic selves if they have to use locker rooms with other boys. Changing in front of other boys makes them feel unsafe and unhappy. Then when they are denied their dignity, happiness, and safety, they would file a class action lawsuit accusing the district of violating the Human Rights Act by discriminating against them based on their “cisgender identity.”
Freda shared the fact that “of the 20,000 student athletes competing in all IHSI sports at all levels, only three people born male asked and received waivers to compete in girls sports last year.”
Mr. Freda did not share any statistics on how many female athletes are affected when three boys are allowed on girls sports teams. Maybe Freda could add up the number of girls who lose their spots on teams + the number of girls who lose to boys in races, games, or matches + the number of girls who lose medals they deserve + the number of girls who are asked to share locker rooms and bathrooms with the alleged three boys. Get back to us with that number.
Next was hothead Justin O’Rourke, “a business psychology doctoral candidate,”—that is, another member of the mental health community that still thinks Americans are impressed by credentials from dubious pseudoscience, leftist-controlled institutions.
His first argument was that “since 2012, more than 214,000 high school students … and college women’s volleyball players have been injured by other female players,” therefore, allowing boys to compete against girls is meaningless.
According to PhD-candidate O’Rourke, if community members don’t object to girls injuring girls, they have no grounds for opposing boys playing on girls teams.
O’Rourke did not share any details about the injuries. How many of the injuries were head and neck injuries? How serious were the injuries? How exactly did the injuries happen? How many of the high school or college volleyball players sustained career-ending head and neck injuries like Payton McNabb’s?
Moreover, if O’Rourke believes that the fact that girls can be injured by girls means sex-based sports teams are indefensible, then why have any sex-based sports? Does he advocate the eradication of all sex-based sports teams? If not, why not?
Then O’Rourke tossed out perhaps the most ignorant and pernicious argument of the evening—and that’s saying a lot.
He made the case that opposition to the sexual integration of sports is analogous to opposition to the racial integration of schools and sports that poisoned America in the 1940s and 1950s.
O’Rourke believes that girls who don’t want to compete against boys are equivalent to white racists who didn’t want their children to attend school with black children. O’Rourke said, “After the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, some white parents pulled their kids out of public schools rather than having them attend alongside black students.”
Take that in: O’Rourke called all girls who oppose competing against male athletes the equivalent of racist white segregationists in the 1940s. Astounding.
That’s what a PhD gets you today. O’Rourke cannot distinguish between opposition to racial integration of classrooms in which skin color is wholly irrelevant and opposition to the sexual integration of sports where biological sex is critically important to both the sport and the locker room.
In 2020 J.B. Pritzker assembled a task force of twenty-five pro-“trans” activists to socially construct “non-regulatory guidance” on how to use schools to advance the “trans” superstition. Schools then treated those “guidelines” as laws. Those guidelines explicitly state that cross-sex impersonating minor students may room with opposite-sex peers on overnight trips, and neither students nor parents may be notified. From page 14:
… confidentiality laws and requirements continue to apply to students in the context of overnight trips. A trip is not a basis to disclose or require disclosure of a student’s transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming identity.
I’m curious, why would leftists oppose voyeurism—you know, peeping? If boys can sleep in minor girls’ hotel rooms and see girls undressed without those girls’ knowledge, what’s the problem with peeping?
If you come away with nothing else, understand this: “gender identity” is a person’s subjective, internal feelings about their maleness or femaleness. W.C. does not know the “gender identities” of the boys in the boys private spaces or of the girls in the girls private spaces. He is basing his decision to use the girls private spaces solely on biological sex. He is saying that biological sex is the only factor that matters to him when it comes to undressing and going to the bathroom. But he’s denying girls the right to do likewise.