Biden’s presidency, they say, is a historic victory for women. With Kamala Harris as his lady vice president and a record number of women in his office, the new commander in chief is promoting the female cause. “This is how the glass ceiling is broken,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar enthusiastically on the day of the inauguration.
As is usually the case, free symbolic victories divert attention away from more significant material losses. Hours after Harris became the first female vice president, Biden signed an executive order that discriminates against all of her sex.
The directive, entitled “Preventing and Combating Discrimination Based on Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation”, means a disaster for shelters for women, sports and health care in the name of equality between transgender people.
For example, institutions that receive Title IX funding must allow biological men who identify as women to compete in women’s athletics. “Children must be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access. . . school sports ”, states the order.
Some call it the “Bostock Executive Order”. All federal agencies, it is said, must implement the opinion of Supreme Court judge Neil Gorsuch in Bostock v. Clayton County from last year. There, a majority of the higher court ruled that the Title VII prohibition of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on sexual discrimination includes discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. This, even though the term “gender identity” itself confused those who enacted the law.
“According to Bostock’s reasoning,” says Biden’s new order, “laws that prohibit sex discrimination – including Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments.. . prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. “
Of course, in stating that “sex” in Title IX includes “gender identity”, the order does not just deny reality and discriminate against biological women. It also effectively reverses Title IX, instituted to give female athletes a level playing field through exclusively female teams. Oh well.
Biden avoids the inconvenient topic: how bone density, muscle mass and lung capacity of biological males who identify with females give them an unfair advantage over biological females, allowing them to claim titles, trophies and scholarships unfairly .
A few years ago in Connecticut, high school track and field athletes Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood started competing – and winning consistently – as women. In 2020, three female athletes filed a lawsuit against the conference policy allowing this. “My daughter would have qualified for the New England regionals in the 55 meter race in spring 2019,” wrote the mother of a complainant. “But, instead, the top two places were for biological boys who identify themselves as girls.”
A recent study suggests that male-to-female trans athletes maintain physical advantages over their female counterparts, even after a year of testosterone suppression. Justice aside, this is dangerous. Remember that, thanks to her masculine strength, trans MMA fighter Fallon Fox broke an opponent’s skull in 2014.
Girls need more suggestions, like Democratic MP Tulsi Gabbard’s “Women’s Sport Protection Act 2020”, who proposed to clarify that Title IX compliance “is determined based on biological sex, as determined at birth by a doctor”. Biden’s order only lays the groundwork for further accidents.
In his oath on Wednesday, Biden linked his inauguration to the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington. “108 years ago, in another possession,” he said, “thousands of protesters tried to prevent courageous women from marching for the right to vote. Today, we mark the oath of the first woman in American history elected to a national office. “
In the 1913 parade, according to historians, these “demonstrators” men pushed, stumbled and launched “indecent epithets” against the marching suffragettes. Biden may profess to deplore his actions, but his government presents its own misogyny. The new variety is more subtle than the old, although it also boasts its share of coarse epithets. He hides behind liberal devotion and calls for identity and tolerance. But his attacks on biological women are no less insidious.
In fact, they are much worse. By explicitly including “children”, Biden signals to American girls that he accepts the gender ideology view that embodied femininity means nothing. Today, trans ideology is influencing a record number of girls and adolescents to despise their female bodies and cause irreparable damage to their fertility and health. Biden’s order shrugs at their fate.
“We must reject a culture in which the facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured,” said Biden on Wednesday. Unfortunately, by ignoring the damage transgender dogma does to women, the Bostock Executive Order does just that.
Ramona Tausz is an associate editor of First Things.
Twitter: @RVTausz