Fear and Loathing in the U.S. Congress
(Project 2025 in action)
A recent update to Meta's “Hateful Conduct” policy states that insults about “Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness” are explicitly prohibited, but “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality” are explicitly allowed.
Montana Republicans have announced that one of the first bills to be considered in 2025 will be a bathroom ban for transgender adults in public buildings (introduced by a woman who said she would rather her child commit suicide than transition – I am not making this up; it's on YouTube1). Nancy Mace (Rep. from SC) has introduced the same bill for all places receiving federal funds, as well as to impose penalties on doctors performing gender-affirming care.
The bill that was House Speaker Mike Johnson's first priority in his new rules package for 2025 had nothing to do with the economic plight of Americans, nor even the much-vaunted border security issue: it was to define sex under Title IX for sports participation as defined at birth. Though the bill's new title is “ Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” the rules preamble makes the real purpose clear.
The fear of transgender women dominating (“destroying” is the word used not infrequently) women's sports has no basis in science, though it takes a little real research to understand the underlying physiology. Nevertheless, the statistics are clear: with 76,000 presumptively transgender individuals among the 7.6 million active high-school athletes in the country,2 perhaps a half dozen girls have been good enough to come to the attention of the national press.
They are not dominating, let alone destroying, athletics, and they pose no danger in women's facilities. There are about 26,800 public bathrooms in the U.S.3 Suppose they are used, on the average, once a day (surely a severe underestimate): that's nearly 10 million times each year; 100,000 of which involve transgender women. If even a minuscule fraction of the roughly 1.7 million transgender women were such a threat, would we not hear about it rather often?
But Nancy Mace, as a presumably well-educated U.S. Senator, knows this quite well, and the real reason for her crusade is evident from these logical absurdities. Are we to believe that she thinks transgender women are transformed into bathroom-bound rapists by setting foot on federal property? Is she really going to be fine with adult “genital mutilation?”
Of course not, nor does she think they are a danger at all. She wants to ban the people. The practices are a sidelight.
It is neither a secret nor a new development that this group of politicians wants trans people to be “eradicated from public life entirely” (a direct quote from CPAC, March 20234). But already in 2022 Josh Schriver (R-MI) said to his colleagues: “In terms of endgame, why are we allowing these practices for anyone? If we are going to stop this for anyone under 18, why not apply it for anyone over 18?”
And the colleague's answer? “I think what we know legislatively is we have to take small bites.”5
Legislators such as these play to human fears like parents who encourage their four-year-old to believe that monsters really are lurking under the bed. But what parent does that, you might ask? Wouldn't that be perverse, even downright sadistic?
Bingo.
If these people wanted to be helpful, they would of course turn to experienced professionals who would happily advise them on how best to do so. They would discover that the Police Foundation, a 45-year-old organization dedicated to advancing policing, has found no evidence of sexual assaults by cross-dressed men or transgender women in women’s bathrooms.6 They would know that the child-safety organization Pat's Place in North Carolina, which professionally interviews children to help them with the aftermath of sexual abuse, conducted 850 interviews over two years and reported the number of incidents with transgender perpetrators in bathrooms: zero.7 (Only 2% of the cases involved strangers anywhere.)
They would learn that, far from being predators, transgender youth are at a strongly elevated risk of being victims of sexual assault when not allowed to use the restrooms corresponding to their expressed gender: about 2.5 times as high for girls in one comprehensive study (there are others with the same trend).8
But solutions won't help stir up vitriolic engagement from a public that isn't yet committed to hate. That requires convincing people that anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy to be “eradicated.” Empathy, which encourages outreach to others, is fundamentally intolerable in that pursuit.
The absence of empathy is, according to the chief psychological advisor to the Nuremberg prosecutors, the essence of evil.
References:
1 The video is here:
2 https://www.nfhs.org/articles/high-school-sports-participation-increases-again.
3 https://www.qssupplies.co.uk/the-public-toilet-index.html.
4 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-03-08/transgender-cpac-michael-knowles-rolling-stone-ron-desantis.
5 Erin Reed, “Ohio, Michigan Republicans in released audio: 'Endgame' is to ban trans care 'for everyone',” The Advocate, 29 Jan 2024.
6 National Policing Institute, “Archival Review Of Sexual Assault Complaints In Places Of Public Accommodation,” July 2017; https://www.policinginstitute.org/publication/archival-review-of-complaints-of-sexual-assaults-committed-in-places-of-public-accommodation/. The survey covered thousands of cases in four states. Only a very small fraction took place in public accommodations.
7 https://www.patsplacecac.org/. See Glenn Counts, https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/politics/stats-show-assaults-dont-happen-in-bathrooms/275-126572739 (8 Apr 2016).
8 G. R. Murchison, et al., “School Restroom and Locker Room Restrictions and Sexual Assault Risk Among Transgender Youth,” Pediatrics 143, e20182902 (June 2019). doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2902