Should Connecticut declare that men can become women?

By Chris Powell

Transgender ideology, having conquered most of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly, suffered some pushback last week when the Appropriations Committee considered what was said to be mental health legislation.

The bill contained the term “pregnant persons,” and some Black and Hispanic legislators on the committee wanted to know what had become of “pregnant women” and “expectant mothers.”

State Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, spoke for the miffed. “My children call me Mother, Ma, Mommy,” she said. “I don’t answer to ‘pregnant person’ or ‘birthing person.'” So Porter proposed an amendment to add “expectant mothers” to the bill, though not to remove “pregnant persons.”

The legislature’s foremost advocate of transgenderism, Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, rebutted Porter.

“‘Pregnant person’ is actually the inclusive term,” Gilchrest claimed. “It is a gender-neutral term, and it would encompass expectant mothers, pregnant women. As we talk about DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — “this is the direction we are hoping to move in in this state and ideally across the country. And so the term ‘pregnant persons’ is the more inclusive term, and so I would ask my colleagues to oppose the amendment.”

The committee disagreed with Gilchrest. Porter’s amendment was approved by a large margin as Republican legislators joined the Black and Hispanic Democrats to add “expectant mothers” to the bill. But few legislators seemed to want to talk about the bigger issue: what the strange new terminology pressed by Gilchrest signifies. This evasion was unfortunate, for transgenderism ideology will not be understood and checked without more inquiry and debate. Instead it will steadily and quietly insinuate itself into the whole of Connecticut law.

Gilchrest was not questioned in detail about what she and the other supporters of transgenderism are trying to accomplish with “pregnant persons.” But it can be inferred easily enough.

That is, they would have the law proclaim, contrary to science, that there are no physical and biological differences between men and women. They would have the law deny that the female sex is defined and distinguished from the male sex by the capacity to bear children. They would have the law proclaim that men can be women and bear children too — indeed, that there are really no sexes at all. 

While Gilchrest says “pregnant persons” is the “inclusive” term, that doesn’t make it accurate. And Representative Porter’s children aren’t the only ones who didn’t consider their mother a “pregnant person” as much as a pregnant woman or expectant mother.

Nearly everyone knows more biology than Gilchrest and her colleagues in transgenderism ideology pretend not to know. “Pregnant person” is not and has never been in general use because it implies a falsity — that men can be women.

What is the point of this ideology? Is it, as controversy suggests, to get men into women’s restrooms and women’s prisons and onto women’s sports teams and to allow schools to conceal a child’s gender dysphoria from his or her parents? Such objectives would never gain much public support if they were to be forthrightly legislated. 

Maybe this ideology aims to get government to change the language obliquely and indirectly without frank and democratic discussion so that people will wake up someday to find that the law and indeed the world have been transformed without their consent. 

Maybe this ideology means to alter the core purposes of government and its definition of elevating society. 

Do Gilchrest and Connecticut’s Democratic Party really think that transgenderism is the next phase of social uplift? Have Connecticut’s problems of poverty, education, child neglect and abuse, public health, housing, and their grotesque racial disproportions been solved?

Or is the increasing emphasis on transgenderism as societal liberation meant to distract from government’s longstanding failure to solve these problems and from the Democratic Party’s indifference to that failure as long as it increases membership in the party’s army, the government employee unions?

There is a serious political issue here, but not yet a political party with the nerve to raise it.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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