Trump’s withdrawal of transgender bathroom guidance leaves questions up to schools, statesIn other words, the President of the United States isn’t going to micromanage bathrooms and locker rooms across this 3,000-mile-wide country anymore. Instead, the decisions are going to be up to officials closer to the various actual bathrooms and locker rooms. The authors of the Federalist Papers, such as Madison and the sainted Hamilton, must be rolling in their graves about somebody finally taking federalism seriously.Until this week, the federal government had provided a standard for how sensitive questions that schools face with transgender students should be resolved. But the shift leaves a patchwork of policies that varies widely across the country.
As I wrote in my Taki’s Magazine review of Sebastian Junger’s Tribe:
As Junger laments, Americans today seem more interested in reviling one another than in cooperating. Perhaps that’s not surprising: America is a huge country and, luckily, hasn’t had to come together much to win wars in recent generations.[Comment at Unz.com]Fortunately, we already have a system, bequeathed to us by the Founders, for how we can get along without getting in each other’s faces: federalism. It’s long been out of fashion, but we can live and let live as long as we don’t insist upon micromanaging the daily lives of other Americans in distant parts of the country.
