Transgender Activists Hijacked the ADA's Disability Protections to Threaten Women

Men are not women. And the ADA specifically bans protection for anything transgender. It is hard to think of another law that so very clearly explained exactly what it did not want to be used for, that courts and administrations disregarded and decided to abuse it to do anyway.

When Congress passed the ADA, it excluded mental problems brought on by drug use as well as, “compulsive gambling, kleptomania, or pyromania” and “transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders” and other “sexual behavior disorders” from the list of disabilities that were protected by the law. Simple? No.

The law is as clear, but in a world where a man can be a woman, the law is not the law.

James Blatt, a Pennsylvania seasonal stocker at the Cabela’s outdoor chain, wanted to use the ladies room. The retailer, some of whose female employees may have been less than thrilled at the idea of sharing a bathroom with a large man (Mr. Blatt had posed at one point in a t-shirt reading “A Transexual Menace”) and he was fired after being accused of threatening another employee’s child.

Blatt (who insisted that he was really a woman named Kate Lynn) sued Cabela’s claiming that denying him the use of the ladies room was a refusal to accommodate his “disability”.

The ADA had specifically ruled out men claiming to be women as a disability, so his lawyers argued that the ADA itself was unconstitutional because it didn’t cover the right of men who think that they are women to use the ladies room.

The Obama Justice Department jumped into the case and argued that since the ADA exclusions specified “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments”, it could be ignored because according to it transgender beliefs were all really a physical problem.

And so every single man who claimed to be transgender was also instantly disabled.

In reality, the ADA’s “physical impairment” reference was to people who were born with actual physical problems or suffered an accident.

But Judge Joseph F. Leeson, Jr., an Obama judge, instead offered up a ruling worthy of the proposition that any man can be a woman, claiming that “gender identity disorders” only refer to “the condition of identifying with a different gender” but don’t cover “a condition like Blatt’s gender dysphoria, which goes beyond merely identifying with a different gender and is characterized by clinically significant stress.”

The difference between “gender identity disorders” and “gender dysphoria” is stress.

A man who thinks he’s a woman, but isn’t too stressed about it, has a gender identity disorder, but if he’s really stressed about it, then he suffers from gender dysphoria.

Never mind that James Blatt’s own filing had described him as being diagnosed with “Gender Dysphoria, also known as Gender Identity Disorder” or that the American Psychiatric Association had just changed Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria in its latest edition of the DSM meaning that one is just another name for the other.

The Fourth Circuit similarly claimed that when the ADA was enacted “gender identity disorders did not include gender dysphoria” when that is demonstrably false.

The Blatt v. Cabela’s Retail, Inc ruling ushered in a wave of ADA lawsuits.

When the Senate had debated the ADA back in 1990, a handful of Republicans with some foresight had warned that this would happen.

“If this were a bill involving people in a wheelchair or those who have been injured in the war, that is one thing. But how in the world did you get to the place that you did not even [ex]clude transvestites?” Sen. Jesse Helms asked. “Do we really want private institutions, particularly schools and day care centers to be prohibited from refusing to hire a transvestite because some Federal court may find that this violates the transvestite’s civil rights to wear a dress?”

Senate Democrats had denied that this was on the agenda. Sen. Ted Kennedy dismissed the idea this could even happen. “Some of the behavior characteristics included on this list are not disabilities to begin with and individuals with such characteristics would not be considered people with disabilities even without this amendment,” Sen. Tom Harkin contended.

Some 25 years later, Democrats codified exactly that meaning while ignoring the exclusions that they had granted to Republicans as a compromise to convince them to vote for the ADA.

As Justice Alito pointed out, Congress had gone to great lengths to create “catch all” terms covering every possible definition of transgender delusions including “transvestism, transsexualism” and “gender identity disorders” and even “other sexual behavior disorders” to make it as clear as it could conceivably be that the ADA cannot cover this kind of thing.

Federal courts are not just ignoring what the Constitution or similarly old documents say about anything, they decided to completely ignore what legislation from 1990 said in black and white.

Alito pointed out that the entire reasoning in the Fourth Circuit decision “does not meaningfully distinguish physical impairments from ‘mental impairment[s]’” despite building its entire case around the idea that the ADA exclusion doesn’t apply because transgender delusions are now a physical impairment. (The proposed Obama legal strategy.)

But that’s because there’s never been any medical basis for transgenderism. Despite a horror show of teens exposed to sterility and cancer risks with hormones, and castrated and mutilated young people who will never be able to have children or form families, there’s zero basis.

The transgender argument leaps from invented definition to invented definition, claiming to be both genetic and purely a state of mind that either requires massive medical intervention or nothing more than a change of name depending on the whims of the man in question.

But all of this is whim..

According to the Fourth Circuit, the court could set aside the ADA’s exclusion because “in light of the ‘basic promise of equality . . . that animates the ADA,’ we see no legitimate reason why Congress would intend to exclude from the ADA’s protections transgender people who suffer from gender dysphoria. The only reason we can glean from the text and legislative record is ‘a bare . . . desire to harm a politically unpopular group[, which] cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.’”

The judges of the court nullified the actual words of the ADA because they claimed that the elected officials who wrote and passed the bill could not have had any legitimate reason for their actions. They have determined that the intent of part of the law was, in their opinion, illegitimate, and therefore they choose to dismiss it. Whether pyromaniacs and pedophiles will get the same protection will depend on whether the Left decides to take up their cause.

There is an intimate connection between the preposterous notion that a man can become a woman and that laws mean whatever judges want them to. When a man is a woman, then a law need not be a law. If words only mean whatever we want them to, then there is no meaning, only the exercise of raw power backed by any convenient pretext, legalism or lie.

Laws require words to mean something. When words mean nothing, laws also mean nothing.

If we can’t agree on even the most basic concepts of reality, like ‘what is a woman’, then we also can’t have a society of laws or a legal system based on anything except power.

Anyone who will say that a man is a woman cannot be trusted to uphold the letter of the law.