[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 141 (Monday, September 19, 2016)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1288-E1289]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
A RECENT ADOPTED RESOLUTION
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HON. JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR.
of tennessee
in the house of representatives
Monday, September 19, 2016
Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, on August 9, 2016 I had a
conversation with my good friend and Knoxville Attorney James M. Crain.
Mr. Crain and I had the opportunity to discuss the federal edict
announcing that every public school in America is to allow students to
use whichever bathroom they choose.
During our conversation Mr. Crain discussed a resolution adopted by
the West Knoxville/Knox County Republican Club offered by Mr. Crain.
Newscom published an opinion editorial titled, ``A Bathroom of One's
Own,'' that is consistent with the adopted resolution.
This article is well reasoned and is consistent with the views of
many of the people from my District in East Tennessee.
I think most people are tired of all the publicity on this issue and
wish we could get back to a time when sexual preference was kept purely
private.
I also believe that the Federal government should have very limited
power over the decisions State and local governments make about their
schools. This has long been my position.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to call to the attention of my Colleagues
and other readers of the Record the resolution adopted by the West
Knoxville/Knox County Republican Club and the article that ran in The
Weekly Standard on June 7, 2016.
A Bathroom of One's Own--Newscom
Two weeks ago the Obama administration issued a federal
edict decreeing that every public school in America allow
students to use whichever bathroom they choose, under pain of
lawsuit and/or loss of federal funding.
Less than a week after that, New York City's Commission on
Human Rights issued its own edict, declaring that anyone
under the city's rule who refused to use the preferred gender
pronouns in dealing with transgender individuals--he, she,
``xe,'' or ``hir''--would be guilty of harassment and subject
to penalties up to $125,000 for the first infraction and
$250,000 ``for violations that are the result of willful,
wanton, or malicious conduct.'' As law professor Eugene
Volokh noted, the use of the term ``harassment'' is
important, because it means that employers and businesses are
responsible not just for their own behavior but for the
behavior of their employees and customers.
And New York is, if you can imagine it, behind the times.
Out in Oregon, Leo Spell, a fifth-grade teacher in the
Gresham-Barlow school district, decided she was transgender.
(Soell made this decision public only after receiving
tenure.) Soell's transition took the form of insisting that
she was neither male nor female and demanding that her
colleagues refer to her as ``they.'' When other teachers
continued to call Soell ``she'' and ``her'' and ``Miss
Soell,'' Soell filed a harassment complaint. The school
district settled with they for $60,000 and promised to
initiate a sweeping set of transgender reforms. To hammer
home the power dynamic, the school district claimed, in the
statement accompanying the payout, that it was quite
``pleased'' with the outcome.
If you think that's depressing, it could always be worse.
In Canada, the minister of justice recently introduced
legislation banning discrimination based on ``gender
identity'' and ``gender expression,'' which could join
previous legislation criminalizing anti-trans ``hate
propaganda.'' Should the bill pass, you could do up to two
years, hard time, if you think the wrong thoughts or say the
wrong words.
If this all seems like an inordinate amount of heavy
artillery for an infinitesimally tiny issue, that's actually
the point. Much as fights in academia are so bitter because
the stakes are so small, transgender activists are crushingly
authoritarian because the justice of their cause is so
uncertain. What the trans project lacks in moral and logical
clarity, it hopes to overcome with vehemence and
intimidation.
The confusion is abundant. If you tell a transgender
activist that gender is determined biologically, through
chromosomal composition, they reply, Well, what about people
with Klinefelter (XXY) syndrome? But even with Klinefelter's
chromosomal anomalies, only a very small proportion of
persons will fall into a category of ``intersex.'' As
National Review's Celina Durgin points out, arguments about
the tiny, tiny sliver of the population who are biologically
considered ``intersex'' actually run counter to transgender
ideology, which places ``gender identity''--a self-discovered
concept--on a separate plane above mere biology. In other
words, if being biologically XX is irrelevant to whether or
not you are a girl, then why should it matter if you're XXY?
Resorting to arguments about the intersexed is actually an
admission of the primacy of biology.
Or consider ``gender fluidity,'' another pillar of the
transgender project. According to this precept, some people
may be one gender on Monday and another on Tuesday. Who can
say which is which, or who is when? Not you. The individual
is what he/she/they/xe/hir says at any given moment.
And once you've divorced gender from biology and agreed
that someone who is chromosomally XY can be a woman, you have
no valid reason to object if, the next day, she says she is a
man again. If you sign on for transgenderism, you're signing
on for gender fluidity, too.
It doesn't stop there, of course. Once you shoot past
gender fluidity and the nongendered ``theys'' like Leo Soell
and ``pangenders'' (who claim to be everything rolled into
one), there's a whole other universe of gender identities out
there. For instance, ``otherkin.''
What are ``otherkin''? Otherkin is the gender identity of
people who believe that they are nonhuman. Last summer
Vice.com profiled a fellow who identifies as a fox. Some
identify as dogs. Some as lions. Some as dragons. Some
otherkin even go through body-modifications to make their
physical selves look more like their otherkin identity.
The otherkin aren't officially part of the LGBTTQQIAAP
alliance yet. But just wait. They're coming. Because to deny
them their place at the table--to deny that a human person
can be not just an animal, but a creature that does not even
exist in the real world--is to put the entire transgender
project in jeopardy. Because transgender theory, which posits
that the self is infinitely plastic, cannot survive a single
limiting precept.
Fortunately, we are not yet fighting over the rights of
otherkin unicorns. In the here-and-now, we merely have wars
over public bathroom and school locker room accommodations.
This may seem like a small-scale concern. The Census Bureau
and the New York Times tried to estimate the number of
transgendered persons in the United States last year and came
up with a figure somewhere between 21,000 and 90,000. Or, to
put it another way, transgenders probably make up between
0.007 percent and 0.029 percent of the American population.
When you're dealing with fractions this small, it's hard to
be precise.
But because virtue-signaling is the highest form of
morality in modern America, the full force of the federal
government is being brought to bear on transgender bathroom
rights, not only through Obama's federal edict, but through
the Obama Justice Department's fight against the state of
North Carolina.
In March, the elected officials of North Carolina voted on
and passed a piece of legislation, HB-2, which was designed
to stop the forced march toward mandating that people must be
free to use whatever bathroom they desire. (It is instructive
to note that the initiatives pushing the transgender agenda
are almost never enacted legislatively; they are often rammed
through bureaucracies and commissions or accomplished by
executive fiat.)
HB-2 was not a perfect piece of legislation. But the
reaction to it was illuminating. The Charlotte Observer's
editorial board proclaimed, ``Yes, the thought of male
genitalia in girls' locker rooms--and vice versa--might be
distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always
been in part about overcoming discomfort . . .''
Which brings us to the final bit of confusion in the
transgender project. At the heart of the bathroom issue is a
simple question: Is there a valid reason for separate
facilities for men and women? Is there any rational
justification for having separate bathrooms, or locker rooms,
or changing rooms, for men and boys on the one hand, and
women and girls on the other?
The trans argument, per the Charlotte Observer, is
essentially ``no.'' By their logic, if women just need to get
over their discomfort at seeing naked men next to them, then
there's no reasonable explanation for why women could want
their own facilities.
Except that this would mean there is no reasonable
explanation for why someone who is transgender should prefer
one set of facilities over another. If biologically born
women need to ``overcome discomfort'' about having naked men
around them, why shouldn't a biological man who identifies as
a woman not similarly have to overcome his discomfort at
being around other naked men?
The logical paradox of the transgender bathroom war is that
it insists that the type of gender and genitalia in a public
facility is completely irrelevant--except to the
transgendered, for whom it is of supreme importance.
At the end of the day, if you're not in favor of unisex
facilities for all--one bathroom for everyone to use--then
the transgender case falls apart. Because the transgender
project tacitly admits that there are reasons of privacy,
modesty, and prudence for segregating the sexes. It merely
wishes to trump these concerns from the vast majority for the
special pleading of a small, powerful, and illiberal group.
It is the very definition of the tyranny of the minority.
Resolution
The West Knoxville/Knox County Republican Club
Whereas, Persons who assert a ``gender identity'' other
than their sex are claiming a right to utilize rest room
facilities, locker rooms and associated showers with persons
of the opposite sex; and
Whereas, No such right has existed in the history of
mankind; and
[[Page E1289]]
Whereas, Persons--and particularly females--are made
extremely uncomfortable by the presence of persons of the
opposite sex in such facilities; and
Whereas, There is no way to determine the legitimacy of a
claim of ``gender identity,'' thus opening the door to false
claims made to gain entrance to such facilities for immoral
and illegal purposes; and
Whereas, Agencies of the Federal Government have exceeded
their lawful authority by construing various Acts of Congress
as conferring a right to utilize such facilities designated
for persons of the opposite sex upon persons claiming a
``gender identity'' different from their biological sex, to
wit:
a. On January 7, 2015, the Department of Energy Office for
Civil Rights issued a letter construing 34 C.F.R. 106.33
(implementing 20 USC 1681(a)) as requiring that transgender
students in schools that receive Federal funds must
``generally'' be allowed to utilize bathrooms and locker
rooms assigned to the gender with which they identify. The
Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, citing deference to
administrative construction, has reinstated a suit by a
transgender ``male'' to require her Virginia high school to
allow her to use the boys rest room, and
b. The Department of Justice has sent a letter to the
Governor of North Carolina, asserting that the provisions of
North Carolina H.B. 2 violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964
because it treats Transgender persons differently than non-
transgender persons by denying all persons the right to use
multi-person facilities assigned to persons of the opposite
sex, and
Whereas, the expanded interpretations set out above will
require schools, in particular, to require that
schoolchildren share toilet, locker and shower facilities
with any person of the opposite sex that claims a different
``gender identity,'' and
Whereas, with particular reference to 20 USC 1681(a), this
expanded interpretation of ``sex'' will have the effect of
mandating that transgendered ``females'' be allowed to try
out for and compete in women's sports and, because of the
greater strength and speed potential of biological males,
will largely destroy the very women's sports programs that
the provision was designed to foster, and which it has
fostered with great success; Now, therefore, be it
Resolved as follows;
1. That the foregoing expansions of these Acts of Congress
to create rights never intended or contemplated at the time
they were enacted is an unconstitutional exercise of
legislative power by the Executive Branch, and must be
addressed IMMEDIATELY!
2. That the United States Code must be amended to clarify
the erroneous ``interpretation'' placed on it by the
Executive Branch by enacting a statute worded substantially
as follows:
As used in this Code, the word ``sex'' refers only to
biological sex unless expressly stated to the contrary. No
such reference in this Code either requires or prohibits any
particular treatment of transgender individuals unless some
particular treatment is expressly stated therein.
3. That since such legislation is certain to be vetoed by
our President, the foregoing bill MUST BE PASSED AND
PRESENTED TO HIM in a timely manner, so that upon returning
it to Congress, ample time for votes to override that veto
can be held BEFORE THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER.
4. That this resolution be forwarded to our Representative
and to both of our Senators, with the notation that failure
to vigorously pursue the passage of the above statute will be
construed by the Club as your agreement with these
unconstitutional actions by the Executive Branch.
5. The undersigned officers of the West Knoxville/Knox
County Republican Club execute this resolution in their
capacities as officers only, and that the undersigned
represent that this Resolution was passed without opposition
by the voting members present at the June 13, 2016 meeting of
the club.
Resolved by the Club this the 13th day of June, 2016
Gary Loe,
Vice President.
Paul E. Wehmeier,
President.
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