Sarah McBride was elected to Congress on November 5. As the Democratic candidate in Delaware, the result should have been a no-news story, an inevitable outcome in that one-party state. But McBride is no ordinary woman. In fact, McBride’s a “he” now presenting as a “she,” the first transgender person to become a member of Congress.
So, McBride is in the news. The presenting issue is bathrooms. Can McBride use the women’s restrooms in the Capitol? South Carolina representative Nancy Mace successfully pressed for McBride to be barred from the ladies’ room: “Single-sex facilities,” House Speaker Mike Johnson announced, “such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms . . . are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.”
McBride is not a stranger to these battles. The newly elected member of the House is a lifetime activist campaigning to advance LGBT causes. I imagine that McBride is rather pleased by Mace’s actions. They throw a spotlight on the trans issue and put him into the national news. The message is clear: I’m here and you can’t pretend that I’m not. You can either be nice or be mean-spirited.
The outcome in this skirmish could have been predicted. Most commentators agree that Donald Trump successfully used public resentment of the recent heavy-handed imposition of transgender ideology against Kamala Harris. Put simply, after November 5, appearing to oppose transgenderism became the consensus “winning look” for Republicans. Earlier, Nancy Mace had cast herself as a pro-LGBT Republican. McBride offered her an opportunity to send the opposite signal and protect herself politically.
Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue. I’m happy that Mace led the charge and Capitol Hill’s women’s bathrooms are for women, and men’s bathrooms are for men, full stop. But count me skeptical that meaningful pushback against the trans crusade will emerge within the Republican party.
Consider Trump’s election night party. Caitlyn Jenner (the formerly self-identifying male athlete and TV personality) was invited. Jenner posted a picture of himself with Trump and Elon Musk on X, commenting, “Hope is back in America. These two men will single-handedly save western civilization . . .”
Musk proposes to renew our faith in the future by sending colonists to Mars. Do not accept limits! Jenner represents something similar. He has contracted to have surgeons construct a new body and has pioneered a new identity. Do not accept limits! Perhaps Jenner thinks this imperative provides the definition of Western civilization, making his breasts and female persona a fulfillment of our society’s hopes and dreams.
Nature does not matter: This is the fundamental premise of the sexual revolution. The intrinsic fertility of the female body ought not to matter. Men and women ought to be able to copulate without worrying about pregnancy. This mentality, which is super-dominant today, underwrites the “right” to abortion. The child in the womb is mere “fetal tissue,” something the woman can do with as she pleases, just as she presumes that she can sleep with whomever she pleases.
From these “oughts” others followed. Why should the intrinsic infertility of a man’s anus have any bearing on our thinking about sexual morality? Love is love, and nature (which is just biology, on this view) must not judge what is licit and illicit. And why should male and female sexual organs and the biological complementarity have anything to do with marriage?
Indeed, why should the difference between men and women have any bearing on anything of importance? The first premise of modern feminism is that the male-female difference must not be accorded legal or cultural significance, except to accord women special civil rights to protect them from the enduring influence of older views that lack such an enlightened understanding of the irrelevance of nature.
Nancy Mace was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, a South Carolina military school that accepted her after a Supreme Court decision deemed it unconstitutional to exclude female cadets from military programs. In view of her role in breaking that barrier, her earlier support of LGBT causes makes sense. Why should our male and female bodies matter? Don’t we want everyone to have the freedom to pursue their dreams?
It sounds idealistic, but the reality is otherwise. The sexual revolution has been a disaster. Biological men who identify as female showering in the girls’ locker room or competing in girls’ sports presently get attention, because the implications are unpleasant to contemplate. Preferred pronouns also rankle, because their announcement implies coercion: Use these pronouns—or else.
But transgenderism creates minor irritants in comparison to the distrust and rancor that presently poisons male-female relations among the young—and the growing cohort of childless adults. And the distrust, rancor, and rampant infertility are born of our collective decision to deny the legal, moral, and cultural relevance of our nature as male and female.
In the midst of disaster, we are right to rush to plug gaps and add sandbags. Bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams stand at the bloody edge of the sexual revolution’s relentless advance. By all means, defend sanity in these skirmishes!
But let’s not allow ourselves to be deceived. McBride called the bathroom fracas a distraction. That’s largely true. Many Republicans are eager to appear as adversaries of “cultural Marxism.” But few are willing to offer the slightest resistance to any of the achievements of modern feminism or gay liberation. These movements endorse the basic premise of transgender ideology: Our nature as men and women should be of no consequence.
McBride has announced that he’ll refrain from using the women’s restrooms in the Capitol. But he can rest assured that no one of political or cultural importance will question his “lifestyle choice.” Unrelenting pressure for “acceptance” will continue—until prominent figures on the right publicly entertain the possibility that women in combat units (for example) is a bad idea and that gay marriage was a mistake.
R. R. Reno is editor of First Things.
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Image by Ted Eytan, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
