A transgender woman has been crowned Miss Intercontinental New Zealand. But it’s 2020, so you just know there will be a twist to this story.

And, of course, there is. The beauty pageant winner is Filipino. 

All of which means that this year’s Miss Intercontinental New Zealand is a foreign-born, biological male.

Could there be a more fitting result in a post-truth world where nothing is ever as it seems?

The mandated response, as we all know, is to applaud and to tell each other how lucky we are to live in a world where people are so open-minded and accepting that literally anyone can be the most beautiful woman in the room, even a man.

But how are we to live with such absurdity?

We have resolved the contradiction by agreeing that if we all say in unison that a biological man who believes himself to be a woman is in fact a woman, then he is. Or rather, she is.

(As you can see, it takes practice. But with the help of woke media and LGBTQ+ activists who threaten to punish those who stray from the narrative, you can get the hang of it quickly enough)

And hey presto! Faster than a beauty queen can say “world peace”, the contradictions dissolve. 

Women can have a penis. Men can be pregnant. And 26-year-old transgendered woman Arielle Keil can be named Miss Intercontinental New Zealand, less than 12 months after reportedly paying surgeons $15,000 to create her breasts and vagina.

Author Stephen King tweeted in July: “I believe trans women are women. I do not believe that hate speech and shaming speech are acceptable. Those things are the enemy of rational discourse. Treat even those with whom you disagree with the dignity you expect yourself.”

Putting aside the fact that King wrote “trans women are women” and “rational discourse” in the same tweet; and ignoring King’s claim that stating biological facts now constitutes hate speech, the fiction writer’s aim is laudable.

Decent people wish only happiness for transgendered people such as Arielle Keil who, reportedly, has led a difficult life.

Arielle, who was born as a boy named Andrew, claims to have been bullied throughout childhood and thrown out of home when she told her parents she wanted to become a woman. 

She says she battled depression and that she had often wanted to take her own life.

Thank God she did not. Keil has now reconciled with her father and is studying fashion design in Auckland. She presents as a thoughtful and intelligent person.

But redefining reality in order to make people feel better about themselves is neither kind nor sustainable. 

Tell a plump woman that she does not look fat in that dress and no harm is done. But tell a man that if he believes himself to be a woman then he is, and you create all sorts of unintended consequences.

Insisting that biological men can become women by changing their pronoun is certainly not kind to women who are stripped of their dignity in the verbal sleight of hand.

Such play-acting reduces women to a mere costume; a thought in a man’s head. Surely this – not glancing at one’s watch while a woman speaks, as former prime minister Tony Abbott once did – is real misogyny. 

Trans activists complain that to deny trans women are real women is to cruelly deny their existence as people. This is silly. To say Arielle Keil is not a woman does not deny her existence any more than saying Rachel Dolezal is not African American denies that Rachel Dolezal exists.

But it should seem rather obvious that to say trans women are women risks disappearing women – or, as CNN like to call them so as to be more trans-inclusive, “people with a cervix”.

See what I mean?

And spare a thought for the Miss Intercontinental New Zealand runner up.

If she had spent thousands of dollars on plastic surgery in an effort to look more womanly, she would have been derided as “fake”. But when a biological man like Arielle Keil spends thousands of dollars on plastic surgery so as to look more womanly, he is said to be beautiful.

And if you disagree you’re a bigot. That’s peak male privilege right there.

Life is hard and some people struggle greatly, for reasons the rest of us find difficult to comprehend.

We owe it to each other to be as kind and as compassionate as we possibly can. But raging against reality to create a world in which charity for our fellow man (or woman) completely overwhelms clarity about who men (or women) actually are is not the way to do it.