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| The City Mouse |
After nine years of strenuous gym workouts, the City Mouse, who lives in Hartford, had let her membership elapse.
“I feel,” she told the Country Mouse, “liberated. Good to
know that the Coronavirus plague was good for something. Because gyms
everywhere in Connecticut have been closed for more than a year on orders of
His Excellency Governor Ned Lamont, I felt no pangs of conscience, and I
managed to save $500 last year in membership fees.”
“Good for you,” the Country Mouse wrote back, but what about
this: “Sex, gender and discrimination dominate
arguments at the Supreme Court in a case about women’s privacy at gyms.” The Country Mouse emailed the
newspaper story to the City Mouse and waited for what he imagined might be an
explosive but humorously sardonic response. The City Mouse, pickled for years
in temperature raising satire, is afflicted with a sense of humor – unlike
Connecticut’s Supreme Court.
The case before the Court involved a suit brought by the humorless
and dour state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities against the owners
of two health clubs who were accused, the story said, “of breaking
anti-discrimination law by providing women with private exercise areas in gyms
open, otherwise, to both men and women. The ostensible purpose of the private
areas is to protect women from sexual harassment by men.”
Any judicial case, or story, or cocktail conversation, or
stray remark on Twitter, involving “sex” or “gender” is bound to be acrimonious
and confusing – “a real can of worms,” as the City Mouse put it in an answering email.
“The suit,” the press reporter noted, “raises questions
about whether the thrust of state anti-discrimination law is to treat everyone
equally or whether it was meant to redress historic persecution of some groups,
such as women, by other groups, specifically men. Complicating the questions
are rapidly evolving definitions of sex and gender and whether, in society’s
view, they are preferences rather than biological distinctions.”
Connecticut’s Supreme Court – sometimes known as the Malloy
Court, because former progressive Governor Dannel Malloy had appointed all but
one justice to the High Court – has in the past stepped in front of evolving
social norms, those freight trains of judicial incompetence.
The Court, a few years ago, pronounced Connecticut’s death
penalty unconstitutional because the literal meaning of the statute affirming a
death penalty lagged behind what the Court supposed was evolving social norms.
Before anyone could blink twice, the Court, always in the vanguard of
Connecticut’s shape-shifting culture, emptied death row of “eleven” convicted
murderers, two of whom were on parole when they raped and murdered the wife and
two young daughters of Dr. William Pettit, who later
became a state Representative.
It was left to Chief Justice Richard A. Robinson to pop the
important question: “There was a couple of times where you said there is a
clear difference between the sexes. What does that mean? I am going to ask you.
It is a simple question, but probably a very complex answer. What is sex? What
is gender?”
“Sex,” the City Mouse wrote, “is the broader term, and therefore
less precise. In the 1920s and 30s, when the American film industry was yet in
its infancy, actors and actresses had “sex,” not “gender,” usually off camera.
Comstock was everywhere. Today, actresses and actors have “sex” in nearly every
film, so much so that “sex” sometimes appears to be the principal actor or
actress unlisted in the credits. I don’t know that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ever
awarded an Oscar to Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Sex, a lamentable oversight.
“The lawyers for the gyms missed an opportunity to tell Chief
Justice Robinson that if he really wished to comprehend crucial differences
between male and female, he should consult with the two female Justices on the
court.
“Gender, in an age in which permanent categories appear to
be evolving, also presents certain awkward difficulties.
“There are, by some unscientific counts, 72 different
genders. According to a 2014 ABC News report, 58 gender
options, confirmed by Facebook, have been identified by ABC. They are:
“Agender, Androgyne, Androgynous, Bigender, Cis, Cisgender,
Cis Female, Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender Female, Cisgender Male,
Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman, Female to Male, FTM, Gender Fluid, Gender
Nonconforming, Gender Questioning, Gender Variant, Genderqueer, Intersex, Male
to Female, MTF, Neither, Neutrois, Non-binary, Other, Pangender, Trans, Trans*,
Trans Female, Trans* Female, Trans Male, Trans* Male, Trans Man, Trans* Man,
Trans Person, Trans* Person, Trans Woman, Trans* Woman, Transfeminine,
Transgender, Transgender Female, Transgender Male, Transgender Man, Transgender
Person, Transgender Woman, Transmasculine, Transsexual, Transsexual Female,
Transsexual Male, Transsexual Man, Transsexual Person, Transsexual Woman, Two-Spirit,
etc.”
Justice Andrew J. McDonald, who is a self-outed gay, asked
one of the attorneys for the health clubs, who wish to provide separate accommodations
for males and females, “If you had a transgender women who had not had gender
reassignment surgery, is she a women for the purposes of entry into this
restricted area of the gym?”
No doubt the 58 Facebook affirmed gender options discovered
in 2014 by ABC news were rattling around somewhere in McDonald’s
non-discriminatory brain, thought the City Mouse.
Would the chivalrous gym owners, who wish to spare female
clients the indignity of being ogled by oversexed males, be willing to make
separate arrangement for all the gender options listed above?
And at what cost?
“Good question,” the City mouse wrote. “But such pedestrian
concerns as costs have never entered into Supreme Court decisions. Unlike the
common run of men and women and Pangender persons, the Justices may order
remedies so costly as to drive out of business all gym owners in Connecticut who
are unwilling or unable to accommodate their progressive, culturally
transcendent obiter dicta.”
The City Mouse appeared to be leaning towards the now
discredited doctrine, among gender fabulists, that there are only two
biological genders, and some few exceptions. “The high Court” she wrote, “is
high on daydreaming. If the eight members of the Court were all Lucians -- author of ‘The sale of Philosophers’
and dangerously satiric, which is to say, transcendently commonsensical -- I
would trust their judgment. But, pity the rest of us, they are not.”
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