Trump Threatens to Annihilate Transgenders

Well, actually no. What is apparently happening is that the New York Times has “obtained a memo” allegedly revealing that there is a faction within the administration that would like to establish a legal definition of gender that basically entrenches in the letter of the law the sort of thing that everyone took as a matter of common sense until a few years ago, namely that there are two genders (formerly known as two sexes), barring the extremely rare cases of biological hermaphroditism. 

Now, to say that this proposed change in the legal definition is merely an entrenchment of longstanding (basically forever-standing) common sense is not to say that it is necessarily a good idea. That is, there is a legitimate question as to whether any government, let alone a federal government, ought to be in the business of enacting common sense beliefs. Is common sense really the sort of thing that should, or even can, be subject to legal definition? 

One might reasonably object, in defense of such a measure, that as long as progressives, such as the Obama administration, take it as within their jurisdiction to officially define alternative genders into existence — theoretically, an infinite number of them — it falls to non-progressives to correct these activist outrages with counter-definitions of their own. Before leaping to that conclusion, however, we might ask what all this legal defining is really about.

The Obama Marxists were trying to protect transgenderism and every other kind of alt-genderism under the umbrella of U.S. anti-discrimination laws. That is what certain people within the Trump administration are allegedly hoping to eliminate with new, traditionally-defined genders. 

But does that not implicitly mean accepting the premise underlying this whole debate, namely that certain groups must be protected against discrimination by law, the only question being which groups, or whether this or that group is real, legitimate, or fabricated for progressive propaganda purposes?

A real anti-progressive approach, it seems to me, rather than playing tit for tat on the legal definitions to be used in defining the lists of protected groups, would be assailing the very notion of anti-discrimination laws. Are laws determining how people of this or that sort must be treated, and criminalizing attitudes which the government, or even a majority of the population, finds distasteful, acceptable within a free republic, let alone one with freedom of association as an explicit founding principle?

In the case of so-called gender, there is no argument possible within a free republic for forcing anyone to hire people who “identify as” one of the various non-traditional (i.e., non-real) genders. But the reason is not, fundamentally, that these genders are imaginary. The reason is that there is no argument at all for forcing anyone to hire a person of any kind, whether that person’s group identity is real or not.

The debate over these competing definitions is what results when progressivism is allowed to metastasize throughout a body politic for generations. Eventually, every aspect of life is so interwoven with government, and so hyper-regulated, that there seems to be no escape from the entanglements, and resisters are left (at least in their perception) with no option but to produce legalities that trump (no pun intended) the earlier progressive legalities. And so the web gets stickier and more complex, year after year, administration after administration. 

There is no way out of this, until some substantial faction wakes up to the reality that fighting fire with fire makes no sense when your house is burning down.