Recently, a demonstration was held outside Perth Library, which is noteworthy because libraries are one of the few spaces that receive overwhelming public support. The demonstrators, though, were not the usual crowd of mal-educated, and often unintelligent, student activists protesting against capitalism while filming themselves on smartphones. What was different, this time, is that the people who picketed the library do not normally demonstrate about anything. Inside the building, Cougar Morrison, a drag queen (note the sexualised name), was reading picture books to children. The demonstrators, who believe that drag is adult entertainment, were met by a counterdemonstration of trans activists who argue that not allowing drag queens to read to children is transphobia.

Drag Queen Storytime is a flash point in the culture war we are currently experiencing. It’s one tip of a multi-pronged spear aimed at changing Western culture and liberal democracy – so, these events are important barometers of contemporary politics. The demonstrations are not, as trans activists claim, the work of bigots who don’t respect individual choice.

There are, as usual, extremists on both sides of the controversy, but one thing differentiates the two groups: the majority of ordinary people believe that drag queens are adult entertainment. In other words, on one side of the demonstration were people who advocate an extreme transgender agenda, and on the other side, were ordinary people and a few loudmouthed, unsophisticated idiots, (that’s, of course, if the reports of hateful rhetoric are accurate).

It’s hard to determine, though, whether the people demonstrating were bigots, because disagreement, or stating anything that does not support transgender ideology, is described as hate; and speech, including not affirming a person’s gender identity, is defined as violence. Distorting language is a primary weapon of the woke. The City of Perth statement defending Drag Queen Storytime, which cited ‘homophobic slurs’, was probably written by the people who authorised the event. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, for the unaware, is an officially approved ideology at local, state and federal levels of the Australian government.

The recent, tragic death of Barry Humphries has unintentionally illuminated the confused logic of transgender ideology. The people who cheered the removal of The Barry award from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, because of alleged transphobia on the part of Humphries, and who think that Hannah Gadsby is funny rather than a puritanical missionary in the church of transgenderism, cite Humphries’ character Dame Edna Everage as a reason for libraries to hold Drag Queen Storytime. Dame Edna wore a dress and performed in public, and so do drag queens – and children, so the assertion goes, saw Edna on television. This argument is an example of what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a category mistake. Humphries performing for adults and drag queens reading to children are not the same phenomenon – and watching Dame Edna on television when you were young does not legitimise Drag Queen Storytime. Drag is not just entertainment, it is highly sexualised entertainment.

The fallacy of a logical equivalence between Drag Queen Storytime and Dame Edna is easily dis-proven. When I was young, for example, I read the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, the SS officer who administered the Auschwitz extermination camp. Reading an adult book as a child, however, does not legitimise teaching children the horrifying reality of the Holocaust. So, the argument that because a young person accidentally accessed a television show or a book that is officially rated as 18+, doesn’t mean that we should teach the same content to children. It’s the equivalent of stating that because an 11-year-old illicitly drank a six-pack of beer, it’s okay for teachers, or librarians, to give alcohol to primary school students.

The problem, though, for trans activists is that if a person’s gender is, as they claim, ‘arbitrarily’ assigned at birth, (in other words, there is no clue to the child’s sex), then they have to treat children as self-knowing, competent, mature individuals. Not treating children as psychologically autonomous is called ‘adultism’ in woke ideology. If a hint of unease about the progression of childhood psychological development enters the equation, (the fact that children often state they are Pocahontas or Batman, or that people don’t fully mature until their mid-twenties), then the edifice of childhood trans identity collapses. Trans, according to the ideology, is innate and drag is a manifestation of trans. Trans activists, then, cannot admit that childhood ‘sexualities’ and gender, using their words, are not absolute. Drag queens, then, are compelled to read to children in libraries to normalise transgender ideology: what queer theorists call making the normal abnormal and the abnormal normal. The ideology, then, is totalitarian. Light can never breach the curtain.

As an aside, sex and gender are not separate categories. They cohere to a remarkable degree. Count the men who are members of the local knitting group, or the women who can tolerate bores droning on about carburettors. It’s another inanity that feminists have foisted on the world.

Nobody, though, cares whether drag queens read books in public. They can recite the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, while swinging dildos between their legs, the latter of which happened at a Drag Queen Storytime in Britain – once they are reading to adults. Nothing is stopping a drag queen, a catholic priest, a communist apparatchik, or the Green party, hiring a private room in a library.

The controversy about Drag Queen Storytime can be reduced to a simple question: what did transgender activists believe would happen when they undermined the principle that parents decide how to raise their children? Alienating everyone who disagrees with you is not the sign of a rational mind. If you cannot, through the democratic process, persuade the silent, apolitical majority of people that your argument is sound, it’s not other people who are the problem – it’s you.

Transgender activism, then, can ironically be summarised in one sentence. Take a gun, point it at your foot and pull the trigger. Transgender activists are the most stupid people on the planet, because the victims of this irrational ideology are the LGB people who never asked for preferential treatment and who just want the same rights as the everyone else. As the woke saying goes, do better.