Dafydd @ Big Lizards:
If this here bill in the California state Assembly actually passes, California may swing sharply to the right — and might even come into play again for presidential elections.
Well I can dream. But it’s undeniable that the bill percolating through the Assembly is virtually an Onion-like parody of Progressivist gender madness… one that will strike deep and horribly into every family in California that has school-aged children.
AB 1266 would allow all students in elementary and secondary school to decide for themselves what “gender” they are today or tomorrow, and use whichever bathroom, locker room, or shower facility they think fits best. That is, a fourteen year old boy in middle school, even one never known for gay or transgendered tendencies, can simply walk into the girl’s shower room, strip naked, and join them… and by state law, he cannot be stopped or disciplined for doing so, as long as he claims that today he feels more like a girl than a boy.
How many offensive ways of wrongness does this absurdist law embody?
- The bill utterly demolishes any idea of privacy; schoolchildren at all levels have the right to expect, as part of respecting their personhood, that they will not suddenly find themselves forced to go to the bathroom and take showers with members of the opposite sex. Many kids, boys and girls, are already embarassed enough showering with members of the same sex; but forced nudity in mixed-company clearly pushes far beyond that boundary of privacy.
- Anyone who thinks that teenaged boys will not take advantage of the new law, will not stroll into the girls’ shower to just sexually intimidate the girls and arouse themselves — and perhaps even sexually assault them, believing that’s what the girls really want — is naive to the point of retardation. Of course they will; teenaged boys are the epitome of irresponsible sexual acting out. (And the recent fad of “sexting” indicates that teenaged girls are not too far behind in the irresponsibility Olympics.) When “It seemed like a good idea at the time” morphs into “I felt like a girl at the time,” school administrators will be helpless to do anything about it. Hey, they’re just expressing their gender indecision!
- While we’re at it, let’s admit that the bill will also completely obliterate girls’ sports in school, since it also allows any male student to declare himself to be female (in his own mind, at least) and (again by law) play on the girls’ team, instead of the boys’. Of course, since they’re physically still boys, still bigger, stronger, faster, better at throwing baseballs or footballs, shooting basketballs, or kicking soccer balls, that means the girls will be more or less window dressing. And more or less targets for the meaner boys passing as girls.
Net effect: Girls will simply drop out of sports, because they can’t win against boys twice their size and obviously prone to bullying. (Why would a boy want to play on a girls’ team unless he wanted to bully?)
Back in the 1970s and early 80s, when the Equal Rights Amendment was wending its tortuous and ultimately unsuccessful path through ratification, the sexist line on it was that it would force boys and girls to use the same bathrooms and showers, and force women to be drafted into the Army. As I recollect, the feminists were furious at the spurious claim; but they were mostly “equity feminists” back then, not “gender feminists,” to use Christina Hoff Sommers’ terminology. “That’s utterly ridiculous!” they (rightly) argued; “nobody’s trying to erase the line between boys and girls!”
But today, the gay Left openly tries to erase that line — and the leftover gender feminists cheer and applaud.
Of course: Since we all know that boys and girls are exactly the same, why shouldn’t they shower together, go the the bathroom together, and play on any sports team, male or female, at their own will? Equality of rights begets equality of outcomes begets complete interchangeability between male and female… first in child rearing, then marriage, and now the ultimate leveling, bathroom buddies. The Progressivist Left is never satisfied; anything worth doing must surely be worth double-plus ultra overdoing!