A story reported by The Daily Wire this morning shows just what we’re up against in the fight for truth and sanity in our culture. Three high school girls in Connecticut are embroiled in a legal dispute over the state’s decision to allow males who identify as “transgender” to compete on girls’ sports teams. Two boys in particular, Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, have been dominating the female circuit for a couple of years. Although they would be middling athletes if they competed against other boys, against the girls they have raked in the wins, together taking the first and second place trophies in some races. The lawsuit filed by Selina Soule, Alanna Smith, and Chelsea Mitchell — real girls, all — seeks to put a stop to this abject madness. But just as the track races are rigged against them, so, it seems, is the courtroom.
District Judge Robert Chatigny, presiding over the case, recently instructed lawyers for the plaintiffs that they may not refer to trans athletes as “males.” National Review has the full quote from an April 16 conference call:
What I’m saying is you must refer to them as “transgender females” rather than as “males.” Again, that’s the more accurate terminology, and I think that it fully protects your client’s legitimate interests. Referring to these individuals as “transgender females” is consistent with science, common practice and perhaps human decency. To refer to them as “males,” period, is not accurate, certainly not as accurate, and I think it’s needlessly provocative. I don’t think that you surrender any legitimate interest or position if you refer to them as transgender females. That is what the case is about. This isn’t a case involving males who have decided that they want to run in girls’ events. This is a case about girls who say that transgender girls should not be allowed to run in girls’ events. So going forward, we will not refer to the proposed intervenors as “males”; understood?
They were then told that they may need to take their case to the Court of Appeals if they cannot “comply” with Chatigny’s order to refrain from calling males male. The lawyers are now calling for Chatigny to recuse himself, correctly pointing out that the judge had “destroyed the appearance of impartiality in this proceeding.” Indeed, the judge came out as not only a believer in left-wing gender theory, but one of its more radical proponents. Calling “trans girls” female is a step beyond what even many defenders of Yearwood and Miller and other trans athletes would say. The usual line is that there’s some kind of vague distinction between “girl” and “female,” so that a girl might be a girl but not necessarily a female. This is crazy and incoherent enough as it is, but not as crazy and incoherent as to flat out claim that individuals with XY chromosomes and functioning male reproductive organs are female. And that — the craziest and most incoherent version of the pro-trans argument — is the one that this judge is trying to impose on the girls and their lawyers.
The problem, of course, is that the fact that the trans athletes are male is the whole point of the lawsuit. The girls’ entire case is that males and females are biologically different and those differences grant males inherent advantages in most athletic competitions. If they cannot make that case, then they cannot make any case. If they have to pretend for the sake of the lawsuit that boys are female, then they lose the very basis for the lawsuit itself. This is a point that Judge Chatigny pretends not to understand. Review this part of his lecture again: “This isn’t a case involving males who have decided that they want to run in girls’ events.”
On the contrary, Your Honor, that is exactly what the case involves. If these were females competing against other females, there would be no reason for a lawsuit. But they are not female, and that’s why there is a lawsuit. I wish that the lawyers for the girls had thought to ask the judge to provide a definition of the word “female.” He apparently thinks that a female is someone with XX chromosomes or someone with XY chromosomes. As that pretty much covers the whole gamut of human possibilities, it would seem that the judge actually thinks the word female means nothing at all. If he has a definition for the word that would allow it to retain some kind of distinct and objective meaning while also permitting penis-wielding XYs to fall under its umbrella, I’d really like to hear what it is. I doubt he can provide one. But that hasn’t stopped him from imposing his confused ideology onto the proceedings.