Terror in the Bath

After the Bath. Drawing by Edgar Degas ca. 1900, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Such a pleasure to see the Supreme Court frustrating the presidency with their refusal today to take on bullshit gun rights cases and the DOJ desire to challenge "sanctuary cities" laws, but obviously the big thing is their recognition, by a 6-to-3 margin, that LGBTQ people can be discriminated against under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act since "sex" became a protected category in 1991. Apparently because, as I suspected, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Gorsuch (who wrote the very well crafted opinion) have some limits as to how low they're willing to go in gratifying Republicans. Not that they're nice people, and I don't think you should be too optimistic about the survival of the Affordable Care Act or the exposure of the Trump tax returns (I'm going to express a tiny hope on both, and a stronger one on the survival of the DACA program), but they see themselves as true aristocrats, too good to follow the Republicans all the way into the swine trough.

Bret Kavanaugh, in infuriated dissent:

 “To fire one employee because she is a woman and another employee because he is gay implicates two distinct societal concerns, reveals two distinct biases, imposes two distinct harms, and falls within two distinct statutory prohibitions,” Kavanaugh argued.

How about to fire one employee because he is a woman (i.e., a man with two X chromosomes) and another because she is gay? Does that make four harms total, or three, or is it still two? Gorsuch was perfectly clear: if an employer allows male employees to date women, but fires women who date women, they are discriminating against women. The various red-state rules allowing employers to order workers around vary according to the worker's sex: you with your Y chromosome aren't allowed to wear a dress to work and I refuse to pay for the gender reassignment surgery your psychiatrist tells me is needed for your mental health; you with your two X's aren't allowed to have a girlfriend. Telling that Kavanaugh is interested only in the male gay employee and not the female one, though.

Samuel Alito:

“[B]athrooms, locker rooms, [and other things] of [that] kind.” The Court may wish to avoid this subject, but it is a matter of concern to many people who are reticent about disrobing or using toilet facilities in the presence of individuals whom they regard as members of the opposite sex. For some, this may simply be a question of modesty, but for others, there is more at stake. For women who have been victimized by sexual assault or abuse, the experience of seeing an unclothed person with the anatomy of a male in a confined and sensitive location such as a bathroom or locker room can cause serious psychological harm...

I was startled in the Taibei airport when we were visiting a couple of years ago to see a woman in the men's room, in a cleaner's outfit, calmly gossiping with a man in the same costume. I'm pretty shy myself, but she was obviously no more interested in looking at my junk than her colleague was, and of course she would have had to make a ridiculous effort to look if she did want to, as would a curious man, and it wasn't even worth the trouble of imagining—why would anybody?—and I realized at that moment that the whole issue, not that I'd ever actually taken it seriously, is even less serious than I had conceived.

I'm supposing Alito belongs to some kind of Opus Dei squash club in DC and its locker room is the only public men's room he's ever entered in many decades, where big naked men with crosses hanging from their necks stalk between the lockers dickslapping each other on their way to and from the shower as Len Leo and and ex-archbishop Wuerl watch them with quiet satisfaction and Alito cowers in (justified) terror. I'd be uncomfortable there, too. When he tries to imagine what the ladies' room is like he is influenced by this, his only relevant experience, but of course women are the precise opposite of men in his mind so it's a haremful of timid women panting from the effort of their exercise routines, draped wilting and flushed around the tiles and partly vieled by steam, erotically vulnerable, a spectacle you'd literally be willing to die for if God hadn't forbidden you to look at it. And his loony idea of the transgender person, from which no amount of reading about reality can dissuade him, is that it's a man who dresses in drag in order to defy God's law, penetrates into the place and then suddenly sheds his clothing, sending them all screaming at the unexpected sight of his hairy male body. This image is entirely created out of his own diseased unconscious and of course mine, I guess, but only because Alito has pointed at it with such inarticulate desperation. Alito may have a kind of intellectual understanding of the existence of trans women and men but all that's in his mind's eye is this improbable spectacle because—what other reason could there be?—that's what he dreams of doing. And he's sick jealous of all the imaginary guys who will do it and watch the girls pee if the federal government fails to stand firm against this outrage.

I wonder what persecuted Mormons, World War II conscientious objectors, Jews forced to work on Saturdays would think of the way "religious liberty" has become a license for bigots to bully their employees. Speaking of fucking textualism.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) June 15, 2020