Advocates of the Equality Act want you to think of it as a basic civil rights measure necessary to protect people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender from unjust discrimination. What it actually does is impose a radical ideology with sweeping implications on all Americans, including making it a form of unlawful discrimination to act on the belief – based on actual science – that maleness and femaleness are determined by biology rather than feelings, even in the way you raise your own children.

Consider the following scenario, rooted in the actual experiences of some parents.

Your 14-year-old daughter, who has never before questioned her gender identity, comes home from school one day declaring herself to be a boy after hearing a transgender teenager speak at a school assembly. She persists in her claims and demands cross-sex hormones, even though her experiments with a transgender identity seem more about winning peer approval in school and on social media than about any deep-seated discomfort with being female.

You take a cautious approach. You delay allowing your daughter to begin taking powerful hormones or undergo surgeries that will irreversibly masculinize her appearance and eventually render her sterile. You also seek a therapist who won’t unquestioningly affirm her transgender identity, but will probe more deeply to see if underlying psychological or social issues might be the real cause of your daughter’s transgender identification (psychiatric comorbidities are high among those with gender dysphoria).

Enter the so-called Equality Act, or its so-called “compromise” bill, the Fairness for All Act. Both would imperil your right to protect your daughter from risky and unproven gender reassignment “treatments.” They would also make it even more difficult than it already is for all parents to prevent their children from falling prey to gender ideology.

Advocates of the Equality Act want you to think of it as a basic civil rights measure necessary to protect people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender from unjust discrimination. What it actually does is impose a radical ideology with sweeping implications on all Americans, including making it a form of unlawful discrimination to act on the belief – based on actual science – that maleness and femaleness are determined by biology rather than feelings, even in the way you raise your own children.

Religious exemptions won’t do anything to help those whose objections are based on common sense, science or medical evidence rather than religion. And once the idea that objections to same-sex marriage or gender ideology are akin to racism becomes enshrined in law, religious freedom exemptions will offer extremely limited and short-lived protection.

Returning to our not-so-hypothetical case, if the Equality Act or the Fairness for All Act becomes law, you would not only find it difficult to protect your daughter from the irreversible harms of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, but your failure to unquestioningly affirm your daughter’s new identity and your refusal to consent to hormone treatment for her could be considered abusive or neglectful.

You would also have a hard time finding a therapist who supports your cautious approach because both of these bills would likely make it illegal for therapists to question a client’s transgender identification. Such an approach could be considered “conversion therapy,” which the activist group GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) defines as “any attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” Both bills outlaw “conversion therapy” as a form of discrimination.

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