By Chris Powell
Presumably Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro agrees with the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
But ordinary people observing DeLauro’s performance in Congress a few days ago might not be so persuaded.
DeLauro was ridiculed for vigorously endorsing the U.S. Transportation Department’s plan to spend millions of dollars developing and testing “female” crash test dummies for auto safety research. Some people wondered: What’s next in the name of “diversity”?
But there is some science to the plan, since women long have been more seriously injured in car crashes than men, even discounting for the tendency of women to drive smaller cars. The disproportionate injuries involve the generally smaller and less muscular stature of women.
It’s not clear exactly how auto design might be modified to compensate for this. While different kinds of seats, seatbelts, and air bags for men and women passengers seem impractical, research might suggest changes that would save lives.
But even as DeLauro was acknowledging the profoundly different physical characteristics of men and women, she was joining all other Democrats in the House of Representatives in voting against what was titled the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would amend federal civil rights law to forbid men who pretend to be women from participating in women’s sports.
That is, according to DeLauro, men and women are profoundly different physically when it comes to auto safety but absolutely the same in sports, and Title IX of federal civil rights law, which was enacted to guarantee equal opportunity for women in sports, should be nullified whenever a male with gender dysphoria comes along.
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The issue of whether men who impersonate women should be allowed to compel others to pretend along with them does not seem to have been put to Fitzgerald. But if he was still around today, his readers might be entitled to ask him whether holding two opposed ideas at the same time is, instead of the test of a first-rate intelligence, the mark of ordinary political hypocrisy, in which even the least intelligent officeholders abound.
Eventually this hypocrisy is going to catch up with the Democratic Party, which lately is posturing not just as the party of women’s equality but also as the party of pretending that the gender differences that prompted enactment of Title IX in 1972 have somehow disappeared and that even the sexual privacy humanity has prized since indoor plumbing was invented should be prohibited.
The party’s posture in this respect arises from its increasing domination by the political left, which is now more illiberal than liberal in important respects. This illiberality thrives in part because women in the party are afraid not to play along with the liberal emperor’s new clothes.
But people generally may not be so easily intimidated. Even people who have never read Fitzgerald can discern nonsense.
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DeLauro isn’t Connecticut’s only politician to be treating dishonestly with transgenderism. Last month U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, formerly the state education commissioner, dissembled mightily in congressional testimony on his department’s plan to nullify Title IX by regulation and thereby end protection for equal opportunity in women’s sports.
U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Georgia, repeatedly asked Cardona to provide the Education Department’s definition of a woman, which would be crucial to enforcement of a new regulation. Cardona repeatedly refused to answer.
Instead, Cardona said: “I lead the Department of Education, and my job is to make sure that all students have access to public education, which includes co-curricular activities.”
But preserving gender-separate sports would not deprive anyone of opportunity. It would just require people with gender dysphoria to participate with their biological gender.
The Education Department’s press office even refused to confirm the accuracy of news reports quoting the secretary. The government can advance transgenderism only through euphemism and evasion.
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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)
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Chris Powell column 