Joe Biden, who for the first 65 or 70 years of his life showed no interest in trans issues, and never hinted at a belief that biological males can be women if they feel like they are, has now become, after just one day in office, the most radically pro-trans president in history. At the ripe old age of 78, Biden is governing much like a 19-year-old college student who just took her first gender studies class might.
Biden made his first pro-trans step before he took office, naming Rachel Levine, the current Health Secretary of Pennsylvania, as his assistant Health and Human Services secretary. Levine is a biological male who identifies as a woman. This, we are told, makes the pick “historic.” But what really makes it historic is that Levine is probably the first assistant Health and Human Services secretary to be appointed despite overseeing a disastrous pandemic response that resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly people. Pennsylvania was among the states that, early on, required nursing homes to accept patients who had previously tested positive for the virus.
But even if we put the deaths of thousands of elderly aside — which we certainly shouldn’t — still we’re left with the fact that Pennsylvania’s COVID death rate is on the higher end of the spectrum. The death rate in the state is 155 per 100,000. By comparison, deaths in Florida are at 114 per 100,000, according to the CDC’s latest figures. The media tells us that Florida has been a disaster zone. Well, what does that say about Pennsylvania? One of the main officials overseeing this disaster has now been given a promotion, apparently based more on identity than merit.
Meanwhile, on his first day in office, Joe Biden issued a flurry of executive orders in hopes of essentially overturning and erasing Trump’s entire tenure through executive fiat. One such order is aimed at “Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.” It reads, in part:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love. Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.
The problem, first of all, is that no child was ever being “denied access to the restroom, locker room, or school sports.” Boys have always been perfectly free to use the boys room and play on boy sports teams. Gender confused boys have always been just as welcome to use the same facilities and take advantage of the same athletic opportunities as any other boy.
The question is whether a boy who says he’s trans should have access to any restroom he wants, or any sports team he wants, even if it means infringing on the rights of biological girls. The answer to that question, from any sane and moral person, is no. It is a simple matter of common sense and basic moral decency. Obviously, we should not compel young girls to disrobe in locker rooms in front of boys, nor should we force them to sacrifice spots on their teams for boys who have inherent biological advantages over them, no matter how a small minority of gender confused boys might feel about it.
The second problem is that the Constitution in no way whatsoever vests in the president the authority to decide which sports teams a child can play on, or which locker rooms they may use. This, by any reasonable interpretation, is not a legal power granted to the president. In fact, no human, anywhere, has the legitimate moral or legal authority to demand that girls share locker rooms with boys. Anyone who enacts or enforces such a policy is infringing on the human rights of those girls, and thus acting in a fundamentally unlawful way.
Yet Joe Biden has claimed this authority for himself. And this is so important to him — it is apparently so crucial, in his mind, that girls be forced to expose themselves in front of biological boys — that he made it a Day One priority. People are dying every hour in a pandemic (as the media has constantly reminded us) while our new president is focused on forcing the sexual desegregation of children’s bathrooms. Joe Biden’s political brand has always been that of a “normal” and “decent” man. But these are neither normal nor decent actions. These are the actions of either a deranged, amoral pervert, or else of a hapless, gutless coward, enacting someone else’s agenda because he lacks the spine or mental capacity to do the right thing. In this case, I suspect the answer is a little bit of both.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.