Denied access

The Executive Order:

Section 1.  Policy.  Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.  Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. 

Wait a second. What do we mean by “whether they will be denied access to the restroom”? Everybody is denied access to one of the two multi-user restrooms, because they are sorted by sex, because there are some men and boys who just will use opportunities like public restrooms with incomplete partitions to peer at or photograph or assault women. Women don’t want to share multi-user toilets with men. The same set of facts applies to locker rooms. A different but related set of facts applies to school sports. Sports and toilets are sex-sorted for various (but well known and obvious) reasons, and keeping it that way doesn’t result in children who don’t have access, it results in male children who still are not allowed to intrude on female children. The female children have rights too.

Discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation manifests differently for different individuals, and it often overlaps with other forms of prohibited discrimination, including discrimination on the basis of race or disability.  For example, transgender Black Americans face unconscionably high levels of workplace discrimination, homelessness, and violence, including fatal violence.

That reads more like Twitter than adult legal reasoning.

It’s odd, because Biden is a very conservative Democrat. There’s none of this going way out on a limb over the wealth gap, or a genuine publicly funded national health system, or lobbying, or public housing – but somehow letting men play on women’s soccer teams is red-hot urgent?

It’s nuts.

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