By James Wilson
California’s Bathroom Bill compelling all school campuses to offer mixed gender access to bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers (not to be confused with unisex facilities) remains locked in legal limbo as state government denies the rights of petitioners for a referendum on the law. Michigan’s Board of Education proposes unleashing the same chaos by regulation. Target Corporation decrees mixed gender access in their stores and is sued by several states. The federal government threatens to punish North Carolina for legislating traditional access to toilets and showers, the state sues the feds, and the feds sue them back. Now the Justice and Education Departments have escalated the controversy, threatening every school district in the country with a demand letter. Largely unreported is the human cost behind the politics; a glut of injustice and criminal behavior is happening in so-called integrated bath and shower rooms in the name of rights for transgendered people.
In the same week in May the Obama Administration published a sweeping – and utterly illegal and unconstitutional – edict that all bathing and toilet facilities across the nation must now cater to mixed genders a man followed an eight-year-old girl into a restroom and choked her unconscious before her mother could intervene.
As far back as March 2014 Christopher Hambrook was jailed indefinitely in Toronto for multiple sexual assaults on women in homeless shelter bathing rooms according to the Toronto Sun. He had already done four years for attacking a five-year-old girl and raping a twenty-seven-year-old woman while on bail for the pedophile charge. Hambrook self-identifies as male or female depending on his mood.
In February a man twice entered a women’s locker room in Seattle to disrobe in front of a girl’s swim team. Seattle Parks Spokesperson David Takami said, “We have guidelines that allow…” On May 5 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton demanded Target produce its guidelines for restroom usage after a man was arrested for allegedly filming underage girls at the Frisco, Texas, Target store. Target announced April 19 its stores would permit access to restrooms based on chosen gender of customers; more than a million Americans are now boycotting Target and several lawsuits have been filed against the retail giant.
The value of Target stock has plummeted and American – including many who favor gay rights – are resisting these edicts – whether governmental or corporate – on a massive scale. The only thing certain is the fat lady is a long way from singing.
The horrific irony here lies in the disparity between numbers of sexual predators and the real numbers of people who actually believe themselves transgendered. Transgender advocates claim a few million but medical sources confirm ninety per cent of so-called transgendered people revert to their birth assignment in fairly short order. That leaves fewer than two hundred thousand such people with more-or-less permanent gender dysphoria, the clinical term for the condition. Yet there are just shy of three hundred thousand sexual assaults in the US each year. They don’t all occur in bath and shower rooms, but their numbers are clearly and rapidly climbing in the present atmosphere of political correctness defying rationality.
The PC approach is medically dangerous to gender dysphoric people into the bargain. The American College of Pediatricians states, “Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.” They confirm nine of ten come to accept their biological identity while grieving the other ten per cent are committed to “a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones and (will) likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation.”
The doctors have done their homework on this. Their report cites a twenty times higher likelihood of suicide among people taking sex change meds – twenty times the risk. Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner may be lionized by Hollywood and the tabloids but he is leading many unhappy people into a false and very pain-filled hopelessness by his narcissistic example.
Make no mistake. People who think themselves transgendered are in serious soul pain. The Lord our God calls us to authentic compassion for anyone in their pain, and this is regardless of what we may think of its causation. But where is the evidence integrated bathing facilities even address the pain of transgenderism? There is none despite many years and many studies. An additional question not yet asked is whether PC laws and policies will reduce the numbers of gender dysphoric people who come to peace with their natural gender by offering this false hope of effective reassignment through catering to their dysfunction.
Meanwhile the PC bandwagon keeps rolling on. Harvard University announces it will blacklist any students who belong to single sex organizations – fraternities, sororities, and men’s and women’s clubs come under this axe – and exclude them from consideration for Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships. Never mind these are academic scholarships having nothing to do with personal choices for association; the university is grimly determined to enforce thought codes on its charges.
The solution is resistance – Godly resistance – by everyday people. More than fifty families have signed onto a lawsuit against a Chicago public school that enacted a California-like restroom policy. The school acted under threat by the feds to pull funding if it did not comply with PC regulations existing only in the mouths of regulators who claim gender specific facilities violate Title IX. These parents care more about protecting their children than federal funding – much less bullying.
Matt Sharp of Alliance Defending Freedom is defending the Gloucester, Virginia, schools against the American Civil Liberties Union. He writes, “No government agency can unilaterally redefine the meaning of a federal law to serve its own political ends…In fact, at least five other federal and state courts have rejected the DOE’s (Department of Education) interpretation of Title IX.” But the agency – egged on by the ACLU and others – continues usurping power because it is part of the most lawless segment of our culture – government. It is incumbent upon ordinary people to do the right thing without waiting for a government train of right conduct that will not be arriving at our station.
There are three right dimensions to this right conduct to which we ordinary people are called. One is to keep seeking justice through the ordinary legal processes open to us. Even the Bible commends this path in Acts 19:38-9. The second is to simply do the right thing – at whatever cost – that is just as biblical per Acts 4:18-20, and just as mandatory for honest people. The third is the most difficult, and the most essential.
In any democratic republic ordinary people are responsible for the government we place over ourselves and our children. The growth in size and arrogance of government at all levels did not begin with the Obama Administration, although he kicked it to new heights and many Bible believing Christians voted for this false messiah of hope and change. For those of us who say, “Not me,” let’s remember this creeping tyranny developed under liberal and conservative leadership over decades.
The third dimension of right conduct is to acknowledge our need to repent – re-focus our attention on God in Christ – after a lifetime of doing what we wanted instead of seeing ourselves as stewards of the Kingdom of God. Those who do not acknowledge the authentic Messiah are just as culpable for the state of the nation, but Christians have both a special responsibility and a special hope in the Lord we say we serve.
We Christians should also be especially sensitive to the real pain experienced by people thinking themselves transgendered. Nothing is gained by PC treatment of these people, but compassion coupled with firm and fair application of just standards for all is how we exercise our creation in the image of One who died for all.
The pragmatic implications are tremendous according to the Thomas More Society attorneys representing the Chicago parents. Their spokesperson, Attorney Jocelyn Floyd, says “To impose such a rule on still-developing teenage girls, as they’re already struggling with puberty’s changes on their bodies and social pressures to look a certain way, undermines their dignity and tells them that their rights don’t matter. This isn’t a message our schools should be sending to our girls.”
We have a right and a responsibility to demand justice in terms of some privacy in the privy. The pragmatic implications are indeed tremendous. But the eternal implications are much greater.
James A. Wilson is the author of Living As Ambassadors of Relationships, The Holy Spirit and the End Times, and Kingdom in Pursuit – available at local bookstores or by e-mailing him at praynorthstate@charter.net
