In the Midst of What Should Be a Reckoning, Democrats Resurrect the Equality Act

Otherwise known as: Have you learned nothing?

In 1974, Bella Abzug sponsored the first Equality Act, which would have prohibited “discrimination on the basis of sex, marital status, and sexual orientation.” The bill didn’t make it far. Twenty years later, Oregon Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced a new iteration of it: the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). Soon, trans rights advocates pushed for the inclusion of “gender identity” in the bill.

That bill didn’t make it far, either, though not for lack of trying year after year, for more than a decade. Finally, in 2007, out-gay Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank introduced a version of the bill without gender identity, assuming it would be more palatable to his colleagues. The idea was that they’d ensure this first tier of gay rights, and swing back around to pick up the trans folks later, after society had adjusted.

Though Frank was correct in his assessment—it was overwhelmingly passed in the House, though never brought to a vote in the Senate—for many people, cutting out the T evoked white Suffragettes pushing black women out of the movement for the sake of political expediency. Outrage ensued, and so did a lot of activism.

Soon after, a movement called United ENDA burst forth, with hundreds of national and local nonprofits and advocacy groups insisting on LGBT or nothing. One group that didn’t support the alphabet fusion, though, was Human Rights Campaign, or HRC. In other words: HRC would have a lot to atone for when the trans rights movement raced to the forefront, especially after gay marriage passed in 2015. Having succeeded in their mission, advocacy groups vowed to use their infrastructure to advance trans rights, making up for their 2007 foible.

As we now know, that’s been a real mixed bag. I really don’t think most of the folks advocating for more tolerance in schools, or to not fire transsexuals from their jobs or deny them housing, really envisioned non-binary influencers like Jeffrey Marsh telling kids with parents hesitant to transition them, “I’ll be your family.” They probably didn’t imagine lobbying for autistic kids to secretly socially transition at school, with transition closets and transgender support plans. They didn’t conceive of twisting that infrastructure into the school-to-gender-clinic pipeline. And they didn’t realize that institutionalizing and protecting the concept of gender identity would not only be fundamentally destabilizing, but potentially cost the Democrats elections, and cede the country to the most corrupt, anti-Democratic administration in our nation’s history.

So what are the Democrats doing now? Reintroducing the Equality Act, of course! Merkley’s still behind it!

Has anyone sent these guys this New York Times editorial, from Harris’s deputy campaign manager? “Democrats today are rowing upstream against powerful new cultural currents, while Republicans are working relentlessly to dam the river itself,” he writes. That’s code for: abandon these identity politics and reach out to the regular people!

At the Democrats’ press conference, Chuck Schumer talked about a fictional world in which lesbians couldn’t go to the doctor. That would be bad, but that’s not what’s at issue here. Gender identity is a belief, not a fact. It is the idea that each person has a hidden feeling about themselves—that their sex is determined by that feeling, rather than determined by their bodies. To prevent discrimination based on gender identity is to ensure that we divide society by each person’s subjective feeling: an endless collective solipsistic implosion. There is, therefore, no objective reality about sex. Woman is a feeling, not a reproductive class.

We already know what that looks like: men opting into women’s prisons, women’s sports, women’s bathrooms. Women with no power or agency to object, women insulted and impugned when they try to. Men exposing themselves to women and girls in changing rooms, raping and impregnating women in prison, winning scholarships or prizes set aside for women. It looks like proto-gay children being taught their bodies are diseased because they don’t conform to stereotypes.

To detail such a list is not to suggest that transsexuals are rapists or fetishists. It is to argue that eradicating the reality of sex leaves an enormous loophole that almost any man can take advantage of—and almost any woman can be disadvantaged by.

No one should be denied housing, healthcare, or employment because of their presentation, or whom they love, or their own subjective sense of themselves. But gender identity has no place in law. Democrats who try to dig it even more deeply into law are only going to lose more voters. That’s clear from the polling. Many Democrats who supported the idea of trans rights changed their minds when they understood the specifics of that vague term.

We must not be forced by law to comply with religious beliefs about gender. But the Democrats sure make that hard. It’s difficult to argue against something called the Equality Act, so we really need to rebrand it as the Women’s Inequality Act. Or the Forced Gender Religion Act. Or the Anti-LGB Act. None of those are as catchy as the misleading but brilliant “Don’t Say Gay” bill. If I were good at snappy slogans, I could have gone into advertising. So please leave your suggestions below. And please reach out to the Democrats, to calmly, kindly explain why we must not include gender identity in the Equality Act.