As a result of left-wing lunacy and the complicity of spineless politicians who are too frightened to resist, every baby born in this country will come with a doctor’s warning: “Congratulations! By the look of it, you might have a healthy baby girl; you won’t know until she/he goes to university.”

The ABC took its left wing duty seriously today by broadcasting an American story that eulogised the exhilaration of using different hormones to live a transgender life. While history is awash with people who have lived these fantasies what is different today is that, with the assistance of academic research, they are viewed as just another part of the normal spectrum.

When the rights of gender-fluid identify swirled through the community in advance of the same-sex marriage plebiscite last year, it was not only embraced by most politicians despite its Marxist origins but was thrust into the heart of the school system by well-meaning educators.

In the rush to virtue-signal their tolerance, they casually overlooked the fact that there is a fundamental difference between children who are born with physical sex characteristics that are neither or both male or female and those who merely ‘identify’ as a different sex to their birth facts.

Yet, that difference is so profound that it demanded fundamentally different not the same political response. The former represents a medical problem for which there are some, but not many, medical outcomes that may or may not be satisfactory. The latter represents a self-informed opinion that is divorced from observable facts known to everyone else; the flat earth theory of sex. Despite its doubtful relation to reality, its elevation as deserving protection by human rights legislation is the triumph of fiction over fact.

Its perceived political significance is evident in the Commonwealth’s Guidelines on the Recognition of Sex and Gender, a 2015 manual that details the Commonwealth’s opinion on the subject. The Guidelines announces, with not so much as a blush, that ‘Gender is part of a person’s personal and social identity. It refers to the way a person feels, presents and is recognised within the community.’

However, the undisclosed author of the Commonwealth’s misguided compassion didn’t seem to know that the basic rule of grammar defines ‘sex’ as a distinction between living things, and ‘gender’ as a distinction between related nouns; that is, sex applies to living creatures but gender is a literary distinction applying to names or nouns.

There are only boys and girls. But male and female words (ignoring neuter non-living things). So why is gender used to refer to living things?

The short answer is that people like to pretend. In that frame of mind, you can reject the evidence of your senses and appear rational by adopting assumptions about reality that are too obscure for most to recognise. You ignore the facts available to everyone through their senses and assert new evidence invented in your mind.

Using that method, the evidence of the sexual distinction between men and women can be ignored and the literary distinction of gender in words can be imposed in its place. The distinction between fantasy and reality is blurred into one. Knowledge based on evidence is replaced by fantasy based on a literary distinction.

Viewed objectively, living such a fantasy would normally be considered a mental illness where objective facts are displaced by apparitions of the mind. It was once considered so. That diagnosis is rejected by academic theorists whose research is based on the opinions of people living the fantasy.

The real problem with the intellectual distortions associated with gender theory and the many related variants is that the distortions although advanced theoretically in the social sciences are broadcast into to the community by sympathetic interests where they spread like an ideological virus.

Debunking such theories before they spread was a possibility in the days when university education produced universal men and women through a liberal education who could hold novel ideas to a higher standard.

That project, however, was all but abandoned when the university became the multiversity and the study of man’s nature was replaced by positivistic social sciences whose method of enquiry denied them the ability to even begin to consider the most important human questions. Theories of gender emerged from the university without any attempt at critical refutation. The methodology itself precluded any attempted ascent from that cave.

It was not until attempts were made to introduce radical gender studies into the school system, that parental criticism was raised and sensing the political dynamic, politicians, too, objected. Parental common sense, unsullied by sociological method, alerted them to the danger of an ideology that masqueraded as instruction and to what was appropriate for the moral training of their own children. It was the ordinary citizen with a vision unclouded by methodology who saw the danger even as the most conservative of our politicians was agreeing to fund its introduction to the schools.

Where is the critical peer review which might have destroyed the assumptions and logic of the argument of gender ideology?

It is too easy even if it is accurate to say that gender ideologies derive from Karl Marx’s analysis of history and evolution. Marx’s theory asserted that economic forces had caused a sub-human animal to evolve into a creature which, with the introduction of communism, would change into the conscious animal, man. History was for Marx an immutable force of progress. But it is not sufficient to justify Marx’s radical equality in the communist state unless all differences, including the natural distinction between the sexes of men and women, are acquired.

If the distinction between the sexes was acquired, then what was thought to be fixed by our natures was not natural but conventional and would disappear with communism. Marx had rejected a fixed Nature and its corollary, natural right, in favour of history and evolution, of becoming and change.

It is that idea of changeability that the left has grasped and taken into the universities to fertilise their revolutionary theories. Any rejection of the status quo, whether the feminist demanding the right of abortion, the homosexual demanding the right to marry, the woman demanding to be called a man or the male demanding the right to be a woman and bear a child, is justified intellectually as an expression of the revolutionary process of history.

The idiocy of gender theory, however, is that it posits in each individual the right to identify themselves in any way they desire while denying the contrary physical evidence. Yet, by the same principle, the theory cannot deny to rest the right to identify those others as nature intended and, compliant with the revolutionary principle, to compel them to comply.

The problem society faces is how to refute these theories when the universities are unable to see the difference between fantasy and reality for the theories threaten liberal democracy itself. Perhaps we should pause to remind ourselves of what the university is and what it is missing with the paraphrased words of the man whose name is anathema to positivistic social scientists, Leo Strauss:

The crisis of the (university) has become concealed by a ritual which calls itself methodology or logic. This almost wilful blindness to the crisis of liberal democracy is part of that crisis. No wonder then that the new (social) – political – science has nothing to say against those who unhesitatingly prefer surrender, that is, the abandonment of liberal democracy.

Only a great fool would call the new social science diabolic: it has no attribute peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli’s teaching was graceful, subtle and colourful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless one may say that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.  

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