On Monday, the Supreme Court concluded that homosexuality and transgenderism are covered under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  This post doesn't have enough space to explain why, legally, that is an incorrect decision.  Put simply, the Civil Rights Act does not cover sexual orientation and was never intended to.  If Congress wants to change that, it can; it is not the Supreme Court's role, though, to make that change.

This post focuses only on the fact that the Supreme Court, in Bostock v. Clayton County, wrongly accepted the premise that transgenderism is part of the homosexuality spectrum.  It is not.  It is a form of mental illness.  The Supreme Court has just said that body dysmorphic disorder is protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Transgenderism is in the news.  J.K. Rowling is under attack for her concern that transgender rights are damaging women's rights and placing women and girls at physical risk.  We also fought the bathroom wars in America, which seem to have ended in a draw.

But what few people talk about is whether there's any evidence that transgenderism exists — that is, that it's scientifically true that people are born in the wrong bodies.  I haven't found any medical or scientific articles saying that's true.  I just find articles assuming that transgenderism is real and that mutilating surgery and drugs that cause sterility, cancer, and heart disease can fix it.

Look, for example, at the American Academy of Pediatrics, the most respected pediatric organization in America.  In September 2018, it published a "policy statement" about treating children and youths who think they're transgendered.

Before reading it, I assumed that, to formulate a treatment policy, the AAP would first establish a foundation for what constitutes transgenderism.  Is it a genuine biological issue requiring surgery and drugs intended to harmonize body with mind?  Or is it a form of body dysmorphia, a mental illness the treatments for which would include psychiatric intervention and drugs meant to harmonize mind with body?  That wasn't what the AAP did.

Instead, in the first paragraph, the statement asserted that transgenderism is part of the LGBTQ spectrum.  That's wrong.  While the former LGB lobby (before Transgender and Questioning hopped on board) may have claimed "baby, I was born this way," the LGB community was always concerned with behavior rather than biological identity.  Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals know that they are boys or girls, right down to the DNA.  Unlike straight people, though, they want their sexual partners to have the same underwear equipment.  (Bisexuals are more mellow and will accept any underwear equipment.)

The AAP, however, asserts that there is no meaningful distinction between people's sexual orientation (a behavior) and their sex (something that, until the "transgender" lobby got involved, was a biological issue).

Read through the AAP article, and you'll see it's entirely premised on the assumption that sex is assigned at birth, but gender is a "choice."  There's no science here.  There is pure activist babble, right down to calling people who conform to biological norms "cisgender."

What's most disturbing is that the AAP policy statement doesn't rely on scientific studies to support this gobbledygook.  Instead, it concludes its definitional word soup by pointing not to a scientific publication, but to The Gender Book:

(For more information, The Gender Book, found at www.thegenderbook.com, is a resource with illustrations that are used to highlight these core terms and concepts.)

The Gender Book is a comic book.  Activists wrote it.  None of them is (or pretends to be) a scientist.  There's a lot wrong with the AAP using it as the starting premise for its public policy statement.

Transgenderism is a form of body dysmorphic disorder, just as surely as anorexia is.  The current approach is comparable to taking a girl presenting with anorexia and saying that, because of politics, she should go on a diet and get stomach-stapling surgery.

I have nothing but pity for those unhappy people who feel as if they're in an alien body.  I also suspect that the preponderance of men with this problem is because the left has successfully removed men from American families, causing boys to over-identify with their mothers.

Whatever the reason for the uptick in transgenderism, it's not about sex.  It's about a specific mental illness.  To give it protection under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 places an untenable burden on American businesses (and, inevitably, on the American military).  We need a Republican Congress to revisit the 1964 Civil Rights Act and claw back the Supreme Court's overreach.