The misnamed "Equality" Act, currently having passed the House and now headed to the Senate, is a giant leap backward for all womankind.  It may just pass unless you and I do something about it.

The Federalist outlined the basic tenets of this legislation.  It's not merely a civil rights law update meant to protect the LGBT — not at all.  If passed (and boy, do you want to start yelling at your senators about now), it will use the law to deny women any and all privacy — not just in the locker room, not just in the restroom, but in the hospital, the jail, the rape shelter, everywhere.

Where once female suspects or prisoners had the right, if searched, to have the search conducted by another woman...no longer.  Granted, if you're not a suspect or criminal, you may not care about that one.  But what will they criminalize next?  We're all a bit uneasy about that question these days!  And your days of getting a pat-down by a female TSA officer are gone, too.

This law basically adds sexual orientation and "gender identity" as protected classes.  You have a shop providing women's services such as getting a bikini wax?  You will have no right to exempt males.  Get ready to wax some scrotums, ladies.  Mom in the nursing home needs bath assistance?  Think of how terribly uncomfortable she will be with a male attendant.  The law doesn't even require that the man pretend to change any characteristics in order to qualify.  If Mr. Macho says, "I'm identifying as a woman" before he gets sentenced to prison for rape, he must be sent to the women's prison.  See the problem there?

What about those special shelters for battered women?  The ones where the location is kept private and women are allowed to be safe from their abusers?  Those will be illegal, too.  Men-who-identify must be allowed in, on their say-so alone.  The abuser you're running from will have immediate access.

If I had a young daughter in middle or high school, I'd be mighty upset if she had to share a locker room and the restroom with boys.  Some things are meant for girls to figure out in privacy.  Just think about the poor girl who has her period start when she's not expecting it.  Having to clean up with male witnesses?  How mortifying!  Not to mention that hormonal teen boys (and girls) have very little self-control to start with.  How do we expect them to find it in these types of circumstances?

Then there are the boys who are competing for a spot on the girls' team.  I jokingly wrote that a good way to stop this would be for all good conservative parents to encourage their boys to try out for the girls' team.  I thought it would make a point and demonstrate the absurdity of this practice.  It's no longer a joke.  Girls' sports teams will become dominated by boys, and financial scholarships girls relied upon to afford higher education will be stripped from them.  This law will make girls and women second-class citizens.

I don't want to get sidetracked by the abortion debate.  The bill promotes free access to abortion and strips away the right of religious groups to deny health insurance coverage for it.  But I would rather not muddy the waters more, so I'll limit myself to acknowledging that this aspect of the bill is the leftist's dream.

I'd rather concentrate on the fact that every tenet of this bill could have been written by the most misogynistic, anti-woman creep on the face of the Earth.  The thing practically invites men to control the women in their lives, relentlessly.

Not all men will do so, but enough will find the ways they can take advantage.  This bill will set back equality to a time when we didn't have the right to vote or control our own bodies.  And even then, the gals in the 1950s could go to the bathroom without worry about the bearded man in the next stall.

The sad thing is, some women, including Republican women in Congress, voted for it.  And some in the Senate are apparently ready to do so as well.

Image: Australia's Hannah Mouncey.  YouTube screen grab.