The debate about trans rights is not really an argument about rights, it’s an argument about truth.

When you understand this, you understand why transgenderism has become the dominant issue in the Culture Wars, despite gender dysphoria affecting only a tiny number of people.

If we cannot say for sure what a woman is, how can we say for sure what anything is?

And if we cannot say what anything is, then how can we say that anything is wrong?

Transgenderism makes everything relative. That is its appeal.

If I say I am a man trapped in a woman’s body because that is how I feel, then that is the truth. Or at least, that is my truth. And who are you to disagree?

There is no objective truth left to which one can appeal.

Having denied God, in whose image we are made, Time Magazine famously declared ‘God is dead’ in 1966. Now, humans have gone so far as to deny their biology. Who and what is left to answer to?

If you cannot trust your lying eyes when looking down in the shower, what can you trust?

Unshackled from the burden of reality, we are now free to think with our emotions and to reason with our feelings.

If French philosopher René Descartes were alive today, he would not have said, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but, rather, ‘I feel, therefore I am.’

I cannot be true to truth since there is no such thing. I can only be true to my feelings since my feelings are the only truth I acknowledge. Furthermore, they are my feelings, so I can never be wrong.

I am my authentic self when I am doing as I please, since doing as I please pleases me. Anything else would be living a lie. That is the basis of modern Woke philosophy.

If you disagree with my feelings, then you are denying my existence since my feelings are the only reality I acknowledge.

That’s why it’s not enough for you to merely accept me, you must affirm me. And by affirm ‘me’, I mean affirm my feelings.

It is right and proper that governments now permit me to change sex on my birth certificate every 12 months if I wish. If my birth certificate does not reflect my feelings, then in what sense is it accurate?

And it is not in the least bit ironic that I can claim to be my ‘authentic self’ after having re-shaped my image under a scalpel. If my body does not reflect my feelings, then my body is a lie and to remain in it is to be living a lie in a very literal sense.

The difficulty in sustaining all of this is that objective truth has an annoying habit of reasserting itself.

For example, men cannot become pregnant and give birth to babies. We know this is a pesky biological problem, but we must not admit this since it undermines all that we have worked so hard to accomplish.

Problems (they used to be called truths) like this must be suppressed – not so much because they upset trans people but because they reveal that objective truth continues to exist despite our attempts to destroy it.

So we will insist that men can get pregnant. It will be confirmed in print and across social media platforms. It will be read over and over until it becomes truth.

And we will insist that Medicare record men giving birth to babies.

And we will demonise anyone who says anything to the contrary, since saying anything to the contrary is hurtful by which I mean it hurts our ability to create a world in which our feelings are the only reality we answer to.

As an aside, you should now be starting to understand why it is so important that we take every opportunity to have children interact with Drag Queens and become LGBTQ+ allies – even better – trans themselves.

What is tolerance and inclusivity training in schools if it is not an attempt to bury the idea of objective truth so deep in the next generation’s consciousness that there is next to no chance of it ever re-emerging?

We will teach the next generation to be so open-minded that they stop thinking entirely. We will convince them that nothing exists outside of their feelings and we will put a device in their hands 24/7 specifically to manipulate and massage their feelings, even as it saps whatever residual power of thought they might have had left.

The family is a problem, of course, since parents tend to feel a sense of responsibility for their offspring. And Christian families are the worst because those kinds of people cling to ancient ideas like objective truth and reality which they attempt to inculcate in their children.

For this reason, we must discourage judgment of any kind and against anyone or anything except the Christian church. The Christian church must be attacked at every opportunity since it is the last bastion of objective truth.

By Christian church I do not, of course, mean those churches that have embraced our unholy trinity of tolerance and inclusion and diversity.

Those churches are to be encouraged.

And they don’t have to be churches proudly displaying the rainbow flag (however desirable that is) where the cross once was. Churches that stick to the nice bits of their Bible and agree to go quiet on the objectionable stuff are quite fine. No, they are more than fine. They are, in fact, quite useful since we can leverage their message of love and acceptance to promote love and acceptance of everything except objective truth.

Anyone who insists reality exists quite apart from feelings must be de-friended, de-platformed, and destroyed. They must be pushed to the fringes – demonised as bigots and as haters – until one way or other they disappear forever.

Then, and only then, will we be free to say that up is down and that down is up without having to worry that truth might resurface in the form of someone pointing out that our feet are firmly planted in mid-air, or that the emperor is wearing no clothes, or that in professing to be wise we have become fools.

You can follow James on Twitter. You can order his new book Notes from Woketopia here.

 

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in