You might wonder how or why it will affect you if a biological man dresses like or identifies as a woman. And you’re probably thinking it won’t. After all, if you’re the sort of person to stare at strangers’ body parts, then you have much bigger problems unrelated to politics.

But even non-mathematicians would be affected if government forces everyone to accept that 2+2 is 5, and to live their lives as if it were true. And unfortunately, Congress is considering a bill to do just that.

The Equality Act, which has 237 Democratic co-sponsors in the U.S. House, would formally recognize gender identity ideology in law for the first time. Every lawmaker will soon have to confront this bill and its biological denialism, so they would all be well-served to read and carefully understand its consequences.

We hope and believe that all Americans will show compassion and genuine love for the transgendered persons they know or meet. It is wrong to mock or belittle people for being different.

That said, biology is what it is, and our laws and policies have to be based on reality, not personal friendships or feelings. Sex, which is determined at conception by specialized chromosomes, is the meaningful distinction that forms the basis for a myriad of biological and legal realities. It forms the biological basis of sexual attraction, including opposite and same-sex attraction, and it is ultimately required for the propagation of the human species.

There is a great deal of government policy that hinges directly on the sex of individuals involved, extending from the federal level all the way down to your local school district. All of this policy will lose its tether from reality and will lose its rational basis if gender ideology is forced upon Americans through a misguided federal law like this one.

This issue goes well beyond bathrooms, but bathrooms play a bigger role than the average biological male is likely to understand. As Julia Beck, a self-described radical lesbian feminist, testified this month before the House Judiciary Committee, the bill will cause girls to "stay home from school when they have their periods to avoid harassment by boys in mixed-sex toilets.” This is a controversial thing to say, if only because gender ideology would have everyone pretend that menstruation is not a particularly female phenomenon. Still, it must be said. This law would harm girls.

Beck, who served on Baltimore’s LGBTQ Commission until she was kicked off it for refusing to participate in biological denialism, also discussed other less common but equally harmful side-effects the Equality Act could have on various biological women. For example, when seeking a caregiver, it would become discriminatory even for a disabled or elderly woman to request a biological female, not just someone who officially identifies as female.

Female athletes would see their sports dominated by stronger and faster biological males. Female business owners would have to compete with biological males for specially earmarked federal loans.

And women’s-only spaces would effectively be abolished. This has not worked well for women’s prisons in the U.K. But when it comes to protecting women who have not committed crimes, “female survivors of rape will be unable to contest male presence in women’s shelters,” Beck noted.

Beck added one other important criticism of gender ideology — that it reduces the entire concept of womanhood to stereotypes about women’s feelings or behavior.

“The concept of gender identity, she said, “suggests that there is an essentially female personality or feeling that a person can have, but no such thing as a female body. Making gender identity the law will in fact mandate a belief in a female penis, or female testes.”

Beck is right to look biological denialism in the face. As controversial as it has become to say this, we will affirm here that women do not possess penises or testes.

Meanwhile, 2+2 still does not equal 5. If your congressman is trying to force you to say it does, then you need a new congressman.