The ongoing controversy about the meaning of gender is not an abstract issue. Recent years have wrought sweeping changes to the social contract in the name of accommodating the less than 1 percent of Americans who identify as transgender, including the rapid deconstruction of single-sex spaces in everything from sports to schools to prisons. This movement has material consequences: A slate of new blue-state laws allowing biologically male prisoners to transfer to women’s prisons under the nebulous guise of “gender identity” has raised serious concerns about women’s safety and has already led to allegations of sexual assault. Similar policies in public education have become a hot-button issue after gruesome recent allegations that the accommodation of gender identity directly enabled a series of sexual assaults in school bathrooms. And women’s sports have seen an influx of podium-topping biological males with innate physical advantages, depriving female athletes of college offers, scholarships, and any number of other opportunities.
Now, powerful activist groups are mounting a final push to make sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) a federally protected class under civil-rights law, stamping gender ideology with the legitimating imprimatur of the American legal regime. With all of the anti-discrimination protections afforded to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, and disability, such legislation would elevate transgenderism to the place of a fixed category with a positive right to affirmation in the public square. But perhaps more worryingly, it could arm the transgender movement’s already extraordinary efforts to silence dissent with the full force of the civil-rights bureaucracy.--
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