In what is certain to be highlighted by future generations as a pristine example of preposterous “woke” culture in the first half of the twenty-first century, it has become impermissible to state out loud an indisputable fact: Men and women are biologically different.
Doing so can get one banned from social media, punished by school disciplinary committees, or fired from a job. In just the last week, Twitter began censoring Federalist articles for daring to note correctly that Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, “is truly a man.” Then over the weekend, Twitter suspended Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson for stating the same truth, claiming his tweet “violated the Twitter Rules.” The message is clear: Free speech must be killed so transgenderism’s mind-numbingly stupid distortion of reality can survive.
Redefining “woman” in a nonsensical enough way that the term can then be used to describe men requires that the word encapsulate both its meaning and opposite meaning at the same time. It cannot be daytime during the night, nor can it be nighttime during the day. In the “nonbinary” dreamscape of transgenderism, however, night becomes day when enough Marxists decide darkness is light. At that moment, light and dark, night and day, lose both meaning and contradistinction.
Objective reality is smothered so subjective fallacy can pose as truth. Far from the “civil rights issue of our time,” as many leftists have hailed it, transgenderism is nothing more than an organized effort to deny women any existence at all.
The Power to Force People to Believe a Big Lie
In the made-up world where men are women, contradiction reigns. Not too many years ago, most people would have vaguely defined a “trans woman” as a man who slips on a dress, wig, and high heels; applies lipstick, blush, and mascara; and behaves in an overtly feminine manner. “Trans women,” in other words, were seen as imitating our stereotypical understanding of what it means to be female.
In the world of activist feminism, however, women have simultaneously demanded an end to all female stereotypes. Ironically, while feminists have rejected qualities traditionally ascribed to womanhood, “trans women” have appropriated those traditional qualities for themselves. The feminists said, “We can be as manly as any man,” and the “trans women” said, “We can be as feminine as we once imagined women to be.”
The end result has been that while some women were choosing to become less stereotypically feminine, “trans women” perpetuated the very stereotypes the feminists sought to purge. If men dressed up as women who dressed up as men, then nobody would mistake them for “women” in the first place. But if feminism requires women to stop distinguishing themselves from men, then men in skirts represent, not how women necessarily think of themselves, but how men think women think of themselves.
At the end of the day, describing a “trans woman” by appearance or mannerism had the incidental effect of defining women in the same ways that some feminists abhor. In order to protect real women from the cultural expectations of feminine stereotypes, “trans women” could no longer be defined by any adjective that fed into those stereotypes.
Without feminine adjectives as cover, though, reality became harder to deny: Biology alone distinguishes men from women. For the imaginary delusions of transgenderism to thrive, biological science must therefore be denied. Transgenderism and feminism worked together to reduce women to nothing more than a vacuous tautology: Women are people who self-identify as women. Brilliant!
Where This All Ends Up
The absurdity of this reductionism is obvious to ordinary people, even if it remains elusive to the highly educated. If I am a woman because I say it is so, then I can be anything by saying it is so. If men can break “glass ceilings” and female records because in their minds they are something they are not, then no limiting principle can prevent personal belief from becoming forced reality. If it is government’s responsibility to force female athletes to compete against males pretending to be women, surely it is also government’s responsibility to make sure poor men who believe they are wealthy receive enough money from the treasury to make them rich.
If I believe myself an astronaut, NASA should welcome me with open arms or be accused of “hate.” If Canadian truckers believe themselves to be “free,” then Justin Trudeau should put an end to the tyranny of his police state posthaste. If Joe Biden believes himself to be a lucid man and the legitimately-elected president, then Americans should nervously smile and nod. If the world must bend to flights of fancy, then imagination self-identifies as reality.
This war against biological reality hurts us all. It is not just all the new male record-breakers shouldering out great female athletes or all the lecherous men posing as women for quick professional advancement in the military or bureaucratic ranks.
By destroying the biological baselines for men and women, transgenderism dismantles our shared history. It deletes the role of women from our human story. It rewrites womanhood as nothing more than a man’s tale of what womanhood should be. And it levels a final rebuke from confused men uncomfortable in their own skin: Anything you can do, we can do better.
There will be a time in the not-so-distant future when this unserious era dedicated to meaningless contradiction is judged harshly by those who follow. People will look back in bemusement at this wayward generation that obstinately repudiates basic lessons in human biology to declare that men can become women (and vice versa) at whim.
They will laugh at our ignorance as we have laughed at those generations that came before us. They will write chapters in history books dedicated to the whole sordid story of transgenderism. Still, our descendants will never completely understand.
Source: The Federalist
