Events in the UK, where a Christian teacher has been sacked for misgendering a female student who now identifies as male, represents an appalling and egregious attack on religious freedom and freedom of conscience and, once again, proves how common sense and rationality no longer apply.
According to the Teaching Regulation Authority the teacher, Joshua Sutcliffe who taught mathematics at a school in Oxford, is ‘guilty’ of disrespecting a trans-student by refusing to use the student’s preferred pronoun (known as misgendering).
As evidence, the TRA cites one occasion where the teacher is alleged to have said ‘I borrowed her calculator’ and concludes ‘by failing to use pupil A’s preferred pronouns, Mr Sutcliffe had failed to uphold pupil A’s dignity and self-respect and failed to safeguard pupil A’s wellbeing’.
In his defence, the teacher argues it’s hypocritical for schools to celebrate diversity and difference by teaching children gender and sexuality are fluid and dynamic and celebrating Pride Day while sacking teachers for acting according to their religious beliefs and what is a biological fact.
Sutcliffe also argues, ‘I believe affirming children who are in gender distress in the classroom is psychologically damaging for them. I refuse to go against my conscience and cause a child harm and cannot apologise for that.’
That gender and sexuality are binary and God-given, instead of social constructs and a matter of personal choice, is fundamental to Christians. The Bible states ‘man and female he created them’.
Pope Benedict XVI warns against ‘destroying the very essence of the human creature through manipulating their God-given gender to suit their sexual choices’ and argues when individuals believe they have the freedom to create their own gender they are ‘stripped of the dignity as a creature of God’.
It is also true, contrary to radical gender ideology being forced on students, that medical research is beginning to question the science and ethics involved in encouraging and allowing children and teenagers to transition.
The French National Academy of Medicine describes gender transitioning as an ‘epidemic-like phenomenon’ and warns ‘great medical caution must be taken in children and adolescents, given the vulnerability, particularly psychological, of this population and the many undesirable effects and even serious complications that can be caused’.
Authorities in Sweden, after many years supporting gender transitioning, now warn about the consequences of gender-affirming treatments on the basis recommending puberty blockers and life-changing surgery is experimental and often counter-productive.
Forcing people to use non-binary pronouns like ‘they’ and ‘them’, instead of acknowledging the overwhelming majority of babies are born female (XX chromosomes) or male (XY chromosomes), is just one more example proving how woke activists use language to radically change society.
Like Alice in Wonderland, we have gone down the rabbit hole where in reply to Alice’s question, ‘Can you make words mean so many different things?’ Humpty Dumpty replies, ‘When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean.’
The danger, as George Orwell writes, is that ‘if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’. Best illustrated by his dystopian novel 1984, totalitarian dictators like Big Brother indoctrinate and control citizens by manipulating language in such a way that criticism and dissent are impossible.
As a result of what he terms Newspeak, Orwell also writes we now live in a world where if the leader ‘says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs’.
Instead of rational and balanced dialogue and debate any who question or refuse to conform to Woke ideology are vilified and attacked. Celebrate Western Civilisation, notwithstanding its sins and faults, and you are guilty of ‘white supremacy’, suggest women can be feminine and you are a ‘misogynist’.
If you are a man defending traditional beliefs and values you are labelled ‘male, pale, and stale’. Such is the extreme nature of thought control universities, government departments, and businesses now have diversity and inclusivity language guides to ensure no one is guilty of thoughtcrime.
Proven by what has happened to Joshua Sutcliffe in the UK as well as Australia’s Israel Folau and Margaret Court plus the principal of Brisbane’s Citipointe Christian College and Cardinal George Pell, those of religious faith are especially vulnerable to attack.
While the situation is not as extreme in Western nations like Australia, one wonders whether Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George is correct when he writes, while ‘I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square’.
Dr Kevin Donnelly is a senior fellow at the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute and author of The Dictionary Of Woke.
