The issue of gender and its supposed fluidity has exploded in recent years, and is becoming more and more prevalent. The Equality Act is a bill in congress that, if passed, would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include gender identity as a distinct protected class from discrimination. Kara Dansky, a lawyer who is a board member of the radical feminist group, the Women’s Liberation Front, spoke of the act at an event called “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left,” hosted by the Heritage Foundation on January 28, 2019. She also discussed Title IX, an act passed in 1972 to prevent discrimination based on sex specifically in the educational field. It was designed to protect girls and women in particular, mandating the provision of single-sex spaces in all educational facilities. Dansky explained that under the Obama administration, a guidance was issued to amend Title IX so that educational institutions interpreted the word “sex” to mean “gender identity.” Though the guidance has since been rescinded, it exposes a concerning potential reality, in which gender-specific rights, especially those meant to protect women, are erased.

Unsurprisingly, Dansky received lots of criticism for this argument. In one NBC article titled “Conservative Group Hosts Transgender Panel of Feminists ‘From the Left,’” Heron Greenesmith, the senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, is quoted. She describes the panelists as “capitalizing on a scarcity mindset rhetoric…saying there aren’t enough rights to go around for everyone, and therefore we must prioritize cis-women over everyone else.” By claiming that the issue is reduced to one of a scarcity of rights, Greenesmith misses the point Dansky is trying to make: it’s not that there aren’t enough rights, it’s that the rights – of gender identity and of biological sex – are inherently mutually exclusive.

If sex is reinterpreted as gender identity, then how are sex and gender defined? If someone can change their sex (which I am using interchangeably with gender) because they feel like a woman even though they’re born a man or vice-versa, sex seems to be based on feelings. But how can one know what it feels like to be a woman or man? Essentially, this argument reduces gender to stereotypes and what individuals perceive the other sex to be like – removing any valuable inherent qualities that specifically characterize each of the genders. The panelist Julia Beck, writer and former member of the Law and Policy Committee of Baltimore City’s LGBTQ Commission, shared her frustration with the reduction of gender to arbitrary feelings and stereotypes. Inevitably, blurring the lines of gender threatens to degrade the different yet equally valuable natures of men and women.