Are We All Trannies Now?

Excellent commentary on Gorsuch's insane opinion, from the WSJ. But, of course, the implications are quite broad:


The Abolition of Man and Woman

If each of us is defined by a ‘gender identity’ related only arbitrarily to sex, we are all transgender now.

David Crawford and Michael Hanby

A commonplace assumption of American liberalism, that courts merely preside over contests of rights, conceals the judiciary’s limitless power to decide questions of truth without thinking deeply or even honestly about them. Bostock v. Clayton County is a case in point. ...

The court has intervened in a bitterly contested question—a question of philosophy before it is a question of law—and codified a radical new conception of human nature with a dubious ideological history. It has inscribed into law the abolition of man and woman.

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This would be laughable were its implications not so humanly disastrous. ...

These are metaphysical judgments. Yet Justice Gorsuch fails to recognize that the crux of his argument relies on and effectively codifies them. The question of sex discrimination in employment is relatively unimportant compared with the momentous imposition by law of these highly questionable philosophical propositions with their implications for society.

It is impossible to redefine human nature for only one person. ... If each of us is defined by a “gender identity” only arbitrarily related to our male and female bodies, now relegated to a meaningless biological substrate, then there is no longer any such thing as man or woman. We are all transgender now, even if sex and “gender identity” accidentally coincide in an overwhelming majority of instances.

The example shows the ruling’s totalitarian character. It requires everyone to live for all public and practical purposes as if what they know to be true in their pre-ideological experience of reality—the knowledge we imbibe with our mother’s milk—were officially false, a “stereotype.” Even worse, it requires everyone to live as if what they know to be false were officially true. ... The war on pronouns, an assault upon the language by which we recognize a world in common, follows of necessity. What we are dealing with is nothing less than a war on reality itself. And everyone has just been pressed into service.

There is no totalitarianism so total as that which claims authority over the meaning of nature. Increasingly the courts are assuming this authority, ..., all under the pretense of “neutrally” mediating between interests, rights, powers and authorities. ... But this is bosh, and no one believes it.

The burdens on free speech, free exercise and, perhaps most fundamentally, free thought, are obvious. But the burden on the basic unity of human society is even weightier. The court has abolished the fundamental fact on which every civilization depends, indeed on which the human species depends.

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