This shouldn’t have to be said, but it’s possible to be supportive of women’s rights without being a feminist. That something as uncontroversial as this needs to be explained is evidence of the influence that feminism holds over contemporary culture. Along with environmentalism, identity politics (which is another name for racism), and other forms of left-wing philosophy, feminism is the dominant ideology in Western, liberal-democratic countries. You can’t watch a television program, open a newspaper, or observe any cultural activity without being metaphorically hit over the head by feminist propaganda. This morning, to give one example, I watched a clip from a British television program, where the guests were complaining that not enough non-blonde, non-skinny women were represented on the English women’s soccer team, and that girls need to see players like themselves, with their identities, to become enthusiastic about playing football.

This was the opposite of my upbringing in Ireland where every second boy wanted to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix and box like Muhammad Ali, both of whom were loved simply because they were brilliant. Hendrix and Ali’s identities were invisible to us. This attitude is shared by both sexes, but is more common in men, who, in general, admire people with talent, whether the talented person is a woman or a man. It’s why men detest the feminist ruse of exaggerating the brilliance of untalented women. They have exactly the same attitude to male braggarts.

You cannot, however, no matter what you do, escape feminist propaganda, which is so pervasive that it’s become the background noise of contemporary life. If an audience was not presented with a strong, feisty, gutsy, extraordinarily intelligent and wise female character, the effect would be so jarring to contemporary sensibilities that they would become instantly bamboozled. (The only exception to this trope is when a woman is the victim of male turpitude).

Of course, if a stupid, unwise, afraid-of-her-own-shadow, shifty female character, without the nefarious influence of a man, was portrayed on television, in literature, or in the cinema, the siren song of whinge would become so loud as to drown out the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute.

Feminists for too long have spouted a deluge of nonsense, which is why we’re seeing a growing revolt against feminist ideology.

I write the above to show that while I’m an advocate for women’s rights, I’m tired of the constant whirring of the feminist dirge that’s been the background noise of cultural life for decades. Another reason is that, while I’m almost entirely immoral (contra philosopher Derek Parfitt’s claim that morality is objective), I do hold some principles, most notably, the absolute importance of free speech. Without free speech, no other goods can exist, at least for any extended period of time.

Recently, however, I’ve found myself, much to my bemusement, absolutely, steadfastly, on the side of the minority of feminists who believe, (as anyone with a semblance of a brain should), that biology is real, that you can’t change your sex, and that women are entitled to their own spaces without the influence or presence of men.

That these truths need to be stated is an absolute condemnation of contemporary culture.

But, and here’s the rub, while I am one hundred per cent on the side of these brave feminists (for once the word brave in relation to feminists shouldn’t be in scare quotes), I am not going to let the greatest gaslight in recent history occur without some sort of pushback. Which is that feminism created our current mess and no amount of rewriting the past can change this truth.

Feminists have not been particularly creative, all the time relying on the work of, ironically, male philosophers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, etc. (Simone de Beauvoir is the intellectual progeny of Sartre, who was a disciple of Heidegger); or psychologists such as the egregious John Money, (even the first wave of feminism was derivative of the ideas of men).

However, it was feminism that weaponised these male theorists’ ideas and pushed them through an institutionally captured –initially feminised, then politicised – education sector.

While most feminists believe in the nebulous idea of patriarchy, which is as empirically valid as Klingons living on the Moon, (ecology and evolution explain the cultural differences between societies), it is the feminist ideas of social construction and, particularly gender, (these notions are two sides of the same coin), that have caused the most damage to contemporary culture.

The feminist claim that everything, including biology and science, is socially constructed, and that gender is distinct from sex, (and is an invention of society), is the root cause of our contemporary insanity. To understand why this claim is nonsense, imagine, as a thought experiment, the relative height of men and women. That men, in general, are taller than women is true. But because some women are taller than some men does not negate the premise that men are taller than women. But this is exactly the argument that feminists use to separate sex from gender.

For the majority of people our gender (whether our behaviour is more stereotypically male or female) coheres almost exactly to our biological sex. A small percentage of people, both male and female, behave in ways that are more typically identified as that of the opposite sex, but they are an anomaly, just like women in general being taller than men.

Even the redoubtable Helen Joyce, scourge of nonsense and author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, uses this argument in interviews. One moment she states that gender is how we behave and that women manifest their gender in all sorts of ways, and the next moment she’s stating that men are responsible for the majority of rapes and sexual violence, which is true; but her claim about men negates her claim about gender. Male sexual abuse is inseparable from sex. It’s genetics, in other words. Sex, not gender, explains egregious male behavior.

Men and women are the same species, but we have different likes, psychopathologies and interests. It’s time we put feminist gender nonsense in the dustbin of history.