Now It’s Not about Bathrooms
Suddenly I’m on alert.
I thought I’d be able to sit on the sidelines, mostly apathetic about the bathroom debates. If anything, I’m unsympathetic with those manning the bathroom barricades. After all, the trees in the woods behind my house are unisex. I have better things to ponder.
And then the Justice Department spoke.
The Obama administration issued executive branch ‘guidance’ to schools and insurance companies threatening litigation unless they comply with the Justice Department’s view of gender dysphoria.
Their argument turns on their claim that our word ‘sex’ denotes ‘gender.’ Sex, they claim, is no longer a biological given but syntactically equivalent to the social construction we denote by ‘gender.’ Laws which rightly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, they say, also forbid communities from making a distinction between one’s biological sex and their self-authenticated gender identity. Sex now is just another word for gender, which itself is now to be understood in law as a private choice.
Suddenly the bathroom battle matters. But the important thing is to see that what matters has little to do with the presenting cause. It’s no longer about where you do your business. It’s now about how we the people do our business: governing.
The bathroom debate elevates to the national level a fundamental question about what words mean. Do words have any received meaning that participants in a conversation responsibly and tacitly acknowledge so that we are able to communicate with each other reliably? Or do words have no meaning whatsoever except what I say they mean? In our conversations, are each of us ultimately self-authenticating?
We have a lot at stake in the argument that words mean what the community says they mean. A toddler who picks up a stick and declares it a ball doesn’t get the last word on our word, because authority arises from the community which generates the language.
We push back because there needs to be some traction in our use of the words ‘ball’ and ‘stick’ or we can’t communicate. If we can’t communicate, we can’t achieve harmony. We declare the toddler out of bounds, correcting him: no, you don’t get to declare a stick a ball because our community correlates the word, ‘ball,’ with round things. Put down the stick!
The point is that we as individuals are not self-authenticating. If I say I am a Martian, my community rightly tells me I am delusional. If I say I am a woman, my community rightly argues, “no, your biology matches what the word ‘man’ denotes. We use the word ‘woman’ to denote humans with these attributes, and no matter how you feel, you don’t have them. Instead, you have these attributes, which we denote with the word, ‘man.’ And the term we use to denote people who are persistently confused about their biological category is gender dysphoria. Because words matter.
The community authenticates the meaning of our words through dialectical discourse, by either accepting or correcting our own usage. And that dialectical discourse is essential to the sustenance of the community.
The problem is that the Obama administration wants to shutdown that dialectical discourse. Communities don’t decide what words mean. The executive branch does. We have no need to deliberate how to think about what’s best for those afflicted with gender dysphoria. We have no time to deliberate the potential communal consequences of entrenching in law the notion that individuals determine what words mean rather than the community. The conversation is over before it begins. It’s over because the Obama administration has declared itself the arbiter of meaning.
The administration’s ‘guidance’ is audacious overreach by a branch of the government. This is an abuse of executive power. They’ve raised the stakes of the bathroom battle because now the issue is no longer about where one pees but about who gets to determine what our everyday language means. So now the debates are about how our government functions. Do we have a representative republic in which all authority arises from the people who deliberate matters communally or have we ceded absolute power to an executive branch?
I’m one who would have happily ignored the transgender conflict, having better things to do with my time. I don’t mind unisex bathrooms. But freedom requires that we resist domination. In seeking to short-circuit communities’ right to deliberate for themselves how they responsibly protect the dignity of those affected by gender dysphoria, the Obama administration has crossed a line.
Time for the people who constitute this nation to resist. We, and not Caesar, determine what our words mean.
If you liked this, click the💚 below so other people will see this here on Medium.
