“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
We’re every day a more embattled and embittered people.
To be sure, real issues divide us, as they have since our earliest days. Today, though, partisan voices magnify our differences, distorting our disagreements and leaving us all but unrecognizable to each other.
Discriminatory law enforcement, for example, should prompt peaceable protest and the reasoned administration of justice. Instead, unreasoned distractions like “Defund the Police” hijack public debate.
In uproar after uproar, excessive Progressive zeal enables Republican partisans to effectively change the subject and divert public attention away from reasonable remedies and areas of consensus, needlessly deepening the divide between “us” and “them.”
In the process, we’ve lost our focus on reality and ended up battling over bogeymen like critical race theory and facemasks.
Critical race theory isn’t a real issue. Hardly anybody knows what it is. Neither are facemasks. A roomful of contagious people boldly spreading a pandemic isn’t the hallmark of liberty. Whether the issue is immigration, the Second Amendment, or abortion, the discussion has become less about actual policy and more about misrepresentations of policy and condemnation of “those people.”
Transgender identification is one of those needlessly divisive issues. Conservatives and liberals share responsibility for the intolerance that poisons the discussion.
I’m not talking about gender-based violence. Harassment, assault and murder are crimes. Those accused deserve due process. Those convicted deserve due punishment.
I’m not talking to self-serving politicians. Greene weds malice to self-confident ignorance. Hawley’s puny fist holds nothing good for our republic. Cruz’s giant judicial ambition constitutes an obstruction of justice. Exploiting the QAnon delusion that the world is threatened by pedophile Democrats is itself the threat.
Most of the present malice seeps and surges from Republicans, but I’m not talking here to the most extreme or most malicious on either side. I’m talking to people for whom being reasonable is more important and more virtuous than winning an argument. I’m talking to Americans, Republicans as well as Democrats, who are willing to consider that parents and children with whom we disagree aren’t perforce agents of evil.
As far as I know, I’ve taught one transgender student in 30 years. I believe he was entirely sincere. I began referring to him using masculine pronouns. He took it in stride when I slipped up. I required his classmates to treat him with the same decency and respect I’d always expected from and for each of them.
Conservative extremists characterize transgender individuals and their advocates as victims beset by pedophile “groomers.” Progressive extremists claim conservatives fear that blurring the line between genders will undermine male supremacy and by extension white supremacy.
My reservations aren’t as complicated or as sinister. Simply put, I don’t understand.
Most transgender individuals that I’ve heard and read articulate that they don’t feel like their anatomical gender. My problem is the objective reality I begin from. I have a male anatomy. I assume, therefore, that the way I feel is the way, or at least one of the ways, a male feels.
The gender to which I’m attracted is a second objective indicator. At the risk of oversimplifying, if I’m a male attracted to females, I’m heterosexual. If I’m attracted to other males, I’m gay, not female, so that tangible marker doesn’t clarify matters.
No other objective criteria come to mind unless I resort to rightly abandoned stereotypes from the era of “tomboys” and “sissies.” Girls climb trees, and women can fight. Boys play with dolls, and men can be sensitive. Gender doesn’t rest on typecast roles and preferences.
Some ideas are conscientiously wrong and need to be opposed. Other differences of opinion are best met with tolerance. Tolerance goes two ways, though.
I shouldn’t rashly dismiss other people’s opinions or experiences, especially those I admittedly don’t understand, and most particularly those that are none of my business. In the same way, transgender persons, parents and advocates shouldn’t find my skepticism surprising, or reflexively dismiss my reservations as transphobic or bigoted.
Tolerance becomes more difficult and more necessary when differences of opinion become deeds in the real world. Most transgender rights advocates contend, for example, that transgender females should be permitted to use girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers so they aren’t forced to share with people they regard as not their gender. That ruling, however, compels anatomical females to share facilities with anatomical males.
I’m not raising the specter of bathroom predators. There’s no evidence of bathroom assaults committed by transgender students. Bathroom assaults are typically perpetrated by non-transgender men against non-transgender women. My concerns are comfort, conventional modesty, majority rule, minority rights, and parental sovereignty to determine whether their children should be obliged to use anatomically coed bathroom and shower facilities.
Both sides defend the rights of children. Neither side seems to give a damn about the children on the other side.
I can see how transgender students who believe they’re male might be uncomfortable using the girls’ bathroom. I can’t see how advocates who can understand that discomfort can’t understand the discomfort anatomical males might feel sharing a bathroom with anatomical females.
I can appreciate a transgender female athlete’s disappointment when her male anatomy disqualifies her from competing as a female. I can also appreciate an anatomical female athlete’s disappointment when she loses to an anatomical male who competes as a transgender female. And I can appreciate why the same reasoning that prohibits hormone and steroid doping because it conveys male physiological advantages to females arguably should disqualify anatomical males who were born with those physiological competitive advantages.
Advancing that argument doesn’t make me bigoted, misogynistic, or cruel. Opposing it doesn’t make me a “groomer.”
We all should be able to understand and empathize. Yet some of us can’t.
None of us should cheer either student’s disappointment. Yet some of us do.
We’re tearing ourselves apart.
Tolerance doesn’t mean agreeing with each other. It means striving to live together in peace even though we disagree.
I heard a politician today. He said he’s fine with burning books.
Come let us reason together.
Before it’s too late.
