Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has come under fire from conservatives for his opinion in the Bostock case, the decision that declares that the law forbidding employer discrimination on the basis of sex protects homosexuals and transgenders.
The opinion is absurd, but not for the reasons some conservatives think. The popular Christian website World, for instance, says the decision “expands the definition of sex…to include sexual orientation and gender identity.” That’s not quite right. What the decision does is strip the word sex of any real-world meaning whatsoever.
Gorsuch writes: “An employer violates [the law] when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex… Because discrimination on the basis of homosexuality or transgender status requires an employer to intentionally treat individual employees differently because of their sex, an employer who intentionally penalizes an employee for being homosexual or transgender also violates [the law].”
In other words, if Mary sleeps with John, and Bob sleeps with John, and you fire Bob, the only reason you are firing him is because of his sex. After all, he has only performed the same action as Mary.
For Gorsuch, to say that you can’t discriminate on the basis of sex is to say that you can’t admit that sex is a category of person with its own traits and nature. His opinion is pure “textualism” in that it treats the text as an entity separate from the real world. It is not “originalism,” because no person could have originally used the word “sex” expecting it to have no real-world meaning.
The opinion has internal logic but, as anyone who has studied logic even for ten minutes knows, logic means nothing if your premise is false. If pigs have wings, then cows are frogs — that’s a logical truth, but it’s not going to help you much down on the farm. So too with Gorsuch’s opinion. If men and women are the same, heterosexuality and homosexuality are the same. But they’re not, so they’re not.
Interestingly, because Gorsuch accepts the irrational premises of leftist gender movements, he exposes their irrationality as well. For instance, the transgender movement claims that transgender women are women in fact. But Gorsuch says, essentially, if Mary says she’s a woman and Bob says he’s a woman, and I fire Bob, I’m only firing him because he’s a man. So it turns out a transgender woman is not a woman, after all.
Gorsuch can’t help but walk into this buzzsaw because leftist gender theory is internally contradictory. The Left wants to have its materialism and eat its spiritualism too. They want to say that there is no difference between men and women, that they have the same desires, propensities, talents, abilities, and sense of the world. But they also want to say that a man can become a woman by having the interior experience of being a woman. But if men and women are the same, how could one have the interior experience of being the other? How would he even know he was having the experience, if the two genders are the same?
The person who understands this unsolvable paradox is Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Rowling is currently the target of the hate-filled, logic-free cancel mob because she refuses to admit that transgender “women” are women. She’s right, of course. Transgender women and women can’t possibly be the same thing. If the word same has any meaning, it can’t be the same to feel like a woman when you were born a woman, and to feel like a woman when you were born a man.
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction,” Rowling has written. “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
Men and women are different, and one cannot become the other. This is not a statement of “hate” or “prejudice.” It’s a description of reality. Without reality, language describes nothing, logic applies to nothing, and the law means nothing.
The movie “Blow-Up” was made in the 1960s and was a comment on the leftist culture on the rise then as now. In the final scene, the photographer hero watches a group of hippie clowns play tennis with an imaginary ball. Ultimately, the clowns hit the “ball” his way. They demand that he pick it up.
He finally gives in. He picks it up. And he disappears.
Neil Gorsuch has picked up the left’s irrational tennis ball. He’s gone.