Commentary

he anti-biology left has finally blown itself to bits. Facebook's 58 (Update: 71) genders was only the first crack in the feminist-gay rights edifice. Now the dam has burst and the entire phony structure is beginning to collapse.

Fox News reports that New York City is now handing out forms with a check box for parents to indicate whether the woman giving birth is male or female. Ed Driscoll over at Pjmedia has more examples, including NRO's report that Mount Holyoke College is canceling that thespian masterpiece The Vagina Monologues because it's demeaning to women who have penises—a percentage that, until recently, most people would have thought to be fairly low.

Not so when you deny biology. They have them! Feminism and gay rights are like matter and antimatter. (Or should I be more inclusive and call it matter that has chosen the anti lifestyle?) They've backed themselves into mutually incompatible positions on this gender issue. Like the famous case of Cecil Kelley at Los Alamos mixing too much plutonium, the closer they get to each other the more they tend to annihilate each other in a gigantic blue flash.

There are so many ways the Left's fetish with sex has gone horribly wrong that no one outside the initiated few can keep straight who is what. When you get to the point when you can't figure out which parts are needed for having babies, your ideology is screwed, so to speak, and you just have to start over from scratch. That's what the Left is going to have to do.

The libertarians over at Reason did a pretty good job deconstructing the history of P.C., but what really hit home was the realization that what the Left is celebrating is really just a case of mass body dysmorphic disorder. The idea that small children, or even babies now, have the right to ‘choose’ their own sex (and in some cases, according to rumors, are surgically mutilated to match) is so utterly preposterous that it defies belief.

In the real world, companies are worried they'll have to build 58 different restrooms, or whether it would be safer to let them choose for themselves which one to use, and risk a lawsuit when someone of Gender #38 gets offended when someone of Gender #37 shows up at the wrong stall. But that, too, is all part of life's rich “Let's blow all our hard-learned ideas about how to live together to bits and see what happens” pattern.

As I said before, when biology comes up against physics, biology loses. By the same token, when ideology comes up against biology, ideology loses. Male and female are not social constructs, any more than protons and antiprotons are. The Left likes to call their opponents anti-science, but pretending you can deny the basic laws of biology is a level of antiscientific overreach that makes Stalin and Lysenko look like pikers.

We all know, of course, that for the Left it's just power politics all the way down. Their goal seems to be to get young people so confused about sex that humans go extinct, and the world reverts back to nature, or as we used to call it back in the dark ages, “the dark ages.” Maybe it's what we get for allowing them to teach sex ed in the public schools before they got the math curriculum straight.

Gender is just a term that means ‘maleness and femaleness.’ It doesn't mean you can just invent new ones. But the Left turned it into an entire ecosystem of nuttiness that, just coincidentally, comes with a new set of demands. It's part of their game plan to smash society down to its smallest components so it can be reassembled, atom by atom, in a new image. Unfortunately, they haven't figured out how to do that second part, and they have no awareness of what they're really trying to create. (We know, but they won't listen to us.)

There may be light, though, at the end of the tunnel. The Marxist French philosopher Alain Badiou showed how, way back in 1988, when he gave up on this poststructuralist stuff and took refuge in mathematics instead. This hasn't trickled down yet, but it may well be that, just as so many of the children of hippies became stockbrokers, the children of the Gender Bender generation will become mathematicians. It may be just what they need to keep track of an inflating universe of demands and grievances.

Spencer Klavan links to a gender theorist site where they claim gender is just an oppressive social construct. So does this mean the gender theorists are the oppressors now? This stuff is as impossible to keep up with as it is to ridicule. Slow down, guys ... grrls ... whatever you are!

Conservatives and libertarians try to be polite. We know that building an ideology, and indeed a whole Weltanschauung, around a concept as nebulous as being hip, which is really all the Left is trying to do, can't be easy. Most of us have no interest in finding out whether there is any semiotic connection to reality in all these terms like ‘gender fluid’ and ‘trans*queer’, or whatever the latest, grooviest term some hipper-than-thou made up this week. Our strategy of sitting on the sidelines not having rhythm and pretending to be un-hep is now paying off in spades. The house of cards divided against itself never had a chance of standing.

It's in the nature of pseudoscience to expand without limit unless challenged. Lest anyone think I am making too much of what's really a linguistic issue, I direct your attention to an news feature in Nature by a freelance writer who says that the existence of disorders of sex development, or DSDs, means we should redefine not just gender, but sex, to be a ‘continuum,’ not just an either/or condition.

feb 01, 2015; updated feb 25, 2015