Of Transgender, Male And Female, And The Issue Of School Washrooms

9/18/17

On transgender, body against mind and the issue of washrooms

An essay in First Things

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/03/supreme-incoherence-transgender-ideology-and-the-end-of-law

My tweet storm response:

1 This piece is in places pretentiously cryptic. I take the essence of the argument to be....

2 the contradiction between gender theory denying the biological and social reality of male and female, yet...

3 wanting, needing and cleaving to that antimony in the dysphoric state claimed, the personal expression of that state and (for example)...

4 wanting the right to a sex specific bathroom even while disclaiming the reality of binary sexual specificity.

5 Pace Milton, if a law refutes either itself or the premises it's necessarily built on, hence law itself, then that law cannot stand.

6 Therefore, a law (say the transgender washroom law) that embodies or necessarily implicates denying the objective truth of male and female.... 

7 anchored in the body undermines in-Milton's sense-the law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sex.

8 A problem is that the impetus for the transgendered washroom law needn't implicate that denial.

9 It's easy to see both clear cases of transgender and to see too the objective truth of male and female.

10 In theory, once the transgendered have finished their sex change the issue goes away...

11 but that completion won't largely typically happen for public school kids.

12 Sex change itself affirms the body as the anchor referent for gender.

13 So kids before that change are in more of a limbo than in a state of denial about make and female.

14 They're not yet in a position to accommodate their dysphoria medically and align body and gender identity.

15 And its that limbo that policy has to meet not Shafer's exaggerated concerns with the outer limits of gender theory.

16 Shafer wrongly extrapolates from the washroom issue, eliding the limbo, a false fixed paradigm of male female denial.

17 The issue of washrooms, unless maybe they're all retrofitted, raises problems arising from this limbo...

18 and not from some necessarily implacable denial of the objective truth of the male female binary.

19 The limbo doesn't admit of perfect solutions and the cost benefit of the alternatives need to be weighed.

20 If retrofitting is prohibitively expensive or even if it's not and parents understandably...

21 object to unsegregating kids' bathrooms, then the imperfect alternatives broadly speaking...

22 are either letting dysphoric kids use the school bathrooms of their choice or privately accommodating them...

23 even if they're set apart by that. To my mind, while neither solution in this limbo state is ideal...

24 I'd argue for the private accommodation. It's a case of two rights pitted against each other...

25 (often cited as a definition of tragedy.) But Shafer has with sweeping misconception and exaggeration blown the issue way out of proportion.