Liberals Shame and Bully Conservative Kids
 
Liberals Shame and Bully Conservative Kids
Written By Laurie Higgins   |   03.29.17
Reading Time: 4 minutes

One of the central tactics used by liberals to impose coercively an incoherent and science-denying “trans” ideology on, well, everyone, is to hurl epithets at dissenters. And if that means adults hurling epithets in the direction of children, so be it. Leftists can’t have children running around our streets even thinking the emperor has no clothes. And they certainly can’t have girls refusing to share restrooms with the emperor.

Two comments left on Illinois Family Action’s Facebook page in response to my article titled “The Enemies of Truth Wage War in Districts 211 and 15” illustrate the terrible way liberals seek to manipulate those who believe that congenital physical embodiment as male or female matters.

Simone McLellan Kentish accuses those who support sex-segregated restrooms and locker rooms of intolerance, ignorance, unjust discrimination, and bigotry:

The TRUTH is that a gender dysphoric child is going through so many challenges of his own dealing with discrimination and ignorance that the farthest thing from his mind would be to ogle another student of the same sex he identifies with.

The TRUTH is that the locker room issue is a convenient excuse intolerant people are using to justify their own bigotry.

My own child will soon be graduating from a D15 school and moving on to a d211 school. I am thankful she’s being brought up in an environment where tolerance and understanding prevail.

Jill Mayes goes even further in her defense of intellectual and moral incoherence:

“Enemies of Truth”?!? Ugh! This religious hatred breaks my heart. Do you even know any transgender people? Life is hard enough without people causing trouble for one another especially children … especially in the name of God. Honestly, this is the most unChrist like behavior I can imagine. Please stop.

Seriously? The most un-Christlike behavior Mayes can imagine is opposition to co-ed locker rooms? Has she heard of ISIS?

There is no doubt that gender-dysphoric children experience challenges, but the proper response to their disordered and futile attempt to reject their immutable biological sex should not be to allow them to invade the private spaces of opposite-sex children.

The objections to co-ed restrooms and locker rooms articulated in the “Enemies of Truth” article have nothing to do with “ogling.” The central objection to the sexual integration of private spaces pertains to the intrinsic meaning of biological sex, particularly with regard to modesty and privacy.

Whether Kentish and Mayes acknowledge it, allowing an objectively male student in girls’ private spaces (or vice versa) necessarily means that objective, immutable biological sex has no intrinsic meaning relative to modesty and privacy.

If, however, biological sex has meaning, then biological males who wish they were girls have no more right in girls’ locker rooms than do biological males who are content with their sex. Either objective, immutable biological sex matters or it doesn’t. If it matters, then boys and girls should not be sharing private spaces. If it doesn’t matter, then there is no reason to have any sex-segregated restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters or semi-private hospital rooms anywhere.

And if biological sex doesn’t matter in private spaces, then why is District 211 requiring the boy who is pretending to be a girl to use a private changing area? Doesn’t that requirement suggest that biological sex does, in reality, mean something?

When I worked at Deerfield High School where my children attended and were swimmers, I could walk into the locker room where the girl swimmers were changing and showering to talk to my daughter. I could not walk into the boys’ locker room to talk to my son. If during my children’s high school years, I were to have “transitioned” to a male, should I have been prohibited from entering the girls’ locker room and been permitted to enter the boys’?

Despite Kentish’s claim, it is not bigotry that leads girls to desire separation from boys when changing clothes. And it is not bigotry that leads girls not to want to do their business in a stall next to an unrelated boy doing his business. It is natural and good for girls and boys to want to undress and do their business in sex-segregated spaces.

Since Mayes objects to my claim that proponents of co-ed restrooms are enemies of truth, perhaps I should clarify what I meant and to whom the comment was directed.

  • Anyone who claims that people can change their sex is an enemy of truth.
  • Anyone who claims that private spaces should correspond to subjective feelings about biological sex rather than to objective sex is an enemy of truth.
  • Anyone who claims that compassion, inclusivity, love, or Christ demands the sexual integration of restrooms and locker rooms is an enemy of truth. The Bible teaches that God created us male and female. God prohibits cross-dressing. And God prohibits bearing false witness. The love that Jesus embodied and taught does not affirm all human desires, beliefs, and actions. Quite the contrary. Jesus himself said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
  • Anyone who believes that the government (i.e., public school administrations) has a right to require employees to lie by referring to gender-dysphoric students by opposite-sex pronouns is an enemy of truth.
  • Anyone who believes that it is a good thing to give minors puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, or double-mastectomies is an enemy of truth.

The blame for locker room controversies in public schools rests not with parents who believe that biological sex matters but with parents of gender-dysphoric children who are trying to impose their arguable assumptions about “gender identity” on everyone and on their liberal allies who seek to humiliate and stigmatize dissenters. And here’s where children come in.

Policies that permit co-ed restrooms and locker rooms implicitly teach what Kentish and Mayes explicitly say: They teach all children that their desire not to share private spaces with opposite-sex persons is intolerant, ignorant, unjustly discriminatory, bigoted, hateful, and un-Christlike. When Kentish, Mayes and countless other “progressives” vilify opponents of co-ed restrooms and locker rooms, they are necessarily vilifying and shaming conservative kids. And that is shameful bullying.


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Laurie Higgins
Laurie Higgins was the Illinois Family Institute’s Cultural Affairs Writer in the fall of 2008 through early 2023. Prior to working for the IFI, Laurie worked full-time for eight years in Deerfield High School’s writing center in Deerfield, Illinois. Her cultural commentaries have been carried on a number of pro-family websites nationally and internationally, and Laurie has appeared on numerous radio programs across the country. In addition, Laurie has spoken at the Council for National Policy and educational conferences sponsored by the Constitutional Coalition. She has been married to her husband for forty-four years, and they have four grown children...
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