Some thoughts about Sam Brinton and why sex matters
Some thoughts about Sam Brinton and why sex matters
November 29, 2022
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Sam Brinton is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition (NE-8) in the U.S. Department of Energy. He has a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering and a dual Masters of Science in nuclear engineering, technology and policy.
It was reported yesterday that Sam has been charged with felony theft in connection with accusations that he stole a woman’s luggage and clothing from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. He is currently on leave from work.
This is Sam:
Photo credit: U.S. Department of Energy
This is also Sam:
Photo credit: Sam’s pinned tweet from June of this year.
Wikipedia would like you to know that he “uses they and them pronouns” (and most media outlets reporting on this story go along with it).
Some readers may wonder, “Kara, why do you care? Why is it important to you that he looks like this and wants to be referred to as they and them?” I care because it matters that our society acknowledge the material reality of sex.
To be clear, I don’t particularly care that Sam likes to wear high heels and earrings. Non-conformity with sex-stereotypes is a good thing. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court entered a landmark ruling in the case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, holding that employment discrimination on the basis of sex-stereotyping constitutes unlawful sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In that case, Ann Hopkins had been discriminated against by her employer because she failed to live up to the rigorous standards of femininity. Her male coworkers had referred to her as excessively “macho” and told higher-ups that she needed to attend charm school. That case was a massive win for women’s rights.
[Fun fact: Sex was not initially included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Representative Howard Smith, a virulent opponent of civil rights in general and for black Americans in particular, added it to Title VII with the specific intention of killing the entire bill. He was absolutely convinced that his male colleagues would never go along with the idea of protecting women in the workplace, so he added sex as a protected category in Title VII in the hope that they would vote it down. Here is Representative Smith, in a 3-minute clip demonstrating his absolute contempt for civil rights.]
I have seen the complaint in Brinton’s case and while I won’t post the entire thing because it contains his private residential address, I can confirm that he has been charged with this:
If I had to speculate based on my experience working in the criminal justice system, I would guess that the state will offer to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor in exchange for a guilty plea and that he won’t serve any jail time. We should know more in late December (it’s being reported that his next court date is December 19). What this will mean for his future employment with the U.S. Department of Energy is anyone’s guess.
But here’s why all of this matters. The complaint includes this in Brinton’s suspect description:
Clearly, “gender” is being used as a synonym for “sex” here, which is a problem in and of itself, but the bigger problem as far as I am concerned is that all of the parties involved - the police, prosecutor, and judge - all seem to be going along with the ridiculous idea that they don’t know that Brinton is male.
If Brinton is convicted, will his conviction be listed as having been committed by a man, a woman, or some mysterious third category? We can all see plainly that Brinton is a man, even if he has adopted a so-called “nonbinary” identity.
Even if Brinton is ultimately convicted of a misdemeanor and not a felony, this arrest will already have been recorded. Local law enforcement agencies have been reporting felony arrests (including felony theft) to the FBI annually via the Uniform Crime Reporting System (UCR) since 1930. The UCR reports felony arrests by sex (among other categories) and shows that the overwhelming majority of arrestees in the U.S. are male.
All of that information is available to the public here.
These things matter.
In Scotland today, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (who supports efforts to allow anyone to “self-identify” as any sex they want to, whatever that may mean) is scheduled to give a talk at a gathering of Zero Tolerance, whose purpose is to end male violence against women. Attendees of the gathering have been asked to “refrain from discussions of the definition of a woman, and single-sex spaces.”
One may reasonably ask, “How on earth are we as a society supposed to tackle the problem of male violence against women if we are not allowed to discuss what a woman is or the need for women-only spaces?”
In a way, I feel bad for Brinton. He has talked publicly about how he came out as bisexual in middle school and later as gay, and how he was subjected to brutal gay conversion therapy as a young man. That’s awful. I don’t want anyone who is attracted to members of the same sex to have to endure that.
But it’s worth noting that the reason that Brinton was subjected to cruel gay conversion therapy is precisely because he is a male who is exclusively attracted to males.
Every single person on the face of the planet - all 8 billion of us - is either female or male. This matters for our ability to tackle real problems affecting women and girls (among other things). How much longer will our society go on pretending that sex isn’t real?