When I was a boy (and thought of myself as a boy and did boy things), my parents taught me that one did not talk about politics, religion, or sex in polite society. I think that they meant with others on social occasions. For dinner table talk almost always involved politics and religion and, on weekends, inevitable, tedious accounts of their weekend rounds of golf. But not sex.
Until high school, there were two, and only two, sexes. There still are only two, biologically speaking. But there were whispers about one or two high-school classmates that some boys and some girls did not do the usual—today, “straight”—things. There were even hushed comments to the same effect about family and friends. I had no taste for the salacious, so the gossip went in one ear and out the other. But there were moments.
I remember coming home from third grade in the middle of the afternoon and going up the front instead of the back stairs to my room, and encountering my mother and a young woman, a daughter of family friends, leaving my parents’ bedroom. It seemed odd to me at the time, even when I was only nine. I said only “hello” as I passed by them; I never asked my mother about it. Years later, I understood that she was bisexual in relationships outside marriage. I remember her concern when a gay family friend, the social columnist of one of the city’s two major papers, needed a ride home. He was drunk, and I could tell that my mother was afraid that he would make a pass at 18-year-old me. I knew better, and I was right. At lunch many years later, a client and friend came out to me. I nodded, resumed our previous topic of conversation, and irritated him because I did not acknowledge how much it meant to him at the time, in the 90s, to come out. I apologized that my detachment showed insensitivity to, not appreciation of, what he had done. I added that I had had no experience to sensitize me and hoped that my detachment foretold the indifference which he hoped all straights might someday achieve. He agreed.
Decades later, what used to be private is flagrantly public, and what used to be personal is heatedly political. Worst of all, matters of sex and gender give CINOs (Christians in Name Only) the excuse to be both hateful and self-righteous in the name of a divinity whom they call their lord, who had nothing to say about the LGBTQIA+ members of society, and who, if we give him credit according to the Good Book, preached love for all, including one’s enemies. Let me be clear: I do not think of LGBTQIA+ as enemies. For millions and for me, they are family, friends, neighbors, teammates, co-religionists, family doctors and lawyers and accountants, co-workers, public servants, etc. All are citizens of the United States and have the right to equal treatment under the law. I would sooner dispense with CINOs than LGBTQIA+s.
The issues which have outraged CINOs concern transgender issues, namely, issues arising from the discrepancy between a person’s sex as determined by anatomy and a person’s gender as reflecting “socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities of individuals,” including “how individuals perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others, including societal expectations related to how to act, talk, dress, and interact” (AI). The particularly inflammatory issues are about bathrooms and sports.
The first issue is just silly. Unisex bathrooms cause no real problems. The sounds and smells from stalls are much the same. If men move to stand a little closer to wall urinals when a woman walks by, they are not embarrassed, and she is not disappointed. I cannot imagine how a transgender person changes the situation. If a born female becomes a transgender male, he is going to use the men’s room as men use it; if a born male becomes a transgender female, she is going to use the women’s room as women use it. What is the problem?
[Post-posting note. I limited my discussion to unisex bathrooms. But the use of separate sex bathrooms is going to be for the usual purposes no matter what a person's gender. We must laugh to scorn the prurient scolds who fantasize to the contrary.]
The second inflammatory issue is not silly, but it is not unsolvable. The key is the difference between sex and gender, that is, the capabilities of abiding sex after a change of gender. If sex confers an advantage after a change in gender, it should be the basis of disqualification. If a born female becomes a transgender male and wants to play men’s sports, he probably puts himself at a disadvantage because he likely lacks the biological capabilities of men. Without any advantage, he should be allowed to play with men if he wishes. But, if a born male becomes a transgender female and wants to play women’s sports, she probably enjoys a biological advantage which the change in gender does not nullify. If denied the opportunity to compete with other women, she will likely believe herself—rightly—excluded because of the sex which she had abandoned, but, if she is not denied, her female competitors will believe that she has denied them fair chances. No one thinks that a team should include a “ringer.”
CINOs imagine non-existent problems. Despite their fears of LGBTQIA+ people as sexual perverts and predators, media coverage of incidents of the sexual aggression imputed to them is rare because such incidents are rare. Problems posed by sexual deviants are mostly limited to those who do not have or cannot be allowed to have sexual relationships. I am thinking of the involuntarily celibate (incels) and Catholic priests (no nuns?) whose abuses are shameful, harmful, and known to be such by the perpetrators, the abuses by priests made worse by the Church’s efforts to conceal them, regardless of long-term damage to the victims.
My rule in matters of sex and gender is a simple one: do as you please with anyone who is legally capable of giving informed consent and shares your proclivities and preferences, but do not meddle in others’ relationships. Having been content in straight relationships, I have had no prurient obsessions about others’ relationships. Indeed, I suspect that third-party scolds who worry about others’ relationships unwittingly reveal that theirs are less than satisfactory and require lurid distractions. I even speculate that a little envy might play a role in their censures.
NOTE on sexy literature in the public schools. School teachers and especially librarians have expertise in age-suitable literature. There is no educational, only politically ideological or personally theological, reasons for challenging their judgment. The social and informational environment in which children live educates them in matters of sex and gender before they even get to classroom or library bookshelves. Instead of scratching their itch or virtue signaling, parents should provide guidance at home, in sober, informed discussions of sex and gender. But I fear that such discussions are precisely what parents who would be book censors cannot have.
Such discussions can be fraught. At a local rock concert, my daughter, a rising high-school senior, met a Naval Academy cadet, a rising senior soon to be, he claimed, commander of cadets. He asked her for a date. After a discussion, my wife and I gave her our consent to the usual movie, snack, home-by-midnight evening. When he arrived, I stated the curfew and gave him a wordless message about the proprieties. When he called for a second date, I sat my daughter down for a father-daughter chat. I told her—she surely knew what I went on to tell her, but, as I liked to say, it made me feel good to say it—that he was older and more experienced than she. I said that I preferred she draw the line at the neck and insisted that she draw it at the waist. To which she responded, “Oh, Dad, I’m so embarrassed.” “Better,” I said, “than being pregnant.” She arrived home early from the second date, strode straight and silently to her room, and slammed the door. Days later, she thanked me for the advice enabling her to say “no: my Dad will kill me.”