Guest post by Blima Miller
Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court was presented with United Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls, a sex discrimination case involving women at a factory not permitted to enter a certain section exposing them to toxic lead. Potential pregnancy was the reason. In the brave new world of gender fluidity and biological sex suspension – or the identity crisis that makes a midlife crisis look like a walk in the park – things can get a little trippy. Basic biological statements are deemed hate speech, unsafe, and unethical. We all know this, and we often walk on eggshells. This past May, one politician of the Spanish Vox Party, Francisco José Contreras, suffered a twelve-hour shutdown of his Twitter account for “hate speech” posted: “A man cannot get pregnant. A man has no womb or eggs.” An Albertan professor was fired for admitting the same, namely that biological sex is real.
Back to 1991, which may cause some reasonable nostalgia:
“By excluding women with childbearing capacity from lead-exposed jobs, respondent’s policy creates a facial classification based on gender and explicitly discriminates against women on the basis of their sex under § 703(a) of Title VII. Moreover, in using the words ‘capable of bearing children’ as the criterion for exclusion, the policy explicitly classifies on the basis of potential for pregnancy, which classification must be regarded, under the PDA [Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), which forbids sex-specific fetal-protection policies], in the same light as explicit sex discrimination.”
Is it not interesting to note that this case could, according to woke biological logic, be altogether invalid nowadays? Potential for pregnancy and childbearing capacity are discriminatory disqualifiers, but in 2021, no longer is that discrimination on the basis of sex. It’s on the basis of pregnancy alone – pregnancies that we are now forbidden to outrule men from. The problem with rejecting science is that it comes back to bite when contradictions abound.
Welcome to Wonderland.
Last month, thousands of medical professionals represented by the American College of Pediatricians and the Catholic Medical Association have sued the Biden administration over the illegal 2016 Department of Health and Humans Services’ Transgender Mandate that requires doctors to perform surgeries necessary for gender transitions. The mandate is the result of the HHS’s overstretched interpretation of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act’s non-discrimination guidelines. Revoked licenses, fines, and loss of funding are the potential consequences of ignoring the directive, which most private insurance companies and many employers are also expected to honor. The HHS is aware of the unsafe nature of transgender procedures; Medicare and Medicaid are necessarily (and infuriatingly) exempt from the mandate. As specified in the lawsuit, HHS has violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Free Exercise of Religion Clauses.
Gender-affirming medical protections, albeit unsafe, are the latest in the misguided Woke wish list. The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund praised the HHS for its efforts to end transgender discrimination in the medical sphere, although it demanded for more be done to reverse “[t]he complete Trump-era regulation,” which “attempted to roll back protections on the basis of sex — including pregnancy, gender identity and sex stereotyping.”
It remains to be seen whether the freedoms of religion and conscience of those in the medical field will be so radically upended, especially as it pertains to surgeries on young children who have neither the physical nor the psychological wherewithal to undergo such “transitions.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom put forth the basic, undeniable concept of gender differences so crucial to this case:
“[Men and women] react differently to different medications. They are at greater risks for different types of cancer. And, of course, only women are capable of being pregnant. Ignoring these facts creates inaccurate, dangerous, and potentially lethal situations for patients of all ages in health care.”
Health and safety of individuals will oftentimes be relevant in case law. Yet the way in which anti-science actors will warp such ideals to further their own ends never ceases to astonish. Risky conventions are then self-righteously imposed at the expense of liberty and rational responsibility.In an ideal world, we’d thank God for creating man (sorry, peoplekind) in His image, the nature of the sexes, and the reproductive miracles gifted to both men and women. All women would be proud of their ability to carry and nurse offspring. Men would be grateful and not desire to play God. The boundaries of scientific recognition would snap back into place. Until then, the Soviet style biology of today is an evil worth fighting – and occasionally laughing over.
Blima Miller is a writer of Conservative opinion and satire.
