Recently, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases about the validity of state laws banning boys from girls sports, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox.
The lawyers on the trans side bizarrely claimed that puberty blockers erase whatever athletic advantage men who say they are women may have. That’s crazy enough—as the attorneys for the young women pointed out, the male athletic advantage doesn’t begin at puberty, but begins as early as 5 or 6 years of age.
But there is something even crazier here, for the presumption seems to be that men have a right to compete in women’s sports unless they have a biological advantage, just because they think they are really women. No. They aren’t what they think they are, and they have no such right.
To say what ought to be obvious: Men and women are different.
Moreover, women want and need some girls-only activities, and men want and need some boys-only activities. This would be true even if the two sexes were equally big, fast, and strong. We don’t have to pretend that they are the same, and we don’t have to pretend that sexuality is all in our minds, so that I might be a “woman in a man’s body,” a “man in a woman’s body,” or even, as we now sometimes hear, a “lesbian in a man’s body.”
If you haven’t heard the last one yet, it refers to a woman who is sexually attracted to other women, but who is trapped in the body of a man.
We are passing through a pandemic of lunacy, of dangerous and contagious detachment from reality.
It isn’t just young people with gender dysphoria who suffer the harmful delusion that we can be the sex other than what we are.
Now, schoolteachers often promote transgender ideology, even to children in the lower elementary grades, asking them, “What are your pronouns?”
At the university where I teach, if I were to use the male pronoun for a male student who “identified as” female, I would be roundly condemned. I don’t go out of my way to offend people, so in a case like that, I would avoid pronouns altogether. But for some people, even that isn’t enough. They won’t be satisfied unless I pretend to agree with them.
How far does this go?
The gender delusion isn’t just about whether we are male or female, or whether men can get pregnant. We are now told that there are up to 95 genders, and the number keeps growing. Some activists suggest not just giving men faux vaginas and women faux penises, but leaving the polarity of male and female behind altogether. They’re for surgically crafting genitals to look like flowers or abstract sculpture.
Other activists are pressing for attraction to minors to be considered a gender. Perhaps next in line will be attraction to other men’s wives: “My gender is adulterer.” So far, the weirdest so-called gender is “xenogender,” defined as “a gender “that cannot be contained by human understandings of gender.” If it can’t be, I wonder, then how do we know that it is a gender at all?
Nor does the lunacy stop even there.
Not only do some people claim to be of a different sex than they are, some now claim to be of a different species than they are. They “identify” as dogs, raccoons, or bunny rabbits, and expect to be treated as such even at school and work—although I don’t think they want to be kept in a cage and fed kibble.
And then there are those who think that they have different bodies than they have. Some people “identify as paraplegic” and demand that doctors sever their spines. Articles have appeared in medical journals, seriously discussing whether people who “identify” as having fewer limbs should have some of their limbs amputated. This isn’t “affirming” them. It’s mutilating them.
All these delusions are symptoms of a still deeper lunacy. Their root is the notion that true freedom lies in rejecting every limitation, even the very framework of human nature.
Every artist knows that to make beautiful things he must honor the laws of his medium, whether paint, stone, or sound. This is also true of the artistry of living, in which the medium in which our lives are etched is human nature itself.
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