I wish I was so elegant as to be able to write such an opinion. This op-ed in the Wall Street Journal regarding the recent decision by the Supreme Court on transgender rights is so beautifully written and the argument so wonderfully presented. I read it twice.
The decision handed down from the Supreme Court created law that made us all transgender and effectively removed any pretense of nature determining whether we are male or female. Now it’s all in your mind.
To say that a man who believes he is a woman is exactly the same as a woman is an affront, and should be offensive, to all natural born women. For men it is different. I do hold a bit of a double standard because I believe that men and women are truly different biologically. That is not to say one is superior over the other. Men and women are just different and no amount of judicial decision or legislation will take away the discrimination that exists in people’s heads.
The example shows the ruling’s totalitarian character. It requires everyone to live for all public and practical purposes as if what they know to be true in their pre-ideological experience of reality—the knowledge we imbibe with our mother’s milk—were officially false, a “stereotype.” Even worse, it requires everyone to live as if what they know to be false were officially true. Ironically, what is now “true” is nothing but stereotypes, that bundle of mannerisms, dress, makeup and hairstyles by which one imagines what it feels like to be a woman or a man. Worse still, it prefers them, especially when they are at odds with one’s actual sex. The war on pronouns, an assault upon the language by which we recognize a world in common, follows of necessity. What we are dealing with is nothing less than a war on reality itself. And everyone has just been pressed into service.
There is no totalitarianism so total as that which claims authority over the meaning of nature. Increasingly the courts are assuming this authority, though they typically exercise it in part unconsciously, even ignorantly, and in part dishonestly and subversively, all under the pretense of “neutrally” mediating between interests, rights, powers and authorities. Or in this case, simply parsing “plain English.” But this is bosh, and no one believes it.
Wall Street Journal