What the restroom war is really about

One of the rare defeats progressives have suffered in the last couple of generations occurred in the 1970s, when the states refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, due in some large measure to the belief that the ERA would abolish separate male and female toilet facilities. So why have liberals chosen to force the issue of "transgender" rights down our throats and trigger another (and possibly) losing fight over loo access?

The answer is not only that liberals are drawn to the issue like salmon to their home stream, but that they’re afraid to leave it be. But not for the reason you think. Indeed, they couldn't care less about the hurt feelings of the sexually confused. What they're targeting is the mindset of those men who aren't at all confused. After all, you have to remember that their goal has always been a state of being that doesn't admit any identity for oneself other than that provided by the government. Just as many Britons cannot see themselves as hospital patients other than with the NHS or third-generation welfare recipients in a Bed-Stuy public housing project cannot imagine themselves as a human being not supported by social services. And so, in this great liberal Game of Drones, everything that provides an alternate identity must go. Christianity, regional identities like the South’s, the vanity of European history, traditional family with its rock-hard loyalties, scholarship and its “ability status,” pride in economic success in the private economy, until eventually even the idea that you have a conclusive and individual sexual identity established by nature is to be delegitimized and masculinity abolished – replaced by some determination of sex, or the lack of it, by some law or government regulation. At which point the left-wing liberal world is finally made safe. Safe in the almost exact same fashion Middle Eastern harem keepers were safe once their male servants and guards were all castrated. Insane, but there it is. The fight about “transgenders” is really not a struggle about them at all. Instead, it’s part and parcel, warp and woof, of the left’s larger struggle: to get your...well, to get your you-know-what. Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD. He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York; blogs here at richardfminiterblog.com; and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com.