How a Male Sex Offender Got Away with Leering at Little Girls in a Virginia School Locker Room

There will be more of this if Spanberger is elected.

Among the many progressive Newspeak terms non-progressives need to refuse to use: "identifies as." As in:

When a man was reported for loitering in an Arlington Public Schools women’s locker room last October, district staff ignored concerned parents because the man, they said, identified as a woman.
“The patron is an adult swim class participant,” the director of aquatics management at APS said in an email. “I have spoken on deck and at the front desk with several people. I have told them that APS policy is to provide equitable and inclusive spaces for all community members and that the individual using the locker room identifies as a female and, therefore, permitted to use the women’s locker room.”
Richard Cox, the man in question, is a tier-three sex offender forbidden to be in close proximity to children. Cox was convicted in 1992 of taking indecent liberties with children after exposing his genitals and masturbating in front of a child at a gymnasium, according to court records. In 2007, he was convicted of six counts of possessing obscene material with a minor.  [My emphasis]

The relevantly-named Cox--who was undeniably male and observed to be so by staff and patrons of Arlington Public Schools--just had to emit the words 'I am a woman' and progressive APS staff folded like a whole Men's Wearhouse full of cheap suits. X "identifies as" y doesn't mean some special, super-secret technical thing. All it means is: x says x is y. Such claims are defeasible. Anyone who is willing to simply accept whatever someone says about himself, even when they can see it's false with their own eyes is a goddamned idiot. Being a man or a woman is not some special kind of property, different than all other kinds of properties. If x says he is 10 when he's obviously 40, we don't let him into the grade school. If he says he is well when he is obviously ill, we do not let him into the intensive care ward. If he says he is strong when he is obviously weak, we don't let him be a policeman or fireman...

   And so on.

   Anyone who thinks that saying that x is so makes it so is either stupid or lying or has some kind of mental illness...or some epistemically radioactive mix of all of the above.

   With contemporary progressivism, it's obviously option 4.