By Gary Powell
1 January 2023. 9.00pm
The gender lobby insists on a complete redefinition of core language. This subversion of language is also buttressed by a subversion of logic. If the identity politics totalitarians prevail, the disastrous paradigm of “might is right” will become the new unspoken foundation for western values.
Without the rainbow-coloured coat-tails of the historical male gay rights movement to jump onto, the gender division of the West’s identity politics charade would have failed to gain traction. However, the historical gay rights movement, initially fuelled by courage as well as by compassion for our fellow same-sex-attracted people, managed to lose its way over the years in a vortex of commercially-fuelled, devil-take-the-hindmost hedonism and nihilism, losing its important boundaries in the process. It was this loss of boundaries – this loss of a sense of appropriate limits and of responsibilities to people in their own community as well as to the wider community – that made it so ripe for colonisation by a gender lobby that was going to turn the gay rights clock back by decades.
(I)n order for the gender lobby to get what it wants, it needs to undermine the whole concept of biological sex […]
Gender ideology asserts that a person has an inner sense of being male or female – something it refers to as “gender” – and claims that, for some people, their “gender” will be different from their biological sex. Well, that’s how the theory is supposed to go: but in order for the gender lobby to get what it wants, it needs to undermine the whole concept of biological sex, and redefine the terms “male” and “female”, “boy” and “girl”, “man” and “woman” to be determined only by a person’s subjective perception of “gender”, and for the facticity of dimorphic biological sex to become erased out of existence for this purpose. Which is why gender activists and their corporate acolytes refer to babies being “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth”.
It goes without saying that humans are observed to be one sex or the other at birth, and that there is no question of anyone legitimately “assigning” any description other than that which is readily observed and scientifically verifiable. (Intersex people are also either genetically male or female.) What the gender activists are attempting is a complete redefinition of the words “male/boy/man” and “female/girl/woman”, so that the traditional, historical, and globally-recognised biological basis for the definition of these words is jettisoned for a completely new definition that bears no relation to the established and settled meanings of those words in the verbal community.
This absurd and intellectually masturbatory self-indulgence has emerged from woke, left-wing, middle-class elites in university departments masticating all sense and meaning out of the common-sense propositions on which our civilisation and ability to function as an advanced society are based, and doing so for cash and prestige. One thing is for certain, though: working-class communities across the western world – across the globe – will never buy into this and will never allow themselves to be bullied into pretending they believe post-modernist claptrap. And when working-class parents begin to see the harm that is being inflicted on their pre-homosexual, high-functioning autistic, or simply gender-non-conforming children, they will fight back with a vengeance against the brainwashing media, corporations, politicians, schools, and government departments that are peddling this toxic ideology to the impressionable and vulnerable young.
What has become clear from considering the assertions of transgender-identified people, is that their sense of “gender” is informed by the male/female stereotypes that were so strongly reinforced only a few decades ago. Many of us have painful memories of punishing words from narrow-minded adults, delivered to us in our childhood when we failed to conform to sex stereotype norms. I recall, when I was ten years old, a teacher reprimanding me in front of the whole class for spending my time playing with girls during breaks, declaring that I should “come to school in a dress if I want to play with the girls”. At the age of five I was a page boy at my sister’s wedding, and I recall an unkind uncle mocking me for the frilly white silk shirt that was part of my costume, telling me that I “looked like a girl”. These were painful experiences for a young child, and it is galling to see a constituency of self-described progressives now aiming to elevate sexual stereotypes to such a position of primacy that gender-non-conforming children today even risk getting dispatched to the puberty-blocker clinic.
Language, truth, and logic are the very tools by which oppressed groups come to win their fundamental civil rights, and to defend them once they are won. They are the very foundations of justice and of moral insights and campaigns.
The gender lobby is attempting to effect a wholesale attack on language, truth, and logic. The danger represented by this movement cannot be overstated. Language, truth, and logic are the very tools by which oppressed groups come to win their fundamental civil rights, and to defend them once they are won. They are the very foundations of justice and of moral insights and campaigns. They are the essentials for every scientific and philosophical advancement made by humanity over thousands of years of experience, demonstration, and debate. They are the sine qua non of a free and just society, and the antidote to claims by Orwellian totalitarians that 2 + 2 = 5. If we fail to defend them, a future of nightmares is only a few steps away.
The gender lobby is so homophobic that it is also attempting, after colonising our movement, to redefine lesbian and gay people out of existence. Instead of being “same-sex attracted”, we are now described as “same-gender attracted”. Which means we lesbian and gay people are expected to pretend that we are not lesbian or gay after all: that lesbians are also sexually attracted to men who declare they identify as women, and that gay men are also sexually attracted to women who declare they are men. The result of this is that the words “gay” and “lesbian”, with their globally-understood meanings, are both now supposed to mean “bisexual”. But they do not mean “bisexual”, and they never will.
The right of lesbian and gay people to define ourselves as same-sex attracted, and to behave as exclusively same-sex attracted and describe ourselves as such, form the very foundation of our human rights as lesbian and gay people. The gender activists are trying to take that away from us and to force us to accept members of the opposite sex who declare (with whatever degree of integrity) that they “identify” as members of our sex, into our dating pool. This is disturbingly redolent of the insistence not so long ago that the “right man” would “cure” a woman of lesbianism, or the “right woman” a man of homosexuality.
Even in a hypothetical universe where there were gendered male/female/non-binary souls, if indeed such an idea can be framed in any meaningful way, no one would ever be able to know which one of the three they had.
There is no empirical evidence at all that the primordial human consciousness with which we emerge into this world is “gendered” in some way. Even in a hypothetical universe where there were gendered male/female/non-binary souls, if indeed such an idea can be framed in any meaningful way, no one would ever be able to know which one of the three they had. Introspection only ever allows access to experience of our own individual consciousness, so a biological male who claimed he had a female consciousness would also have had to have experienced introspectively a male ontology in order to know that he didn’t have the latter: something that would be logically impossible.
What is far from logically impossible is that he instead has the same fundamental consciousness as everyone else, but that he enjoys and feels comfortable presenting himself culturally according to traditional female stereotypes, or with the approximate physical appearance of a woman; or that he has identified as transgender (and therefore supposedly as heterosexual) in order to short-circuit the often harrowing process of coming to terms with being gay; or that, as a high-functioning autistic person, he has been sold a pig in a poke and encouraged to believe his feelings of alienation are attributable to a transgender identity that he needs to embrace. Or a number of other plausible explanations.
But we can no more assert that we have a consciousness of being a specific “internal gender”, than we can assert that, when we eat strawberries, they always taste to us like dragon fruit and not strawberries, if we have never eaten a dragon fruit, and if we cannot intuit what other people experience when they eat strawberries.
Logic is the antidote to identity politics, and that is why the woke post-modernist movement prefers veridical relativism to reason and verifiable empirical facts. (Until, of course, something happens to them personally in this empirical world that motivates them to accord to reality and logic the respect they deserve.) Once our verbal means of communication are undermined, together with the systems of logic that underpin our ability to make sound and accurate judgements, the outcome will be that views and laws will come to prevail not because they are true or just, but instead because they are asserted and pronounced by the powerful, the violent, the new establishment with vested interests in control and subjugation. This is a battle we cannot allow the gender totalitarians and their self-serving, morally-bankrupt enablers and cowardly lickspittles to win.
© 2023 Gary Powell
Gary Powell 