Perspectives
December 12, 2024 | By Richard Moore
Policy Issues
Culture

The Elites Win in Eau Claire…So Far

The nation’s high court has sidestepped a crucial discussion about transgender ideology by refusing to hear a challenge to the gender transition policies of the Eau Claire Area School District.

SCOTUS Rejects Case Against Child Transitioning

The U.S. Supreme Court this week refused to take up a case against the Eau Claire Area School District—a parental rights challenge to the school district’s gender identity policies—the court’s latest sidestep of a crucial discussion not merely about gender ideology but about the left’s institutional efforts to crush individualism and democracy.

Specifically, the court denied a petition filed earlier this year in Parents Protecting Our Children v. Eau Claire Area School District. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and America First Legal (AFL) had asked for a review on behalf of a parents group that opposed what WILL called the school district’s secret gender transition policy.

WILL and AFL had lost on standing in the lower courts, and so the case was never determined on its merits.

To their credit, justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, saying the high court needed to address such issues. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also wanted the case heard. A fourth would have been sufficient to get the case before the full court.

Setting aside arguments on standing for the moment—a serious issue all its own—the case highlights two critical issues in the U.S. today, though only one explicitly so: the rights of parents to raise and educate their children. As WILL said it straightforwardly, the parents challenged the school district’s policy to hide gender identity transitions at school from parents.

“Our petition asks the court to take the case to hold that when a school district adopts an explicit policy to usurp parental decision-making authority over a major health-related decision—and to conceal this from the parents—parents who are subject to the policy have standing to challenge it,” WILL stated.

And, Alito wrote, that contention presents a question of great and growing national importance—“whether a public school district violates parents’ ‘fundamental constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing of their children, when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process.’”

It’s important not least because more than 1,000 districts have adopted such policies, Alito observed.

It’s Not About Me, or Even ‘They’

Beyond the constitutional question about parental rights—critical in and of itself—the case lays bare another crucial aspect of such policies, and that is, to put it bluntly, gender ideology is not about gender ideology.

Not really.

What it’s about is the destruction of individual identity in the culture. What it’s about is enforced uniformity. What it’s about is the triumph of a dystopian collective future, molded in the image of elites by elites.

Transgenderism and intersectionality have many political uses for progressives.

For one, as Tucker Carlson and others have pointed out, it’s a gigantic industry, the gender industrial complex. The sex-reassignment market size is $4.4 billion, according to a report by the American Principles Project. When it comes to the left, always—always—follow the money.

It’s also a poster child for moral decay among elite progressives. Hyper-narcissism among the wealthy and ruling classes is always a feature of societies that have cleaved into elite and non-elite, and nowhere is that more true than on America’s coasts. They are affluent enough to be able to satisfy every temptation, no matter the costs of destroying social norms across the culture. Ultimately, every boundary and barrier collapses, including law and order.

One would not normally directly connect the assassination of a CEO on the streets of Manhattan—carried out by a product of privilege against an executive from the heartland—with the moral relativism and ethical decline of elite society, but a review of the celebrations of the murder carried on by elites across social media platforms tells us that it is connected. The alleged murderer may or may not be deranged, but those glorifying him certainly are.

Long ago, the essayist Christopher Lasch warned of this in his 1990s book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy:

“The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture. … ‘Multiculturalism,’ on the other hand, suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savored indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required. The new elites are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort. Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world—not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.”

In the end, Lasch wrote, they live in a world “of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality—‘hyper-reality’ as it has been called—as distinguished from the palpable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women.”

Celebrating Moral Implosion

What Lasch is describing is not the alleged killer but his celebrants. There is no greater signature of moral collapse than the celebration of cold-blooded cowardly murder. Taken to its extreme, beyond the narrow confines of elite playgrounds, society collapses, quite like a man shot in the back on Sixth Avenue.

And that’s the problem. The elite’s desires do not stay contained within their own moral depravity. They seek to impose it on all the world. As Lasch wrote:

“Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency—against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life—the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.”

The elites want not only to play and celebrate but to tell the rest of America how to to play and celebrate. They want to define reality for all the country on their terms. And if they say biological sex is a fiction and two-year-olds are perfectly able to make gender transition decisions, then that’s what we must believe, too.

The Key to Total Control

As Lasch warned us, the two great levers of control in the modern age are the media and our schools. And as George Orwell intoned: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

Over the past several generations, the corporate media has hijacked and ravaged independent journalism, and yoked the media to woke politics and a revisionist history of America as one founded and birthed in racism.

In education, the powerful capture by an education monopoly of government schools has similarly opened classroom doors to a second great attempt at social control through a rewriting of the past. At first, several generations ago, the power seeking was subtle, carried out by shifting away from teaching critical thinking skills to teaching what must be thought. Then there was new math and new reading, and common core concepts of how to teach literature that conveniently dismissed the classics for texts on classism.

More recently there has been critical race theory, and now transgenderism as the tools by which elites are redefining family life and what it means to be a parent. Biological parents are not highly valued in the new construct. Big government is.

And so transgender politics is not about transgenderism, not when it is turned against our children. It is purely a weapon for control, and that is why, in school districts like Eau Claire, you can find equity training that invalidates biological parents: “Parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.”

That’s an explicit transfer of control of our children to the government, for the statement that parents must “earn knowledge” means that some other entity must stand in judgment of when such knowledge is acceptably earned. That can only be the government in the form of a government school.

The wholesale integration of transgenderism policies into government schools—indeed, the elevation of transgenderism to a superior position over privacy and women’s rights and the protection of children from abuse and mutilation—is even more pernicious because it is infused with collectivist ideology.

Transgenderism is much more than one weapon for control among many; its very proposition undermines individual identity. The mandated use of pronouns such as “they/them” translates the language of human being into collectivist terminology. It suppresses individual thought and deed in favor of “others”—they/them—and brainwashes our children that they are no longer “I” but “they.”

Many years ago, in Anthem, Ayn Rand anticipated this moment in her novella about a dystopian world in which the word “I” was banned. Anthem depicted a world in which human spirit was enslaved, and the emotional landscape was barren and desperate. The world was poverty-stricken but nothing in that universe was so poverty-stricken as the language.

Here but for the grace of God go we, for we are clearly on the path.

Transgenderism might or might not be a mental disorder. It might or might not be in some discrimination cases a civil rights issue. But what its political embodiment in America’s schools and in sports and in other spheres of life, especially for minors, certainly represents is a new order of totalitarianism. The goal is to have but one gender: Government.

You can call it whatever pronoun you will.

In his 1990s book, Lasch urged a pushback against the elites and against their abandonment of moral compass. Moral standards were critical, he declared, and, for them to be recovered, the population had to stand up for them, especially in the media and in schools.

Fortunately, and I think Lasch would be pleased, even though he considered himself to be a man of the left, the American people are opposed to the transgender agenda. That’s why Donald Trump’s ad proclaiming Kamala Harris as standing up for “they/them” while Trump was standing up for “you” was so effective. That opposition was also reflected, in part, in the election results.

More is needed, but we also need a high court majority that understands the gravity of the moment, as justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh do. The court majority—including other conservatives—rejected the case on standings grounds because no one could demonstrate that anyone had yet been harmed by the policy.

But as Alito wrote: “The challenged policy and associated equity training specifically encourage school personnel to keep parents in the dark about the ‘identities’ of their children, especially if the school believes that the parents would not support what the school thinks is appropriate. Thus, the parents’ fear that the school district might make decisions for their children without their knowledge and consent is not ‘speculative.’ They are merely taking the school district at its word.”

Precisely, the threat of transgender totalitarians is not speculative. It is happening, as the court observed, in more than 1,000 schools districts. The court should take action, and so should parents in the next school board elections.

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