No room for compromise

There are two layers to the current confusion over gender identity and public policy. The first layer is what is often called “culture war.” This layer consists of Caitlyn Jenner, J.K. Rowling, and, most recently, drag marketing from beer companies. These are often media controversies that concern how people talk and who they like or dislike. For a solid number of Americans, the debates about transgenderism stay predominantly on this level, and for that reason, their worldview of gender is capable of accommodating a hundred different takes, mostly downstream from their mood and experiences.

The second layer, however, is far more intrusive. This is the layer of parenting: What should you do if your child informs you he/she has the wrong body? Should your child’s school recognize a transgender identity without informing you? Who should be welcome in your child’s locker room or restroom? These are the questions that transcend the aesthetics of either experimental progressivism or reactionary conservatism. This layer is the limit of tribalism, the boundary of expressive individualism, the terminus of “you-do-you-and-I’ll-do-me” postmodernism. This is the layer of decision.

The Biden administration’s recent proposed changes to Title IX expose just how unavoidable the layer of decision is, and just how ill-equipped contemporary liberalism is to confront it. In a rebuke to recent moves by about two dozen state legislatures, the Biden administration presented a proposed addition to Title IX that would prohibit schools from outright disallowing transgender athletes but allow schools to restrict participation when the issue of an athlete’s gender identity “could undermine fairness or potentially lead to sports-related injuries.”

It's not hard to imagine how such an unwieldy proposition may have been concocted. The Biden administration is arguably the most gender-deconstructing presidency in U.S. history, replete with everything from appointees to executive orders seemingly tailor-made to mobilize and please transgender activists. But the arc of history is long, and it doesn’t always bend as predicted. There is a seemingly growing number of trans-skeptics even within secular camps. Gender identity in sports has particularly galvanized a feminist backlash. There are signs this may not be a winning issue for Democrats come next November. What’s the move?

Apparently, not much. The proposed criminalization of blanket restrictions against trans athletes is ideologically interesting but likely impotent, as one leader of a trans-rights organization told The Hill. It is a threat made dull by its attending concession, which would give schools leeway in determining restrictions on athletes. The purpose of the new language is ostensibly twofold: one, to signal the administration’s virtue to its activist base, and two, to give that base at least some plausible pathway to suing school boards. Yet in doing so, the president has also acknowledged that the gender revolution’s obstacles are not just hardline conservatives. Real voters, in real school systems, don’t see the march of progress in a biological boy being able to rule the basketball court or the swimming pool against female competitors.

Was it inevitable that sports would become the battleground of the gender revolution? Sports are, after all, one of the last remaining meritocracies in society, an industry in which the naked pursuit of winning is still mostly revered and complacency with losing mostly loathed. For many Americans, what has pushed the gender debate from the first layer—the layer of talking points and aesthetics—into the layer of decision is school sports. It’s one thing to know RuPaul’s Drag Race is on the air. It’s another thing to watch your aspiring athlete child pointlessly trying to compete with an anatomically and hormonally advantaged opponent. “Live your truth” hits a little different when a state championship or a college scholarship hangs in the balance.

Given this, the long-term viability of squishy “compromises” in the gender debate is grim. If the cultural left were to look a little harder, they might see that the real reason for red states’ action on transgender athletes is not bigotry, but belief (and biology). If sex and gender are non-things, simply mental constructs that we fluid human beings are discovering all the time, then no amount of appeals to safety or “fairness” can make it right to ever restrict a bathroom, a locker room, or a swim meet to only men or only women. If, on the other hand, sex and gender are real things—parts of our embodied human existence that define who we are—then no appeal to diversity can make it right to ignore how all our embodied human existences interact with each other. And nothing is wrong with parents and politicians who believe this and protect their kids and their institutions from those who reject it.

The first layer of the gender debate has been easy for some to dismiss. The second layer is quickly becoming impossible to ignore.