Let’s say you run into someone named Nicolaus who asserts he’s a Copernican. ‘His truth’ is that our Sun is the centre of the universe and everything – all the rest of the vast body of stars and galaxies – revolves around this mid-size star in our solar system. Or so he says. And he demands that you respect his worldview. He insists that whenever you speak to him you outwardly accept his version of reality. Does anyone, Guardian readers included, believe that politeness demands you defer to his subjective sense of reality if anything important is on the line? Yes, yes, yes in many situations you might just let the matter slide and say nothing. Social life works much better if most people, most of the time, let some dumb-headed claims pass unremarked. (I know. I once caused a dinner party to break up when living in Hong Kong when I challenged one of the other guest’s claims that some form of homeopathic alternative medicine remedy had made her better from some ailment or other. She took great offence at my scepticism. I didn’t back down. A bit of yelling eventually eventuated. This woman ended up crying. Dessert was never served as we all left early. And boy oh boy was my wife angry with me. Live and learn.)

On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to institutionalise this sort of idea that a person’s subjective sense of how the world is becomes ipso facto the correct one and one to which all and sundry must defer. Sure, in a spirit of generosity we might point out to old Nicolaus that his view of how the heavens are ordered is a pretty big advance on the older Ptolemaic one. Still, we’d tell Nicolaus that he was wrong as regards our Sun being the centre of the universe. And if he persisted we could point to all sorts of evidence about the external, causal world to show he was wrong – all of it worth more than the subjective beliefs and potential feelings of offence of Nicolaus. Right? That’s what follows from accepting that there are mind-independent truths about the world that are imposed on all of us humans. Should you happen to find yourself in some French deconstructionist professor’s class where le Professeur is claiming that gravity is a social construct – caused by (pick your least favourite group) oppressing (pick a more favoured group) – you would take him up to the eighth-floor window and ask him to jump. He won’t because he too knows that there are facts about the world imposed on the universe.  It doesn’t matter how you or some group of people would prefer things to be.

If you accept that truth is not subjective a good deal follows from this. For instance, there are all sorts of things about the world you might wish were different – that you were smarter, more attractive, had a different skin pigmentation, the list goes on and on. But your wishing that this or that were the case does not magically make it true.  And from there I take it that readers can see why the whole transgender movement is asking people to pretend to believe in something that is simply not true. I don’t know how many trillions of cells each of us has in our bodies but each one has either XX or XY chromosomes. That is imposed on you by the world. And it regulates how your body develops, your strength, the amount of testosterone, quickness, muscle mass and muscle twitch speed, everything.

Personally, I’m a believer in the old-fashioned notion of tolerance, the live-and-let-live version. Once you’re an adult I don’t care what you do as long as you’re not harming me or others. Born with XY chromosomes but want to wear a dress? Go ahead. Also want to have incredibly intrusive surgery and take drugs (both of which only became available in the last half-century due to the amazing advances of modern science that originated in one culture, Western culture)? Well, again, go ahead. But I draw the line when people insist I pretend that the world is something other than it is. Demanding that the rest of us use a pronoun that links to what some person feels or wishes had been the case simply does not make it so. And in some situations politeness must give way to respect for the truth. Who can play in what sporting leagues is a very obvious such situation. Or who will be put into what prison.

Moreover, when various Australian senior judges say that using ‘preferred pronouns’ is simply a matter of politeness and respect I’m afraid they are talking through their rear-ends. Bollocks! What it is, dear judges who are genuflected to day in and day out, is a thinly disguised request for everyone to lie. To favour a person’s subjective sense of how they’d like the world to be over the way it is. To opt for some person’s or group’s desired state of affairs over what we know to be the actual state of affairs and to do so in the name of respect or politeness. But once we leave the dinner party setting and are talking about how government structures the state and citizen-government relations then politeness is of trifling concern compared to the truth.

Moreover, the flabbiness of this sort of ‘my feelings ought to trump mind-independent reality’ thinking is given away when we notice the sheer arbitrariness of how this identity politics new world order is all supposed to work. Put on blackface and say you identify as a black person (and let us assume this is as genuine as any other such self-identification) and no one much cares about your subjective feelings because you’ll be relentlessly attacked. US Senator Elizabeth Warren was pilloried for claiming to be native Indian when the facts showed she had almost zero such genes. Her desires counted for nothing.  In that setting the truth about the external, causal world is what matters. For what it’s worth, my bet is that a white man has a lot more in common with a black man than he does with a white woman – starting with life experiences and moving on through many, many aspects of life. Yet the forces of political correctness want to ignore mind-independent truths in one context (identifying as a woman) but not in the other (identifying as a black). The line-drawing, and whose subjective feelings are worth what, turn out to be arbitrary all the way down.

All of that is a long-winded way of saying that all of us should resist any judicial and governmental and university attempts to force us to swim in some Orwellian sea of Newspeak. At a dinner party we can, and mostly should, all be polite. And nice. But when the state is directly or indirectly involved and trying to force us to genuflect before patent falsehoods we should simply refuse. Consequences be damned!