The nexus of all-about-me-ism and you're-just-cattle-belonging-to-the-state-ism

It can be found in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013 that just passed the Senate.  Stella Morabito at the Federalist makes the connection for us:

Gender identity is an ambiguous term that relates to people’s perceptions and feelings. By adding it to the list of categories in anti-discrimination law, ENDA combines threat of punishment with vague language that is wide open to interpretation. This is a classic recipe for tyranny.

Consider first ENDA’s definition of “gender identity”:

The term ‘gender identity’ means the gender-related identity, appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.

The issue of definition here is significant. Let’s look separately at the terms “gender” and “gender identity.” Gender identity does not simply refer to male or female. It’s all about perceptions and behaviors and feelings and one’s “internal, personal sense” of being male or female, or, in some cases, “other.” It’s also reactive against any social or cultural norms that assume people are either one sex or the other.

The trend toward getting inside one's fellow citizen's head to parse attitudes and  feelings got underway with the whole notion of hate crimes.  That development saddled our society with the absurdity of punishing someone already sentenced to lifelong incarceration a few additional years for having offed his fellow citizen for prejudicial reasons.

Now we're expected to have a respect bordering on reverence for our fellow citizens' feelings about being male or female, including, perhaps especially, feeling of resentment toward the type of genitals with which Nature and Nature's God imbued him or her when the chromosomal blueprint was set at the moment of conception.

But what if a person's feelings about all this are vague, or fleeting, or have a record of going back and forth?

And then there are people obsessed with their feeling about other traits besides genitals and hormones - age or race, for instance.  Morabito points out the absurdity of their not being accorded the respect of inclusion in ENDA:

One could easily argue that “age identity” is a far more widespread concern. Some 60-year-olds no doubt identify as 40, no matter their age “designated at birth.” They could follow the ENDA logic to claim they suffer age discrimination in the workplace. Why aren’t schools guilty of discrimination keeping some 12-year-olds who identify as 18, or perhaps as 8, wasting away in middle school classrooms?

Lots of people don’t appreciate being stuck in one type of racial identity or national origin identification either. If one “feels” or “identifies” as Native American or African American, regardless of genetic make-up, why shouldn’t that person get full protection of anti-discrimination law according to ENDA’s logic?

But this legislation (nor any standing law) would not protect any other sense of identity or self-perception. Protecting these other “perceptions” should immediately strike us irrational. So maybe we should consider the idea that self-identities are neither legitimately protected by default nor punished by law.

Morabito then examines the "strict and ever-changing requirements of linguistic gymnastics" that this law imposes on any interaction with one's fellow citizens  in a workplace setting.  It's the next stop on the slippery slope after speech codes and sensitivity training.

I like her examination of the bill's phrase "sex designated at birth," as if the doctor or midwife is the one making the call.  ("Looks like a woo-woo to me. What do you think, Nurse Ratchet?")

Then she points up the totalitarian nature of legal codification of the concept of "appearance and mannerism."  No private organization will have any recourse against its being reduced to a freak show:

No distinctions appear to be allowed. Anything goes, really. It’s disingenuous to believe that employers will have any final say in their office decorum or dress codes once ENDA goes into effect. There’s a section in the legislation stating that matters of “grooming” that are “reasonable” are still up to the employer to decide. But in reality this law leaves it up to judges, bureaucrats, and trial lawyers to decide what is and what isn’t appropriate for any given employer’s business. A mannerism that requires someone’s gender identity to repeatedly say (respectfully, of course) “Yeah, baby!” or wear any manner of distracting apparel? Protected!

It’s naive to believe — at this stage of modern history — that protecting such behavior is beyond the scope of ENDA. The collection of bizarre legal outcomes that one can see resulting from this legislation, all guided by an ever expanding state, all counter-intuitive and counter-productive, should be a matter of concern to all of us.

Objecting to ENDA is not a “socially conservative” position. It is an existential position. Those who sign on to this bill ought to understand that it stands for the un-defining of sex/gender for every American, not just those with different perceptions of their own gender.

The dangers in this kind of legislation are not widely understood. Yet here we are on the precipice. In fact, the enactment of gender identity laws has been happening under the radar for many years, even outpacing same sex marriage legislation. They’ve already passed in 16 states, the District of Columbia, and 143 municipalities throughout the nation. The media is saturated with testimonials of transgender beauty queens, toddlers, and military service members. We likely wouldn’t have heard much from Chastity Bono if she never decided to identify as male and take the name Chaz. Consider one woman-to-man transgender underwent a double mastectomy and took hormones but kept her reproductive organs intact so she could have children. Oprah Winfrey introduced this mother as “the first pregnant man.”

The Freedom-Hater enterprise has perfected its insidious twisting of time-honored words - and here, I'm not thinking so much of "male" and "female" as I am "freedom" - to debase them with a superficiality that in any previous period of human history would have been dismissed as frivolity unworthy of consideration.

But that internal realm of "feelings" and self-referentiality is the only kind of sovereignty we're going to have left in post-America.  You can post all day long about your celebrations of being "liberated" from the constraints of what's between your legs, the pitch of your voice, and your amount of facial hair.  And anyone who points out to your face that you're being ridiculous - or who, in an employment interview, sizes you up as ridiculous and takes a pass on hiring you - will be subject to the some of the sternest disciplinary measures the leviathan state can mete out.

Only certain citizens' internal worlds will past muster.  Fluid feelings about gender will be fine to express, but if your internal world is based on an understanding of Divine Law and the universal need of individual redemption, you will need to keep your disruptive, hurtful mouth shut.

You'll be free to infantilize yourself, but not to actively seek that which is dignified, noble and ennobling.

People with a normal view of all this will say "the hell with it" and close up their productive enterprises.  The state will be at the ready, and the cattle-like masses will be corralled into the pen of dependency.

You will be free as the breeze in ways that matter not at all, and enslaved in the only way that does matter.