Update to the Update:
As expected, the Equality Act passed the House. The vote was 226-206, with three Republicans voting “yes” – down from the eight who voted “yes” in 2019.
The chances of the bill passing the Senate, especially now with Collins tacitly expressing doubts on the bill in its present form, are low. However, if this is an issue that concerns you, it is still worth communicating to your senator – or in fact any senator, making clear that you are not contacting them as a constituent, but as an concerned citizen. I think Senator Rand Paul’s questioning of Dr. Levine today shows that someone – staff, Paul himself – has done homework on the issue, and if staff can be pointed towards good resources on this score…well, more knowledge is always good.
Here’s a form from the Women’s Liberation Front to get you started.
I’ve had that banner up there for a week, as just one more nudge for folks to pay attention to “Equality Act.”
It’s not a niche issue. It’s a big deal. It has the potential to do an untold amount of damage. I’ve written about it before, most recently last week.
At that time, the news was that the Equality Act was coming up for a vote in the House last Tuesday (2/23). Now the word is that it’s tomorrow, with, the supporters hope, the Senate following in due course.
I’m tossing up this post to refresh your memory on the problematic nature of this bill. Yes, it will do great damage to religious freedom. But even more importantly it will seek to erase sex as a category in American law and society, which means it seeks to erase females.
In short, once again: the Equality Act includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected statuses – which means nothing more or less than self-identity.
This, in fact, is the entire purpose of the Equality Act. When you read the bill – the text is here – after the introduction, it is essentially a series of clauses that specify where “sexual orientation and gender identity” are to be added to other laws and policy statements after “sex.”
Mainstream feminism is completely lost on this issue, which is not surprising, since it is, in general lost, and has been for decades.
But self-described “radical feminists” are and have been paying attention, and along with social conservatives, are the only voices being raised in protest and warning.
So when you look for reasons to oppose this legislation, don’t forget that social and religious conservatives have one set of arguments – but there’s another viewpoint as well, as articulated by groups like the Women’s Liberation Front and discussion boards like Ovarit and the Gender Critical board on the Reddit-alternative, Said It. The latter has become an important source of conversation since the popular Gender Critical subreddit was (of course) cancelled by Reddit.
I’m bringing this up again because this post at Said It is excellent, and the author digs deep into this bill and highlights some of the (many) problems that you might not have heard elsewhere.
Under existing employment discrimination statutes, employers had a very narrow defense of bona fide occupational qualification, meaning that they could argue that discrimination was legitimate and necessary in specific instances. These instances usually boiled down to bodily privacy concerns (e.g. hiring a female to oversee an area where women will be in states of undress), role-modeling (e.g. hiring a female to counsel traumatized female rape victims), authenticity (e.g. hiring a female to place a female role in a production), and selling sex (e.g. hiring a female stripper is essential to because the strip club is selling female sex) (I used female examples, but the exception is not limited to women or sex.). Now this exemption has effectively been eliminated because bona fide qualifications based on sex would now also have to include gender identity. So even if you have a legitimate business reason for hiring a female, say to minimize risk of sexual assault of female prisoners by correction officers, you will now have to include men who identify as women among your “female” hires.
Elsewhere in the bill they define gender identity and sexual orientation. The definition for gender identity is completely subjective and mutable, obviously. The sex definition includes both gender identity and sexual orientation in its definition even though they both have stand-alone definitions separate from the sex definition. Clearly, gender is meant to take precedence over sex.
The bill explicitly states that bathrooms, lockers, dressing rooms, and other shared facilities will not be barred on the basis of gender identity in commercial businesses, public spaces like parks and libraries, public schools/colleges, and employment.
Even though I already had an idea of the consequences of the bill, it was surprisingly hurtful to read through because it is so clear that this bill was drafted with the specific intention to destroy women’s spaces. There is no other reason to add sex to the public accommodation provisions except to eliminate women’s spaces. The sponsors of the bill get to claim that they are finally adding protections for women in public accommodations when the reality is that these “protections” are going to eliminate the safe spaces that women had. We already knew that, but it angers me to see it in print.
Yes, there are serious issues related to religious freedom in this bill. In fact, it explicitly seeks to override the protection of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (on p. 25 of the bill). Turning back to the politically conservative sources, in the National Review:
Laycock, a longtime supporter of gay marriage and proponent of enacting a federal gay-rights law, explained that the Equality Act “regulates religious non-profits And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA. This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.”
But back to the erasure of women and girls. Like a broken record, I will repeat myself. The Equality Act enshrines gender self-identity in public policy and social arrangements. It makes it impossible to keep males out of female spaces, since all that male has to do for admittance – to that prison, that shelter, that locker room, that athletic activity – is to claim the “gender identity” of a woman or girl.
You might be interested in Graham Linehan’s new project – The War on Women Substack. More here.
Related: The UK news today is all about the language in a bill related to maternal health. The bill passed the House of Commons with language replacing “mother” and “women” with “gender neutral” language and is being debated in the House of Lords.
From Mumsnet, quoting a suggested letter to members:
I am, of course, delighted that ministers will receive formal paid maternity leave. No minister should have to resign in order to care for a newborn, and I am very glad that this issue will prompt the government to look at all state maternity (and paternity) provisions afresh.
What I was dismayed about, however, was the fact that a proposed amendment to the language of the bill was not made. Currently, Clause 1, Page 1, Line 14 of the bill says that the provision of payment of maternity allowance will be offered if:
(a) the person is pregnant and it is no more than 12 weeks before the expected week of childbirth;
(b) the person has given birth to a child within the previous 4 weeks.The amendment, put forward by 19 Conservative MPs and 2 Labour MPs, was to – quite simply – replace the word “person” with “woman”. Only women can get pregnant and so only women need be referred to in this passage.
This is being rather hotly debated. You can see the debate here. I especially recommend Lord Hunt’s remarks at 14:40.
This brilliant blog post summarizes the debate up to yesterday.
Fortunately for the Barons, there is no need for them to worry their follicly challenged heads. The Ministerial & other Maternity Allowances Bill really is just about pregnant women, new mothers and their maternity leave. Scrotum-owners just have to get over it.
In short, if people are fighting tooth and nail to omit the words “women” and “mothers” from legislation about maternity….there’s a problem. You might want to think hard about why.
Charlotte was Both 