In laying out its opinion, the Herald blithely avoids mentioning a number of salient points. First of all, “transgender” refers to a psychological condition known as Gender Identity Dysphoria. There is no “woman trapped in a man’s body;” there’s a psychological problem which 70 to 80 percent of victims outgrow if left alone. Imagine the remorse of losing a wrong sexual identification dysphoria after gender-change surgery has already been performed. Encouraging people to live out their sexual identification fantasies is on a par with encouraging an anorexic to not eat, if that’s what an anorexic wants to do. Forcing people to accommodate someone else’s psychological fantasies as reality is a real dose of leftist authoritarianism.

Secondly, the Herald focuses on bathrooms, neglecting to mention that locker rooms and gender-specific shower rooms are going to be affected. If you want your daughter’s school showers to be open to biological males who have decided to “self-identify” as females, vote Democrat this fall and you’ll get your wish. There have already been a number of cases of men coming into female locker rooms and disrobing in front of women and girls, using the casual excuse that they “self-identify” as females. Of course, the liberal media avoids reporting those instances because it doesn’t fit the current leftist narrative.

Lastly, there are federal laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender, but those laws were written well before this current idea from the left that “self-identification” is the same thing as actual biological gender. So the argument from the left is that there are some “rights” that a transgender person has because they self-identify as a different sex. The courts will look at that, but as even the New York Times has begun to realize, there are some actual federal rights that women have in their private moments that preclude them being forced to allow men into their locker rooms and showers.

Mike Sigman

Durango