It’s been announced that the House is going to vote on the Equality Act next week. This is not a drill.
What is it? I’ll let the Women’s Liberation Front take it from here:
The Equality Act, introduced in the US House of Representatives as H.R. 5 in 2019, includes gender identity rules that have received little public focus regarding their adverse impact on sex stereotyping bans, or the danger they pose to women and children. The bill would codify the regulatory changes President Biden laid forth in his Executive Order on gender identity his first day in office.
In several places in this bill, it directs the term “sex” in federal civil rights law to be replaced with the term, “sex, sexual orientation, gender identity.” The bill’s authors made clear that gender identity is to take precedence over and replace sex as a protected category. The bill doesn’t mention individuals with clinically diagnosed gender dysphoria, or undertaking surgical or hormonal transition, thus making clear that self-declared gender identity would be sufficient to claim protected legal status.
And that, in the bolded font, is the key. Yes, there are other problems with this bill. Many, including those impacting conscience protections and religious freedom. But this particular component is clear and focused: replacing the category of “sex” with “gender identity.” And let me be clear in case you haven’t been keeping up. That “gender identity” has nothing to do with surgery or even medication. It’s one hundred percent self-proclaimed self-identity.
Under current civil rights law employers may hire and assign work on the basis of sex only when it’s a bona fide occupational qualification. These are some jobs and assignments this change will affect, taking away the right of Americans to insist that only someone of the same sex be able to:
Perform security pat-downs or strip searches
Supervise locker rooms or shared showers
Handle intimate care for hospital and long-term care patients
Chaperone a doctor or medical assistant who is providing such care
Perform intimate medical examinations
Supervise drug tests
Supervise children on overnight trips
Also from the summary, “The bill prohibits an individual from being denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.” This means that American women will no longer be able to expect any single-sex facilities when using or being required to stay in:
Shared hospital rooms or wards
Locker rooms and public or group showers
Multi-stall bathrooms
Jails, prisons, or juvenile detention facilities
Homeless shelters
Overnight drug rehabilitation centers
Domestic violence or rape crisis shelters
This bill will also end sports programs and scholarships set aside for women and girls. All such programs will have to admit men and boys who identify themselves as women or girls. Such programs will no longer meet their intended purpose of protecting the rights of women and girls by redressing historical inequality of opportunity.
This bill tragically attempts to prohibit sex discrimination by forbidding the law to see sex. A law, and courts, that cannot see sex objectively, also cannot address sex discrimination or protect the bodily privacy rights and dignity of Americans in those circumstances where sex matters immensely.
To repeat: There are numerous reasons to oppose the Equality Act.
For example, gender self-identity makes an absolute mess of record-keeping and intake for medical care. For no matter what you do to your appearance and even your body, if you come to the emergency room, those treating you need to know if you’re …male or female. Your self-identification doesn’t matter at all at that point.
Gender self-identity has already had its impact on crime statistics in the UK:
Most significantly of all, we also know that the ‘sex’ disaggregated data held by the police doesn’t actually record what most people think it does. Police forces now record crimes based on self-declared gender and not birth sex. In 2019 Fair Play For Women submitted a series of Freedom of Information requests to find out how the police record the sex of a suspect when a crime is reported.
We found police commonly record self-declared gender identity instead of birth sex; even when the crime is rape.
This means suspected and convicted rapists are recorded in official statistics as female if they no longer wish to identify with their male birth sex.
While some police forces said they record the fact if someone identifies as transgender, this information does not appear on government crime figures, which provides only male or female options. Transgender status is stated only if the person is a victim of transgender hate crime.
The USCCB has a good paper outlining many of the problems with the Equality Act, highlighting, of course, the conscience issues, if you are most comfortable coming at this from the Catholic angle.
This concept of gender self-identification as the core category of human definition in law and society must be defeated, and if it can happen in the House, that’s a major victory.
This isn’t about declaring that individuals who experience gender dysphoria are wicked people determined to hurt women and girls. Don’t be boxed into that characterization. It’s about, among other things, acknowledging reality. Not only biological reality, but the reality that human beings are not angels.
We acknowledge the great, elaborate lengths that frankly crazy and perverted people will go through to act out their impulses and be close to the vulnerable in churches, youth organizations and education. In a culture awash in destructive, dehumanizing pornography, barriers and mutual care collapsed or suspect, no, it is not unreasonable to acknowledge that men who want to harm women and girls or, for whatever reason their disturbed psyches are dictating, want to enter into women’s spaces, will use gender self-identity to do so.
It’s happening already. Here’s a backgrounder pdf from the Women’s Liberation Front back in 2019, with this legislation’s first go round (passed, by the way, in case you have forgotten).
The following are selected examples of material harms to women and girls that have already been caused or exacerbated by existing “gender identity” laws and policies. These examples are taken from various U.S. states and several countries outside the U.S. Under H.R. 5 (the “Equality Act”), none of the following examples would have required fraudulent intent – in fact the concept of fraudulent intent is irrelevant under H.R.5. This is because H.R. 5 explicitly defines “gender identity” as being determined by any person’s selfdeclared claims about their subjective and changeable “gender identity.” And it further mandates that “gender identity” must displace considerations of sex in all areas of civil rights law, including determining eligibility for jobs where being male or being female is a bona fide occupational qualification—such as jobs that involve the provision of intimate care for disabled or elderly women, the supervision of minors when they are partially or fully nude, the supervision and intimate care of incarcerated women, and the conduct of bodily searches.
As I have said many, many times before. Sex is binary. A woman is an adult human female. Many aspects of life call for sexually integrated spaces – but not all. Women deserve their own spaces when they are escaping from abuse, when they are imprisoned, when they are under medical care, when they are tending to personal physical needs, and if they desire, when they are educated, just to name a few.
Women deserve to be safe in those spaces, and the Equality Act, as written, would open up those spaces to the presence of men – the worst men, who for whatever reason, can’t or won’t leave vulnerable women alone or who get off on pretending to be women in women’s spaces.
Contact your representative. Call or write. Don’t let the party of your representative discourage you from contacting. There are Democrats who might be leaning against the Equality Act, and there might be Republicans who are leaning towards it.
Some resources:
Women are Human – this page illustrates the lie of “This never happens.”
I could go on and on about this horrendously misogynist movement, but I won’t. Here, at least. You know I have elsewhere. Right now, this vote is what matters – and if it passes, then the next vote, in the Senate. This is about more than religious freedom. It’s about reality, language, safety and integrity.
Charlotte was Both 