I’ve always fancied myself as one of those Christmas Cracker riddle writers – what a great job that would be… Anyway, here’s one I made up all by myself the other day.

Question: What do you call the most successful American female swimmer of all time? Answer: a man.

Last week, in Washington, Paula Scanlan gave testimony to House Judiciary Committee hearings entitled, The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’.

She gave this testimony as a young woman whose entire childhood had been devoted towards her goal of being a swimming champion. Indeed, Scanlan still holds the New England Independent School League record in the 400-yard freestyle relay.

These hearings have been set up by the Republicans to examine and expose how children are being potentially coerced by adults in positions of authority into life-altering gender transition procedures. They also explore the impact this is having on those around them.

Paula Scanlan, after explaining about her own ambitions and experiences as a top-level female swimmer, said that she changed dramatically – and dramatically for the worse – the day the well-known transgender swimming athlete Lia Thomas joined the girls’ team.

Thomas, who was born and competed as a biological man throughout school, brought the issue of transgender swimming competitors to the top of the media cycle.

As we have discussed many times in this magazine, one of the tragic outcomes of radical gender theory is that it has been foisted on our unsuspecting school kids and their parents. Western societies around the world – and their official sporting bodies – have been allowing biological boys to compete against girls, devastating the dreams and ambitions of those aspiring young athletes. Many girls have simply abandoned sports out of a sense of futility.

It’s not only the medals that these girls miss out on. The real nightmare awaits them in the change rooms.

Swimmer @PaulaYScanlan breaks her silence at a "gender-affirming care" hearing: "My teammates and I were forced to undress in the presence of [Lia Thomas] … a biological male." pic.twitter.com/wkM0FIjC0o

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) July 27, 2023

‘We were offered psychological services to attempt to re-educate us to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male,’ said Scanlan.

Let that sink in.

This is the modern left, writ large. Whether it is to do with gender, or race, or colonial history, or sexuality, the modern left imposes their collective will by offering the dissenting individual ‘psychological services to re-educate you to become comfortable with that which you know instinctively to be wrong’. In this case, young girls undressing in front of men.

What does this situation remind you of? Well, students of real (as opposed to fake) history – which therefore excludes pretty much anyone under 40 in Australia – will immediately recognise that those are the very tactics employed by Mao Tse-Tung during his ‘cultural revolution’, Pol Pot, Stalin, and other evil communist despots. They were all keen on psychological treatment to cure you of your ‘wrong think’.

As James Lindsay said: “What is Woke?” Woke is Maoism with American characteristics.

The clue here is that in the world of Woke, or the modern Maoism, the individual must bow to the will of the collective, as determined by the cultural elites. This is a complete perversion of democracy.

Take transgenderism as the example. We’ve always had transgender people – particularly transgender pop stars. They were individuals. Lou Reed famously sang about ‘walking on the wild side’ with Holly, who ‘shaved her legs and then he was a she’.

Then, most famously of all, there was The Kinks with Lola wittily written by Ray Davies.

You see, there is nothing new about transgenderism. The difference is the political environment wrapped around the movement. Back in the 70s, the Left predominantly, but also many on the right, believed not only in free speech but also in its twin ideology of libertarianism.

Essentially, this was the idea that so long as they are not harming someone else, adult individuals should be pretty much free to do whatever they like.

In a libertarian world, where the emphasis is on the individual, transgenderism was fine and caused barely any ripples. But we don’t live in that world any longer. The Left here and throughout the West, having successfully taken over all our major institutions, have done precisely what Marx and Lenin instructed them to do, which is abandon individual rights and impose collective authoritarianism.

Now, instead of the individual being free, the individual must bow to whatever the authoritarian collective demands. Which means, because the authoritarian left have decreed that women can be men and men can be women, the whole of society must change and bend to the will of the authoritarian elites. This is Orwell’s nightmare come to life – where girls must be re-educated to feel comfortable with being naked in front of a grown man.

Society must bend to the will of the collective, or else…

In this ‘brave new world’, the media are now our censors. The collective will crush you. Universities are intellectual gulags. Leftwing ideology is our persecutor and our inquisitor. Language has become our jailer, where say the wrong thing and you are branded ‘hateful’, and cast out.

There’s only one problem… Biologically, it is simply not possible to change your sex. The left constantly tells us you can change your ‘gender’. 2 + 2 = 5. But as with all totalitarian systems, what begins as a collective fantasy for ‘the greater good’ swiftly ends up doing unbelievable, permanent, physical, and mental harm to the dissenting individual.

At the hearings, Paula Scanlan goes on to detail her own sexual assault when she was 16, and how having a naked male with her in the changing rooms understandably ‘freaks her out’. This is real mental trauma, which is bad enough, but you might have noticed a beautiful young 19-year-old girl sitting next to Paula. Her name is Chloe Cole. As a young teenager, she was medically transitioned into a ‘boy’. And then last year, Chloe changed her mind.

I mean, who would have guessed? A rebellious teenager grows up a little and changes their mind… What an extraordinary occurrence.

Unsurprisingly, Chloe is one of a growing army of de-transtitioners and her story is almost too cruel and too sadistic to bear. And I warn you, the details are horrific. But her story is what many left-wing parents, teachers, academics, politicians, and doctors are foisting on their children – as we speak.

Incredibly powerful plea from detransitioner @ChoooCole to the lawmakers seated before her: "This needs to stop. You alone can stop it. Enough children have already been victimized by this barbaric pseudoscience."

"Please let me be your final warning." pic.twitter.com/pdiOVyAHL1

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) July 27, 2023

And how does a young woman become the plaything of the largely experimental medical industry? It’s all political. As I said, it’s the teachers, it’s parents, it’s the specialists, it’s the grown-ups who these poor, poor children trust. Make no mistake: it is the dogma and ideology of the left. It was the creed of the Left that says to parents – shockingly – that ‘you can either have a dead daughter or a live transgender son’. Yes, that was really said to parents.

What an absolute disgrace. Yet if you try and warn about this nightmare, as has happened to many brave women like Moira Deeming or Katherine Deves, you are branded hateful and transphobic. Our spinless, cowardly political leaders and bureaucrats who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year won’t even answer the question, ‘What is a woman?’

Well to all those cowardly public servants, politicians, and peddlers of cultural Marxism the world over, let me make it easy for you. Chloe Cole is a woman. A damaged, but very brave woman. Paula Scanlan is a woman, a traumatised but very brave woman. Lia Thomas is a man who wants to be a woman but biologically never can be one.