René Descartes could not have foreseen the insanity of the 21st Century transgender movement when he wrote, ‘I think, therefore I am’. Descartes did not set out to be a radical subjectivist, but his work nonetheless spawned the modern dogma of mind-body dualism that is the skeleton key to modern transgender ideology. In the centuries that have followed the publication of Decartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), thought has risen to hold near-absolute superiority over material reality – at least, it seems, amongst all Western, developed peoples.

In the wake of the Cartesian revolution, we stand at the precipice of a new revolt against accepted notions of reality. Where once we beneficially thought, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ the new philosophical flavor is, ‘I think, therefore it is.’ Transgenderism, perhaps the most radical re-imagining of human identity to emerge in the past four centuries, is not content with subjective self-identification within a diverse community of opinions. It is essentially an anti-enlightened viewpoint: It demands a medieval subscription to the dogma itself.

Modernity has always posed a problem to the surety of individual identity. On the one hand, the post-Enlightenment era allowed for the rise of empirically-discovered truth. Paradoxically, the same era opened the door to the radical free agency of man to self-define. As society and its institutions shifted en-masse toward an obsession with the empirical, the individual shifted inexorably toward an obsession with self-definition. By 1823 this meant, for many, the freedom to choose one’s own country. By 1923 it meant the freedom to escape the occupation of one’s father. In 2023 it means the freedom to escape the material reality of one’s own body.

Transgenderism fulfills the ambitions of modernity’s great thought-movements. In the shadow of Hobbes, it purports to a mechanical realisation of man: The body, for transgenderists, is a mere machine. If we have technicians (surgeons) capable of manipulating its artifice, then we may design it as we will. In the shadow of Rousseau, we see man defined not by what he is factually in the world, but by the romantic notion of what he says lies within his own heart. The primacy of rights over duties, propagated in the brilliant thinking of John Locke, and codified in the amendments to the American constitution, emancipates man from the historic prison of his own body. In the spirit of Marx, transgenderism is an anger-fueled movement that demands the violent destruction of what is, in pursuit of what might be promised after the revolution.

The global left, in its unabashed love of modernity, is at once ideologically defenseless against the cult of transgenderism, and simultaneously in love with its promise. That is because transgenderism is the ultimate act of modernity, and the left itself is wholly derivative of modernity.

By comparison, the global right, in its confused, sometimes reticent, sometimes enthusiastic embrace of modernity, is not adequately prepared to combat this insidious ideology. Conservatism’s marriage of convenience with classical liberalism and their incorporated joint venture with libertarianism, has produced a catalog of ham-fisted responses to the transgender crisis.

And make no mistake, this is a crisis. It is not so purely because of the surgical mutilation of children, or the permanent retardation of their physical faculties through aggressive chemical-hormonal interventions. It is not a crisis because Western militaries devote increasingly larger proportions of their budgets away from mission-readiness, and toward gender ideology. It is not even because under legislation like California’s AB957, parents can be stripped of the custody of their children, for failing to ‘affirm’ a change of gender.

Rather, the crisis is one of truth itself. The prospect that humans might seek to defy or overwhelm the most fundamental characteristic of their being – their sex, forces a violent confrontation with objective reality. This is a crisis because it exposes the willingness of so many otherwise enlightened folk to endorse the terrible falsehood that one can switch genders at will, as if we possess some magic power over our human condition. If this disposition grows or even merely remains in society, then modernity will have truly embraced untruth.

The right has hitherto fought transgenderism within the very post-truth battleground that allowed for its rise in the first place. With a few notable exceptions, the most stringent voices against transgender ideology have attacked symptoms, not causes, of the pernicious dogma.

The farcical tale of Lia Thomas, the 6 ft 4 biological man creating records that female collegiate swimmers cannot match, has drawn much media attention. The focus has inevitably been drawn to the injustice of having a biological man in the locker room with female teammates, along with the humiliation of women in the pool. Fine – but these are circuses consequent to an antecedent crime: the decision to entertain untruth in the name of ‘tolerance’ in the first place.

The debate surrounding the surgical manipulation of children is similarly problematic. It is a trap this author admits to falling into. We rise up in fury against the assault of transgender ideology on the sensibilities of our young. And rightly so. Children who face losing the functionality of their bodies in the name of a destructive social contagion must be defended from their own lack of reason. But we hedge when it comes to following the line of argument through to its logical conclusion. We permit adults similarly deprived of reason to normalise the propagation of absurd falsehoods. We have tolerated a fire that fuels itself on an abundance of unreason, only to scramble desperately to put it out when that tolerance has allowed the flames to lick at our young.

Modernity is in large part, built on the notion of tolerance. John Locke made it so, when he set forth the path to peaceful coexistence between church and state, in his Letter concerning toleration (1689). Tolerance has been a very good thing for Western democracies. But as a political principle, it was never conceived without necessary preconditions. In fact, Locke’s famous treatise is riven with concern about the limits of toleration. The man who would give the greatest agency to the freedom of the individual in modernity placed hard limits on the notion of toleration:

‘No opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated.’

To combat the mania of transgender ideology, it will require a re-calibration of thought from those sensibly opposed to its spread. Man is neither woman, or something approximate to her form. The evidence screams at us that no human being will ever have the power to disintegrate their own DNA and reconstitute it in alien form. Modernity’s preference for empiricism must beat out its weakness for unmoored subjectivity: The truth must out.

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Ben Crocker is a research fellow at Common Sense Society in Washington DC. His Substack is Crocker’s Columns.

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