It amazes that the tiny sliver of Americans disenchanted with the sex they were born into seem to have taken total control of American culture, and of the laws, policies, and etiquette to enforce their every whim, no matter how bizarre, or how contrary to nature or to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Americans. And these folks are allowed a level of intolerance and personal vitriol granted to no other group in living memory. (See William Murchison’s fine piece in Tuesday’s TAS here.) Informed readers keeping up with recent events out of North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi know this is true.
This group’s current phantasm is that the sex one is born into — they prefer the more loosey-goosey term gender — is of no consequence, and one can change genders (sexes) with less fuss than that required to change one’s cable provider. As a logical consequence of this delusion, the notions that a person born with a penis and testicles is male, obvious to everyone on the planet and uncontroversial for all of history until this century, or that the sexes are entitled to privacy in public restrooms, are out the window. And anyone clinging to the traditional view of these matters is a bigot and must be cast into outer darkness, or at the very least sent to re-education camp and assigned a cultural probation officer. If this doesn’t remind you of Soviet psychiatry, it should.
This insanity hasn’t infected America alone. One of the latest victims of these cultural Pol Pots is British novelist Ian McEwan (Atonement, Saturday, Solar). In a talk at something called the Royal Institution in London, McEwan riffed on the contemporary politics of identity, where some people feel free to make up their “self” with little or no respect paid to reality.
During his critique of the consumerist approach to identity, which includes the phenomena of men insisting that they are really women, McEwan made this unremarkable remark: “Call me old fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.”
TAS readers will not be surprised at the fertilizer storm that followed, nor should McEwan have been. He was of course called a lot of things by the inquisitors in the Twitosphere, none of them as polite as old-fashioned. He was styled a bigot, a weirdo, and a “transphobe” (the language is always growing). One “transgendered journalist” came up with this knee-slapper: “His ideas about penises are outdated.” (Who knew that ideas about penises had an expiration date?)
Of course an apology was demanded. And, sadly, McEwan complied, giving his hysterical critics what they wanted but didn’t deserve because his remarks did not disrespect gay or transgendered people. While he had the temerity in his statement to say that some of his critics were “righteous and cross” (ya think?), he did concede the sexual left’s central axiom that “biology is not destiny.”
Biology may not be our entire destiny, but it’s an important chunk of it. Men and women are different. Very different. Different in ways that have nothing to do with the way people are socialized. Ways that are hard-wired. The differences are obvious to anyone not weighted down with progressive ideology in its various toxic strains. Beings from another planet who came here to observe us would pick up on the differences in a half-hour or less. It takes total immersion in progressive fantasy to deny them, and then to rant against anyone who doesn’t join them in this, no matter how principled or intellectually sound his/her reason for not doing so.
Perhaps we will regain our sanity in this and other areas at some point, though the reality-deniers are in the cultural drivers’ seat now. And perhaps groups and individuals demanding tolerance for themselves will start extending a little to others. But if this re-establishment of the obvious is to take place, at some point it will take someone with the you-know-whats to tell the sexual left to go p**s up a rope when they pepper him with their unconditional demands and undeserved insults. It would appear that this someone isn’t Ian McEwan.
As an aside, and totally in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I recently asked more than a hundred women if they would be comfortable with men in the lady’s room with them. Their most frequent response was: “How the hell did you get in here?” A perfectly reasonable reaction. But a reaction that today might have them hauled up on charges before the Court of Political Correctness. The NBA, the NCAA, and PayPal would be very cross. And Bruce Springsteen wouldn’t sing for anyone so un-inclusive. (At least there would be one upside to the excommunication from with-it society.)
