While you were off enjoying Christmas and New Year’s you may have missed an amazing story: Down in Ecuador a man met a woman. They fell in love. And now the woman is four months pregnant with his child. Amazing, right? Stop the presses!
Except that there’s a wrinkle: The man says he’s a woman. And the woman says she’s a man. So the couple claims that, for the first time in human history, the husband will be giving birth to their child. And because of this, their totally pedestrian story became international news.
It’s tempting to dismiss this as just another case of life imitating the Onion, but that would be a mistake. It’s actually a helpful window the radical authoritarian impulses which drive World War T (Steve Sailer’s perfectly apt name for the transgender project).
Like the push for gay marriage, transgender advocates would have the public believe that they just want to be left alone. But like the gay marriage project — which moved quickly from “leave us alone!” to “bake me a cake!” — the transgender project makes larger claims on society.
At the most superficial level, there’s the Orwellian insistence on total control of language. The couple in Ecuador, Fernando Machado and Diane Rodríguez have, respectively, female DNA and female body parts and male DNA and male body parts. According to them, their child was conceived they way billions of other children have been. Yet Machado and Rodríguez insist that the world pretend that they are not what they are and have done something novel.
If they would like to believe such things privately that’s their right. And their friends and neighbors might be willing to indulge them. But Machado and Rodríguez are demanding that their entire society participate and use language—the understanding of what “man” and “woman,” “father” and “mother” mean—only as they deem fit.
And Machado and Rodríguez are intent on making their child a public act. In a public statement, Rodríguez boasted that the pregnancy will shatter “patriarchal norms.”
Rodríguez elaborated when interviewed by a reporter from Fusion back in October, before the story broke widely: “Some people are for this and some are against it, but that doesn’t make us uncomfortable. We knew that would happen and we were prepared because our goal is to shake the moral foundation in Ecuador and other countries.”
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
