Boys and girls
There are certain positions that people take that are so illogi- cal that you stop listening to whatever else they have to say on anything else. They have already signaled their intellectual un-seriousness and provided evidence of the capacity of the human mind to become deluded under the sway of ideological frenzy, usually of the woke variety.
The most obvious of those positions these days involves “gender/sex” (the left likes to blur the distinction, invariably unpersuasively); more precisely, the claim that gender is purely a matter of “identification” rather than biology. With a straight face and in earnest tone they assure us that someone with a penis is something other than a man and that we are obligated to go along with the pretense.
Such claims produce a “full-stop” because you realize there is no point in attempting to reason with someone who believes biology doesn’t matter and that when children are born they are something other than what they appear to be and have always been; which is a boy or girl (whatever they make seek to become later).
You sense that you have been lured into wasting your time because the person you are talking to could, if it suddenly became fashionable, just as easily tell us that the sun rotates around the Earth, the moon is made of green cheese, and we once fought a war to free ourselves from a Chinese emperor rather than a British king (or that that Chinese emperor is wearing luxurious clothes when he actually has none).
The idea that we become whatever we identify with means that tomorrow I can become an aardvark if I for some reason wanted to, and that everyone would have to refer to me as an aardvark thereafter.
As children many of us wanted to be Superman, but we assumed it might require more than simply laying the claim and expecting others to accept it (the “leap tall buildings in a single bound” part was especially challenging).
Under the sway of LGBT dogma, from which no loyal leftist would dare dissent, we have thus now been led into an increasingly bizarre and contradictory cul-de-sac regarding race and gender, one that gets the relationships precisely backwards.
Contrary to the left’s depiction, gender is an inherently immutable trait in the sense of being biologically based and identifiable at the moment of birth (and even before). There has never been a way to change this and children will continue to be born either male or female, regardless of whether some people wish it otherwise, or it gets recorded in that fashion on birth certificates.
At the same time the left defines gender as fluid and amorphous, it increasingly sees race as defining and immutable, as reflected in the underlying assumptions of critical race theory and attendant, non-falsifiable corollaries like “white privilege,” “systemic/structural racism,” and “unconscious bias.”
Evidence for race as a fluid, largely socially constructed concept can, however, be quickly generated by a thought experiment in which everyone on Earth was forced to enter into an interracial marriage and have the maximum number of possible children, Harrison Bergeron-style. The hunch is that with the passage of several generations, race as we know it (as a visible distinguishing characteristic) would have largely ceased to exist and therefore matter as an issue in public policy (which is why rising rates of intermarriage might present our best hope for making the race question vanish, or at least dramatically alter how we approach it).
In short, what the left sees as fluid (gender) is actually immutable and what it sees as immutable (race) is actually fluid. For the left, gender is interchangeable and thus irrelevant, race fixed and determinative.
This confusion becomes particularly visible and the generator of controversy when the issue becomes transgender women participating in women’s sports, including in places like the Olympics.
Perhaps the relevant observation here is that such controversies only seem to involve men who transitioned into women wanting to compete against women and never women who transitioned into men wanting to compete against men— this is helpful because of the extent to which it reveals how the competitive advantage works so often for the former and so seldom for the latter; hence the entirely justified claims of unfairness to women athletes.
Regarding which, University of Chicago political scientist Charles Lipson notes that “The best way to resolve this issue is to step back and ask yourself: Is there any compelling reason to hold separate competition for men and women in this particular sport? … If the answer is ‘Yes, there are strong reasons in this particular sport,’ then the same rationale answers the question, ‘Should transgender women compete against other women in this sport?’”
Put differently, “If there are good reasons for holding separate competitions at all, then transgender women should not compete against other women.”
To answer that question any other way is to effectively agitate for the elimination of women’s sports.
All of which is to say that being sensitive to those who suffer from gender dysphoria doesn’t require a broader suspension of reality, defined as acceptance of the importance of biology and the long-standing differences between men and women flowing from it.