Three recent stories demonstrate how far Western culture has lost its way on matters of sex and gender.
A divorced is fighting to prevent his former wife from beginning to “transition” their 7-year-old son, James, into a girl. The mother argues that James wants this, citing his fondness of the movie Frozen. Wait, weren’t we lectured five minutes ago that girls’ and boys’ tastes were social constructs, and there’s nothing inherently girlish about the color pink, for example? So how does liking princesses and hairbands make a child a girl?
Another story was of Rachel McKinnon, a man who identifies as a woman, who won the women’s world cycling championship. McKinnon challenged naysayers, tweeting with obvious truth, “We are either full and equal women, or not.” The equally obvious answer is, “not.” The most effective demolition of McKinnon’s case came from the satirical, pseudonymous Twitter feed of Titania McGrath, who wrote: “Misogynists always claim that men are better than women at sports. But if that’s the case, how come cyclist Rachel McKinnon only started winning gold medals after she transitioned?”
In the third story, a lawyer representing female beauticians whom a transgender activist tried to force to wax his genitals, summed up the central truth in these issues. Jay Cameron, of the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, said, “Self-identification does not erase physical reality.”
Our culture is in a state of near madness over gender dysphoria, a term falling out of favor because it contradicts political fashion. It was recently understood as a psychological problem, a feeling of discomfort with one’s gender. Now, it is instead argued that people suffering from this (often temporary) disorder actually have the wrong bodies, that women can in all physical respects be men, and vice versa. From this comes clamorous debate that would recently have been thought insane about such things as whether men can have babies.
There have always been genuinely sad cases of people who psychologically or physically are of indeterminate gender or sex. Such people deserve sympathy, but acceptance is dismissed as insufficient. It is demanded, rather, that we immediately embrace the latest revolutionary idea, which may contradict what we were once instructed to believe and will doubtless be rendered obsolete by the next explosive diktat from the woke ideological fringe.
At breakneck pace, the Left is getting crazier in its beliefs and demands. And the Democratic Party is rushing to accept destructive polices that result. Our cover story, “Leftward, Ho!,” is about how Beto O’Rourke, like Bernie Sanders in 2016, is driving his party yet further left. What was recently radical becomes today’s Democratic orthodoxy. God knows what tomorrow will bring. I hope you enjoy this and all the other great reads in this week’s Washington Examiner magazine.
