ERA and Equality Act reject female identity as the basis of women’s rights

If Sleeping Beauty awakened today, she may be shocked to learn that being a woman no longer means being female. Gender perception trumps biological reality. In fact, biology is downright bigotry in the progressive-era redefinition of the age-old understanding of sex as the immutable genetic code of being male or female. Prince Charming could have ovaries.

What Sleeping Beauty would find is a culture in chaos. The tempest of this 21st-century moment? A Democratic majority beholden to left-wing activists and propped up by media that temper any balanced reporting of the facts, evidence, or novel narratives that challenge tradition. Social media platforms and their attendant mobs ban truth-telling in the name of “fake news” and censor dissent.

No wonder that the Equal Rights Amendment and the so-called Equality Act are being advanced without any examination of the war on women they portend. Any scrutiny could expose their kiss of deception.

House Democrats passed a partisan resolution to “extend the deadline” of the Equal Rights Amendment by a vote of 222-204. Never mind that a federal district court recently declared that the ERA ratification effort expired with no option to resuscitate. The deadline passed long ago, said the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in an opinion from the Obama-appointed judge in Virginia v. Ferriero.

But advocates will not be deterred. They continue to claim that the ERA can be air-dropped into the U.S. Constitution by virtue of three states “ratifying” in recent years — decades after the expiration date. Resurrection seems reasonable in the run-up to Easter, after all.

More pernicious than the process fueled by state activity is what proponents promote as the modern-day meaning of “on the basis of sex.” In the words of the ERA Coalition: “While the effort to amend the constitution to include sex equality began nearly a century ago, our renewed efforts are centered on Black, Indigenous and Women of Color, gender-nonconforming and transgender women and girls, and nonbinary people — those who are most impacted by systemic inequities.”

Under the logic of activists, the ERA is no longer about sex-based rights for all women or about upholding the status of women as female. Sleeping Beauty might as well stay slumbering because feminists have just gutted the meaning of femme natale.

Under the same banner flies the so-called Equality Act, a modern-day invention to redefine the meaning of “sex” in federal civil rights laws. This measure passed the Nancy Pelosi-run House this Congress 224-206 without a hearing or opportunity to amend the bill. That could be because examining the impact of the radical gender orthodoxy this bill proposes would expose how reckless and extreme it is.

The deceptively named Equality Act elevates protections based on a person’s self-identified gender perception over enduring, sex-based distinctions. Any man can claim to be a woman, and no one can challenge the assertion. Under the Equality Act, being male or female is not a relevant fact to challenge a person’s gender identity for gaining access to public accommodations or sports teams. This is a harmful and destructive idea.

Gender identity ideology denies the need to protect women in women’s shelters and prisons. It rejects equal rights to female-only facilities and sports teams. It declares war on the very essence of what it means to be female. Gender identity ideology also denies children the truth about themselves as boys and girls, sowing confusion in their minds and deception about their bodies which is leading to experimental, irreversible medical interventions in the name of gender dysphoria treatment that damages natural development and long-term health.

Polls consistently show that people are deeply concerned with the impact of gender identity ideology on women and children. But they are not being told the truth about legislation with nice-sounding titles claiming “equality” or campaigns that weaponize wokeism through corporate boardrooms. It’s time to expose these details to public scrutiny before it’s too late.

Considering all that is on the line for women today with the Equality Act and the ERA falsely claiming to advance the rights of women, Sleeping Beauty may want to sleep this radical woke era out.

Doreen Denny is the vice president of government relations for Concerned Women for America.