Fringe gender ideology defeats three judges’ impartiality
Washington Examiner
The extent to which government institutions and the judiciary have embraced fringe gender ideology is disturbing.
This problem was on display in a recent decision by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
In Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools, the court upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit by female high school athletes whose opportunities in sport are being taken by boys competing as girls based on flimsy theories of gender identity that most people, being sensible, reject.
As the girls’ complaint notes, their “opportunities for participation, recruitment, and scholarships … are now being directly and negatively impacted by a new policy that is permitting boys who are male in every biological respect to compete in girls’ athletic competitions if they claim a female gender identity.” Men have significant physical advantages in sports, as anyone who has ever watched sports already knows. Biological males who say they are female have all those advantages.
As National Review’s Ed Whalen noted this week, during the motion-to-dismiss phase of a lawsuit, judges are required to accept as true all of the material facts alleged by plaintiffs “and to draw all reasonable inferences in the plaintiffs’ favor.” The idea is that if a lawsuit still seems likely to fail even given this benefit of the doubt, it meets the criteria for dismissal.
But the 2nd Circuit panel failed in this duty. Judges simply and openly rejected facts alleged in the complaint.
Throughout their opinion, the three judges on the panel, all Democratic appointees, failed even once to acknowledge the real problem brought before them by the plaintiffs — that boys who identify as female are not actually girls. It merely refers to them as “girls who are transgender,” which is not accurate. They are boys who identify as girls.
The male athletes whose participation in female sports invited the lawsuit are not once acknowledged by the judges to be genetically male, even though the complaint states this explicitly.
The judges use such ideologically charged words that most real people don’t use, such as “cisgender.” This is evidence that the judges took sides before the issue was litigated. In other words, they exercised their prejudices, not their judgment.
What this means is that an appeals court failed to be properly impartial between litigants. It seems to be a clear case of political correctness frustrating the pursuit of justice.
Gender ideology and its Orwellian language about sex are contaminating the machinery of government and corrupting our culture. The public and now the courts that are supposed to serve them deny obvious realities out of fear. This incident calls into question the judges’ suitability to serve on the bench.
Men who identify as women do not become women merely by saying so.
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