Today’s cantankerous debate over “what is a woman” seems pointless. After all, it is easily settled scientifically—XX vs. XY chromosome—and human anatomy is unambiguous. Even toddlers can distinguish between males and females, so why argue? Hard to imagine a less contentious dispute yet, as the recent controversy in the WNBA (and elsewhere) illustrates, reaffirming the self-evident reality of sexual identity invites potentially career-ending condemnation, even death threats.
This “what is a woman” controversy also applies to sexual nomenclature. One medical-based compilation lists 72 distinct genders, including the adman gender, defined as “a gender that is indefinable or indomitable. People identifying with this gender refuse to be categorized in any gender identity.” Some prefer “birthing person” versus “mother” and “chest-feeding” rather than breastfeeding, while a 2021 Harvard Medical school journal article explained the serious harm from “misgendering”—using the wrong pronoun for an individual who now identifies as a different sex will make them feel invalidated and unseen while likely promoting mental illness.
What drives this “what is a woman” controversy? The answer is that the Left intends to undermine people’s own judgements about reality, and when people no longer trust their own beliefs about what is real, the Left will substitute their Marxist ideology. This battle over defining “woman” is part of this redefinition of reality. Recall those 2020 TV news reports of burning cars, periodic gunfire, and looters smashing storefronts characterized as “mostly peaceful demonstrations. ” For some viewers, looting and fire-bombing was now “political protest” and thus constitutionally protected free speech. As Groucho Marx once supposedly quipped, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” The Left would like Americans to believe Groucho.
Getting people to deny reality is not as difficult as it might seem. In the famous Asch experiments the experimenters put an individual in a group and asked him to choose one of three lines of very different lengths that was closest in length to “a standard.” (One line was obviously identical to “the standard”).
Other than the subject in the study, all participants were in league with the experimenter and instructed to answer incorrectly, so the study was designed to see how many subjects followed the group’s undeniably incorrect judgment. Most resisted group pressure to offer the obviously wrong response but, about a third disregarded reality and concurred with the group’s blatantly erroneous judgement. When multiple opportunities for judgement were presented, about three-quarters occasionally defied reality. Solomon Asch, the experiment’s inventor, opined, “That intelligent, well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.”
Furthermore, with coercion, lies can more easily become “truth.” In Orwell’s novel, 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is tortured into believing that 2+2=5, just as he had already come to believe that War was Peace and Freedom was Slavery. To quote Orwell,
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? [Emphasis added.]
Orwell stressed the power of the modern state to make lies into truth, and today this power largely resides in the contemporary universities where professors can insist that someone with an XY chromosome, a beard, male testosterones levels and male genitalia, can be “a woman” by just announcing it. This is only the first step.
The door now opens to a parade of “don’t believe your lying eyes” brainwashing nonsense. Gullibility is the new norm. If men can have babies, then it is easy to accept that “race” does not exist either other than superficially, such as skin color, and that women are identical to men in their mathematical ability. And, to recall 1984’s “War is Peace,” students learn that diversity is our strength, so importing 260,000 Somalis must, by definition, strengthen our nation despite all contrary evidence. Particularly Orwellian is the slogan “silence is violence” whereby students on perfectly peaceful campuses feel physically threatened and thus demand measures such as speech codes to protect them.
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