Purity Tests
by S.I. Rosenbaum
Among the cornucopia of horrors pouring out in our daily news, you may have missed this one. It’s an amicus brief, though it’s not at all friendly, arguing that trans girls shouldn’t play sports on girls’ teams in West Virginia, in the case of Little v. Hecox, which is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUSblog reports that the issue at hand is “whether laws that seek to protect women’s and girls’ sports by limiting participation to women and girls based on sex violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.”
Twenty-four professional philosophers put their names to this amicus brief. They are nearly all professors at universities in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Their stated interest in the case is as follows:
Amici share with the public at large an interest in seeing the law be formulated using clear, precise and principled distinctions, rather than unclear, vague and invidious ones. Consequently, they have an interest in seeing that the laws ensuring fairness in sports be formulated in sex-based terms, which are much clearer, more precise and more principled than any relevant alternatives.
In other words, the “principled distinctions” they propose to make do not consider or even mention any real, flesh-and-blood women and girls or the lives they lead; no, these people are interested in clarity and precision of language, principled language, to formulate the law regarding those people’s lives. What follows are thousands of words of garbled language in support of even more garbled reasoning regarding the quality that has been brought in to support so many of history’s atrocities—namely, the intangible quality of naturalness.
Keep us breathing fire!
For $3/month you can read this whole post and get our weekdaily newsletter too!