Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_Language-Rules-Article.mp3

Womaniacal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—another Democrat leader with compromised cognitive abilities and no moral principles—has womanaged to womangle her first day of the new congressional session.

She womandated that in order to make the U.S. House of Representatives Code of Official Conduct more inclusive, it will henceforth exclude references to the following: fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, husbands, wives, fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, stepfathers, stepmothers, stepsons, stepdaughters, stepbrothers, stepsisters, half -brothers, half-sisters, grandsons, or granddaughters, as well as all pronouns that correspond to immutable biological sex, like he, she, his, hers, him, her, himself, and herself.

Pelosi calls these changes “visionary.” Methinks she is a visionary womanqué.

No matter if all the persons affected by the banning of these words identify as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, or daughters. No matter if central to their authentic lives and happiness are their identities as constituted by and inseparable from their immutable biological sex. To Big Brother Sibling and his small-minded, power-ravenous Sister Sibling, Nancy Pelosi, using Big Government to eradicate public recognition of sexual dimorphism is all that matters.

Democrat science-deniers thrive on cancelling words, ideas, speech, and religious liberty (not to mention powerless humans in their mothers’ wombs). If satiating the lunatic “trans” cult, homosexual activists, and radical feminists gains science- and morality-denying Dems more power, who cares about language, ideas, liberty, or truth.

In my mind’s ear, I hear some Christians tsk-tsking my description of the “trans” cult as lunatic.  Those Christians have yet to explain how Christians can heed C.S. Lewis’ admonition to train up our children to feel hatred for ideas and actions that are worthy of hatred without using harsh language to describe evil. To use scriptural language, Nancy Pelosi and everyone else who accommodates the diktats of “trans” cultists, homosexual activists, and radical feminists are vipers.

I can hear some other conservatives—also known as living, marinating frogs—dismissing concerns and warnings about the scorched earth devastation of feminism, homonormativity, and “trans”-cultism, all of which conspire to undermine public recognition and respect for God’s created order.

These are the same conservatives who now use the word “gay” instead of homosexual.

These are the same conservatives who failed to object when pro-homosexual resources were introduced to their children in government schools through sex ed, health classes, theater classes, English classes, and social studies classes.

These are the same conservatives who attend same-sex faux weddings and call their actions “loving.”

These are the same conservatives who welcome homosexual activists into the Big Circus Tent of the Republican Party—homosexual activists who are committed to killing the party from within like a coronavirus.

These are the same conservatives who do nothing when their local public libraries invite drag queens—that is, perverted adult men—to read stories to toddlers.

These are the same conservatives who know and care little that there is a public health crisis among adolescent girls and young women whose hearts and minds are being poisoned by the social contagion of “trans”-cultism.

And these are the same conservatives who have little understanding of the enormity of the threat posed to our essential First Amendment rights by the Equality Act.

Just after Pelosi announced the exclusion of “gendered” language from the House Code of Official Conduct, U.S. womentally unhinged Representative Emmanuel Cleaver opened the 117^th Session of Congress with a prayer that ended with these words:

We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and ‘God’ known by many names by many different faiths. Amen and awoman.

Yes, a former pastor with a Master of Divinity degree actually said those embarrassing words.

Cleaver is apparently so steeped in intersectional identity politics and beholden to the culturally powerful groups that seek to blur the lines between sexes, he ignored that “amen” is not a gendered word. He’s willing to trade the Word of God–whom he claims to serve–for a mess of rancid political pottage.

If we’re going to invent neologisms in a futile attempt to recreate a world in the image of intersectionalist ideologues, I’ve got some:

• Womendicants: women who live off the government
• Womendacious: women who lie
• Womengelian: women who order the deaths of or experimentation on their children

Pastor and theologian Douglas Wilson tweeted a response to Cleaver’s peculiar prayer closing that aptly describes how many feel on the first week of the new congressional session:

The opening prayer for the 117^th Congress concluded with “amen” and “awomen,” and I regret to inform you that all my patience with the 117^th Congress, at the conclusion of their opening prayer, was exhausted.

I suspect many right-thinking Americans are also feeling something more intense than exhaustion.

There’s another possibility: Maybe Cleaver wasn’t saying “amen” as in “so be it.” Maybe he was using the prefix “a” attached to men and women, meaning “not men” and “not women.” Yeah, that makes more sense.

Unless there’s a revival, America is doomed by the rebellion, cowardice, and ignorance of leaders elected by rebellious, cowardly, and ignorant people.

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings. … [T]he special function of certain Newspeak words. … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.” George Orwell, 1984

“For whatever other reasons the language rules may have been devised, they proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

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The Illinois General Assembly is considering SB 2762, commonly called the “REACH Act.” It requires that public schools provide a “medically accurate” sex education, including “health-positive instruction on diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.”^[1]

This article concentrates on one aspect of this, the concept that gender is mutable, and not tied to a person’s biological sex. Once you see how that small thing is so medically inaccurate, you can imagine how the rest of the bill is similarly self-defeating.

Defining “gender”

Until recently, what did Americans mean when we used the word “gender?” Here is a clue from an online dictionary that deals with the meaning and usage of words (etymology):

gender (n.)

c. 1300, “kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits,” from Old French gendre, genre “kind, species; character; gender” …

The “male-or-female sex” sense is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for “sex of a human being,” in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous.^[2]

That is, gender is another word for describing male and female behavior, clothing, roles, etc. There is a 1:1 correspondence between sex and gender.

There is a recent push to redefine what gender means. You see this in modern dictionaries, which now add clauses about how gender has meanings “based on the individual’s personal awareness or identity.”^[3] But do these dictionary changes reflect our actual use of the word? Or is this just another way to force us into accepting an expanded meaning, along with the behaviors that it implies?

Separating gender from sex is a recent invention

In practical use, “gender” helps describe the differences between men and women.

A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their biological or perceived sex.^[4]

That is, “gender role” and “sex role” are equivalent, are linguistically matched. So how did we go from “gender corresponds to sex” to “gender has no association with sex?” This appears to have been caused by the writings of the researcher John Money.^[5]

According to Money’s theory, all children are born essentially psychosexually neutral at birth, and thus surgeons can make any child any gender as long as the sexual anatomy can be made reasonably believable. For this reason, it did not matter how the genitalia looked originally, according to Money, because you could always teach gender or sex roles.^[6]

He claimed that a person’s sexual identity and beliefs can be taught, and can be chosen. In other words, someone can effectively be a man or woman – the gender role – without biologically being so. This assertion provides scientific cover for later advocates, who push the concept of “gender fluidity” we’re asking students to learn and believe.

But was Money being honest with his research and results? Or did it merely support ideas he already held? Consider his works:

• He browbeat the parents of twin boys to raise one of them as a girl, and to even get surgeries to enhance that boy’s female appearance. Money told everyone that this “John/Joan” experiment was a great success, and it brought him fame. In fact, the experiment was a great failure for all involved.^[7]

• He endorsed incest^[8] and pedophilia ^[9] as normal and acceptable behaviors.

• He claimed that heterosexuality is a societal thing, a superficial, ideological concept.^[10]

With so much advocacy in his writings and sayings, it is hard to believe that his work is scientific. Those who build upon it also lack scientific rigor, for they build upon a foundation of sand. The research cannot be taken at face value.

How many genders are there?

To provide medically accurate lessons on sex education, we need to be able to say how many genders there actually are, and how to tell them apart. For each gender, we need to know what behaviors to look for, what might offend someone of that gender, and so on. There is no sense to being ignorant of those genders we expect our students to study and respect.

Gareth Icke writes that, according to Tumbler, there are 112 genders – so far!^[11] For example:

• Abimegender: a gender that is profound, deep, and infinite; meant to resemble when one mirror is reflecting into another mirror creating an infinite paradox.

• Adamasgender: a gender which refuses to be categorized.

• Anongender: a gender that is unknown to both yourself and others.

• Glimragender: a faintly shining, wavering gender.

Are there really 112 distinct genders? For example, maybe “Abimegender” is merely a trivial variant of Admasgender? But in reality, none of this has been researched. It’s all just fad terms, with more being invented daily.

A Canadian teen advice site says:

Gender identity is how a person feels and who they know them self to be when it comes to their gender. … Gender can be complex and people are defining themselves in new and different ways as we gain a deeper understanding of identities. Some terms may mean different things to different people.^[12]

So not only are genders being continually created, their advocates don’t even agree what they mean. The traditional use of gender describes the differences between men and women. The expanded use of gender describes nothing. It has as much substance as a name tag.

How many genders are there really? Here is a hint. When someone sees a doctor for gender reassignment surgery, how many choices of gender can they choose from?

Many genders? That’s not medically accurate

There is no solid science in “gender has no association with sex.” Yet we are asked to accept this as truth, and to require our school students to learn it as though it were medically accurate.

This is enough cause to oppose the REACH Act (SB 2762). Call your state senator and give him or her the what for.

Endnotes

1. Full text of SB2762, 101^st General Assembly, http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=10100SB2762sam001&GA=101&SessionId=108&DocTypeId=SB&LegID=123756&DocNum=2762&GAID=15&Session= ↑
2. Gender, Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender ↑
3. Gender, Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gender ↑
4. Gender Role, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_role ↑
5. John Money, Gender Wiki, https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/John_Money ↑
6. John Money, Sexuality, Gender, and the Body, September 21, 2010, https://genderbodyreligion.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/john-money/ ↑
7. The True Story of John / Joan, HealthyPlace, https://www.healthyplace.com/gender/inside-intersexuality/the-true-story-of-john-joanCopied from Colapinto, John, John / Joan, Rolling Stone, December 11, 1997 ↑
8. Ibid.“A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.” ↑
9. Ibid.“If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who’s intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.” ↑
10. John Money, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_MoneyThe exact quote comes from the now off-line PAIDIKA: The Journal of Paedophilia, Spring 1991, vol. 2, no. 3, p. 5. ↑
11. Icke, Gareth, How Many Genders Are There In 2019?, David Icke (blog), August 11, 2019, https://www.davidicke.com/article/549278/many-genders-2019 ↑
12. Gender Identity, Teen Talk, https://teentalk.ca/learn-about/gender-identity/ ↑

This article was originally published at FixThisCulture.com.

If you haven’t been called it yet, surely, you’ve heard it: the ubiquitous epithet “transphobe.” It’s the evil spawn of “homophobe.” I don’t mean those accused of being “transphobes” are evil spawns of “homophobes.” I mean the term “transphobe” is the evil spawn of the spurious term “homophobe.”

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, British writer “Juliet” Jacques, a 38-year-old man who pretends to be a woman, claims “Transphobia … is a respectable bigotry in Britain, shared by parts of the left as well as the right.”

Jacques claims that there are two virulent strains of “transphobia”: One strain “rejects … the idea that gender might not be determined only by biological traits identifiable at birth,” and the other strain, “argues that trans women’s [i.e., biological men’s] requests for gender recognition are incompatible with cis women’s [i.e., normal women’s] rights to single-sex spaces.” Jacques claims that both strains “rely on the conceit that trans and nonbinary people should not determine their own gender identities.”

Translated from “trans”-tortured Newspeak into plain English, Jacques is describing two groups of people still tethered to reality. The first group rejects the idea that biological sex is subordinate to subjective feelings about sex in importance and in how it’s treated in society. The second group believes women have a right to private spaces free from the presence of biological men.

For those not fluent in Newspeak, “gender identity” refers to the subjective internal (or is it infernal?) feelings of reality-untethered people about their maleness, femaleness, both, or neither. Jacques errs when claiming that both reality-tethered groups believe “trans” and “nonbinary” people should not determine their own “gender identities.”

Generally speaking, reality-tethered, biocentric people have no opposition to the reality-untethered determining their own “gender identities.” The problem is the reality-untethered are demanding that society treat their subjective feelings as if they are more important than biological sex and accommodate their subjective feelings in radical ways that rob the reality-tethered of their right to privacy and free speech.

The reality-untethered are demanding that in shared spaces, their subjective feelings about maleness and femaleness supersede biological sex. Those who believe that spaces like locker rooms and activities like sports should correspond to biological sex are being denied their right to determine their sex identities. And the reality-untethered bio-rejectors are demanding that others use language that denies biological reality. They’re demanding that others use language that affirms an imaginary worldview. They’re demanding that their “hurt feelings” determine how others must speak. While they demand that I respect their “reality,” they ignore that my reality includes not just me but everything in the world.

To advance a reality-untethered social and political universe requires the silencing of rational and moral arguments, and that, in turn, requires cultural oppression, known colloquially as bullying.

“Transphobe” is the term of bullying art used to shame and silence anyone who believes biological sex has meaning and that it is more important than subjective, internal feelings about one’s maleness, femaleness, both, or neither.

• A “transphobe” is anyone who feels it is a good thing for humans to identify as the biological sex they are and ever will be.
• A “transphobe” is anyone who believes that females are entitled to be free of the presence of biological males to whom they are unrelated by blood or marriage in places where they undress, shower, sleep, and engage in bodily functions. A “transphobe” is anyone who believes men are similarly entitled to be free of the presence of unrelated biological women in those same kinds of places.
• A “transphobe” is anyone who doesn’t want to have a romantic or erotic relationship with a person or persons of the same sex who pretend to be the other sex.
• A “transphobe” is anyone who believes cross-dressing is wrong.
• A “transphobe” is anyone who believes harm is done to children when they are allowed to cross-dress, adopt opposite-sex names, and be referred to by opposite-sex pronouns.
• A “transphobe” is anyone who believes the medical profession should not prescribe cross-sex hormones to anatomically and biochemically healthy persons to treat their disordered feelings.
• A “transphobe” is anyone who believes the medical profession should not lop off the healthy body parts of teens or adults as a way to treat disordered and often fluid feelings about their maleness or femaleness.
• A “transphobe” is anyone who believes that cross-dressing men should not be reading stories to or twerking in front of toddlers in public libraries.

The chief tactic of sexual anarchists to crush their ideological opponents is to attach the word (or forms of the word) “phobe” to any moral claim they, in their ignorance, detest. They detest the moral claims that homoerotic acts are immoral; degrade those engaged in them; and harm children, families, and society. So, anyone who makes these claims is called a “homophobe.”  Even if these claims are expressed out of love for individuals, children, families and society,  the “LGB” community calls those who express them “homophobes,” haters, and bigots because bullying works.

“Trans” cultists detest the claims that biological sex is profoundly meaningful; that private space-usage should correspond to biological sex; and that cross-dressing, cross-sex hormone-doping, and elective amputations of healthy body parts to treat immaterial feelings is harmful, so anyone who expresses these claims is called a “transphobe,” because bullying works.

While “LGB” and “T” activists and their collaborators claim to worship at the altar of inclusion, tolerance, and non-judgmentalism, and claim to loathe all shaming, marginalization, and taboos, they don’t.

They seek to shame, marginalize, and exclude anyone who doesn’t affirm their sexuality dogma.  They judge theologically orthodox Christians as sinners for rejecting sexual insanity. And they justify their judgmentalism by asserting that they have no obligation to “tolerate intolerance.”

What taboos will cultural regressives next seek to shame and eradicate? Polyamory/Sexual non-monogamy? Consensual adult incest “Genetic Sexual Attraction”? Pederasty and pedophilia “Minor Attraction”/intergenerational love? Bestiality Zoophilia?

Soon all those ignorant, hateful, exclusionary bigots who don’t understand that “love is love” will be called polyphobes, kinphobes, pedophobes, and zoophobes. “Shaming” polys, kin-lovers, child-lovers, teen-lovers, and animal-lovers will be deemed analogous to racism.

Next to arrive on the already defiled cultural scene will be activists for other even fringier paraphilias. Those who identify as sadists, masochists, infantilists, and voyeurs will claim that to live authentically requires no one disapprove of their peculiar habits. Normal people who yet have a moral compass and spine will be called sadi-phobes, maso-phobes, infanti-phobes, and voyeur-phobes.

(A word about voyeurs: If no offense has been committed by men who through cross-dressing, hormone-doping, and surgery are able to conceal their sex from women in women’s locker rooms, then surely no harm is committed by men who through technology are able to conceal their presence from and peep on women in women’s locker rooms. If deceiving women about the presence of men is hunky dory in the case of opposite-sex impersonators, then surely deceiving women about the presence of men is hunky dory in the case of voyeurs.)

Exclusion per se is not intrinsically bad, and inclusion per se is not intrinsically good. Disapproval per se is not intrinsically bad, and approval per se is not intrinsically good. Shame is not intrinsically bad, and shamelessness is not intrinsically good. The goodness or badness of exclusion, inclusion, disapproval, or approval depends on what is being excluded, included, disapproved, or approved.

Likewise, social taboos—renamed “phobias” by “progressives” and pagans when they enjoy the taboo acts—are not intrinsically bad. Every society has and needs taboos. Taboos are nothing more than volitional acts that society deems wrong and harmful. Neither “progressives” nor pagans seek to eradicate taboos, shame, exclusion, or marginalization. Rather, they seek to impose and enforce their views on who should be excluded or marginalized, and what should be deemed taboo and stigmatized.

No society will or should eradicate all taboos, stigmas, shame, or marginalization. Therefore, the questions every civilized or primitive society has to answer are, 1. On what basis will some members of society be marginalized, 2. What will marginalization look like, and 3. What volitional acts will be taboo and stigmatized.

The “trans” cult is a solipsistic cult in which the self determines—or imagines—the world, and nothing outside of or in conflict with this self-imagined world matters. This self-determined, imaginary world is also an anti-Christian world in which evil is deemed good and good evil. In this world, expressing biblical truth about sexuality is taboo, and theologically orthodox Christians will increasingly and brazenly be shamed and pushed to the margins of society where they will be denied their right to speak freely, assemble freely, and exercise freely their religion.

Don’t surrender to the morality-phobic monster that prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/The-LGB-and-T-Mobs-Unleash-the-Morality-Phobic-Monster_audio.mp3

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Months before I started alternating between Identity Politics and Paraphilias, incest was featured in one of my articles. At the end of it was this question: “How will society respond when those who practice incest start self-identifying as such and begin clamoring for their ‘rights’?” “Rights” in this context means, among other things, the right to get married, complete tolerance and acceptance by society and for their incestual relationships to be viewed as completely normal.

Earlier this month, the Daily Wire featured a post with this headline and lede:

LOVE WINS: Cosmo Pushes Incest
“This Is What It’s Like to Fall In Love With Your Brother”

Recently, the Illinois Family Institute’s David E. Smith said that “this is no longer your father’s culture war.” Rather, he said, it has “evolved into a debate over identity politics and even common-sense biology. That’s a war we can win.”

Joshua Mitchell, a professor at Georgetown University, backs up Dave’s optimism in a 3500-word article at City Journal titled “The Identity-Politics Death Grip.” He makes many good points – here are just a few excerpts:

Normal politics—liberal politics, classically understood—involves speech, argument, and persuasion, followed by voting on ideas or proposals that can be overturned in the next election cycle. Normal politics presumes that we can rise far enough above our small-group attributes—our race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion—and that we can arrive at a political arrangement that works well enough for us to live together as part of a larger polity until the next election, when we commence the process again. But for the Democrats, absolute certainty has prevailed over normal politics—and the certainty, at bottom, rests on a single idea: identity politics.

Identity politics rejects the model of traditional give-and-take politics, presupposing instead that the most important thing about us is that we are white, black, male, female, straight, gay, and so on. Within the identity-politics world, we do not need to give reasons—identity is its own reason and justification. Because identity politics supposes that we are our identities, politics does not consist in the speech, argument, and persuasion of normal politics but instead, in the calculation of resource redistribution based on identity—what in Democratic parlance is called “social justice.”

The irony of identity politics is that it does not see itself as political; it supposes that we live in a post-political age, that social justice can be managed by the state, and that those who oppose identity politics are the ones “being political.” What speech does attend this post-political age consists in shaming those who do not accept the idea of identity politics—as on our college campuses. In the 1960s, college students across the country fought so that repressed ideas would receive a fair hearing. These days, college students fight to repress all ideas except one: identity politics.

“Thoughtful Democrats see that identity politics is a dead end,” Mitchell writes, but the “militants are hunkered down.” Hence, he adds, “the Democratic Party is on life support.”

That doesn’t sound like victory in the culture war to me. Later in the article Mitchell writes:

It may be that the only way that the Democratic Party can rise, Lazarus-like, from its deathbed is if African-Americans call out identity politics as the disaster that it has been—for them and for the country. If the party cannot find a cure for its confusion, it will expire in the paroxysm that identity politics produces.

David Smith also said that today, if you don’t bow to the reality of 63 genders “you’re on the wrong side of history. Yes, really, 63 – Google it.”

If you want to dismiss that kind of foolishness as just plain silly, you might want to read another City Journal article, this one by Seth Barron:

What’s in a Pronoun?
An awful lot, say transgender activists.

The word gender or transgender or gender-free (etc.) shows up 34 times. I challenge you to read it without laughing or rolling your eyes. I’ll close this post with a paragraph from Seth Barron’s article:

A new California law, the Gender Recognition Act, allows people to designate their gender as “nonbinary”—meaning that they “may or may not identify as transgender, may or may not have been born with intersex traits, may or may not use gender-neutral pronouns, and may or may not use more specific terms to describe their genders, such as agender, genderqueer, gender fluid, Two Spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant.” The Golden State has also required nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to “use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns after being clearly informed of the preferred name or pronouns.”

That’s why Dave Smith is right — this is a war we can win.

Up next: Our next paraphilia of the day.

The Left is working overtime to silence and/or marginalize conservative voices in America
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Written by Stella Morabito

As usual, tyranny comes disguised as “civil rights.”

The latest exhibit of this general rule is President Obama’s directive that seeks to force a transgender bathroom, locker room and dorm policy on the entire nation, starting with schoolchildren. Many of us are taken aback by this news, but we really shouldn’t be. The order is merely the latest incarnation of a long line of social engineering. The goal, as is always the case with such movements, is to remake humanity. What the people behind this latest version won’t tell you is that their project requires each and every one of us to deny our own humanity.

Let me explain.

The transgender movement has never been about “gender.” It’s all about sex. Sex is the real target. “Gender” is merely the politicized linguistic vehicle that facilitates a legal ban on sex distinctions. There aren’t a whole lot of dots to connect to uncover the logic of where this leads: if you abolish sex distinctions in law, you can abolish state recognition of biological family ties, and the state can regulate personal relationships and consolidate power as never before.

Let’s Review Reality

Physical reality exists independent of “gender identity non-discrimination” law—or any man-made law. Laws have no power to make reality go away, but they can change how people behave in response to reality. They can enforce disregard for reality through speech protocols, social and economic pressures, invasions of privacy, and thought policing. And that is what the effect of Obama’s executive order is all about.

It will serve to outlaw speech that identifies males as males and females as females. At the moment, it may not seem that way, since we see people striving to pass as one specific sex or the other. But, trust me, we’re all being forced to “transition” into conformity of thought. In New York, you can now be fined if you don’t re-engineer your speech (and thoughts) to align with new and ever-changing pronoun protocols.

We’re being pushed to “evolve” rapidly from laws that seem to allow male-female distinctions to laws that will categorically reject those distinctions in the not-too-distant future. Federal forms are already reflecting these changes by erasing sexed terms such as “mother” and “father.” And at every turn, we’re seeing the specific term “sex” replaced with the meaningless, ambiguous term “gender.”

This puts us on the path to banning recognition of the reality that every single human being exists through the union of one male and one female. There are no exceptions to this reality. You exist as the union of the two opposites through whom you were created.

So the administration’s action is an order for a somewhat suicidal type of behavior modification: it attempts to make us deny the reality of our humanity. In a real sense, this amounts to a denial of our very existence. All such denials of reality require heavy-handed censorship. We have already seen the governors of South Dakota and Georgia fold in the face of threats that federal funding would be withheld and big businesses would withdraw from the states if they attempted to enforce single-sex restrooms.

Without Sex, There Are No Families

What will happen when all of society is sexless in both language and law? If the law does not recognize your body as physically male or female—applying only the word “gender” to your internal, self-reported self-perception—does the law even recognize your body? Every single cell of you has either “male” or “female” written into its DNA, but the law refuses to recognize such categories. Such laws will only recognize an infinite, immeasurable “gender spectrum,” your place on which is determined only by your mind. So what exactly are you after the law has de-sexed you? In what sense is your body a legal entity?

And what happens to your familial relationships after the law has de-sexed you? Are they legally recognized? I don’t see how they could be. Certainly not by default, certainly not by the recognition that each child comes through the union of two opposite-sex parents.

In a society de-sexed by law, would the state recognize your relationship as a husband or a wife? Mother or father? Daughter or son? Those are all sexed terms. A system that does not recognize the existence of male and female would be free to ignore the parentage of any child. You might be recognized as your child’s “legal guardian,” but only if the state agrees to that. Anybody can be a guardian to your child if the state decides it’s in the child’s “best interest.” In this vision, there is nothing to prevent the state from severing the mother-child bond at will.

In such a scenario, the state controls all personal relationships right at their source: the biological family. The abolition of family autonomy would be complete, because the biological family would cease to be a default arrangement. The “family” would be whatever the state allows it to be. Again, in the de-sexed world of gender politics, all personal relationships end up controlled and regulated by the state.

Martha Fineman, a gender legal theorist, touched on this in her 2004 book The Autonomy Myth. In it, she argues for the abolition of state-recognized marriage because it allows for family privacy, writing that “Once the institutional protection [is] removed, behavior would be judged by standards established to regulate interactions among all members of society” (emphasis added).

Gender ideology is an effective statist tool. Cultural Marxists use it to corrupt language and sow confusion, especially among children. It paves the way for the removal of the institutional protections for freedom of association and family privacy that stand in the way of “regulating interactions among all members of society.”

How Could a Society Reject Its Own Freedom?

Getting free people to reject freedom may seem a tall order. How, you might ask, could people ever be convinced to let go of their families and consent to such a dystopian social structure? How do you get public opinion on board with an agenda that leads them to deny the reality of their own humanity?

There are lots of pieces to this puzzle, including the erosion of social trust, the breakdown of family, social polarization, and growing ignorance of history. But the groundwork has been laid over a long period of time.

First, virtually all outlets of communication had to be on board—Hollywood, academia, the media. Check. All medical personnel, particularly mental health personnel, had to be “educated” to comply with the transgender program or risk losing their licenses. Check. The educational establishment had to imbue schoolchildren with the ideology. Check. Large corporations had to get on board as stakeholders and enforcers. Check. And, of course, the push to legally de-sex society had to be embedded—Trojan Horse style—within a slightly less alien idea, with the slick slogan “marriage equality.” Check. Churches had to be brought on board so that even religion became a conduit for anti-truth. Check. Social, emotional, and economic pressures had to be established to censure anyone who dared to question the wisdom of it all. Check. Any such person had to be labeled a bigot, a hater, and a non-person. Checkmate.

At this point, the most primal and universal of human fears comes into play: the fear of being socially rejected. Self-censorship takes off. People start falsifying what they believe, until they eventually don’t even know what they believe anymore. Nobody can talk openly to one another. In the end, it’s as though we are each being marched into a separate solitary confinement cell. That’s what happens when free association takes a hit, when the state severs particular relationships in the name of a collective togetherness. Then, when we can’t verify reality with one another anymore—because we are so afraid of being ostracized—we end up living in an age of mass delusion.

The only way out is to affirm reality. We must reclaim our full humanity. Let’s start by reinjecting our language with one very good word that points to reality: sex. Yes, let’s revive the word “sex,” and use it generously whenever referring to the biological reality of our physical nature. (And spiritual nature too.) At the same time, let’s refuse—always—to use the word “gender” when we mean sex. It’s a poisoned and weaponized word that has been used to legally de-sex and thus dehumanize us all. We must work together to resist its deceptions.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist and blogs about relationships, power, and freedom at stellamorabito.net. Article originally published at PublicDiscourse.com.

Written by John Hayward

Welcome to life in totalitarian America, where even going to the bathroom and identifying the sex of an adult have now become intensely political acts.

Totalitarianism is about the politicization of everything, and once people’s careers can be destroyed by the New Bathroom Order if they publicly object to the once-bizarre idea of men in the ladies’ room–we’re there. Ask the now-unemployed Curt Schilling.

Totalitarianism is about using force to gain political goals. You can’t get more coercive than forcing the vast majority of people to endorse the utterly bizarre just to accommodate the allegedly hurt feelings of an almost undetectably small percentage of the population. So for the sake of each transgendered person’s hurt feelings, two thousand ordinary folk must be forced to ignore what their eyes and hearts tell them … and be publicly slandered as quasi-racist bigots if they murmur any objection.

Moreover, Americans have already solved the problem: They just politely ignore the fact that public bathrooms are quietly used by transsexuals–both those who look like the other sex and those who really don’t look like the other sex. That decent-minded, live-and-let-live compromise means Americans don’t have to pretend that men are women, and they can call the police if they feel threatened, for example, when a transsexual wants to use a changing room in a school.

But the progressives’ hostility to Americans’ civic compromises was always an element of the gay marriage crusade, as well. It was clear that the amount of coercive force unleashed upon society to make gay marriage work was far, far greater than the coercion necessary to allow civil unions to quietly operate alongside normal marriage. Sure enough, in the blink of an eye, we went from soft-focus “Love Wins” to the nation’s judges’ gaveling out legal threats: “Bake that cake, or lose your entire business.”

As my old colleague Erick Erickson put it, “You Will Be Made to Care” amid an ever-increasing level of coercion, strife, and bitterness. You will now be made to care about men who claim they “identify” as women, while pushing their way past you and into public restrooms that were once the preserve of wives, mothers, girlfriends, and daughters.

It’s going to take a great deal of money, manpower, and regulation to get the New Bathroom Order up and running.

Remodeling public restroom facilities to create more individual, lockable, unisex rooms is one way to reduce the new humiliation, but it would be very expensive.

We’ll probably need some kind of Ministry of the Crapper, where bureaucrats and judges can separate perverts and goofballs and award official-transgender permits to “authentic” transgendered and gender-confused individuals. A great deal of taxpayer money will be spent, and many new rules will be written by many well-paid functionaries. So what’s not to like, for those of a totalitarian bent?

Better still–for the totalitarians–the level of animosity in society will keep growing, as well. A populace stressed out by paranoia and angry accusations of bigotry will be less likely to cooperate, compete, and live in harmony. Instead of local civic cooperation, they’ll resort to government and police when they have to deal with the next dispute that once could be resolved quietly by a healthy civic society. The politicization of everything naturally leads to the enforcement of everything. Debates become bitter because the stakes are higher, and we cannot simply agree to disagree.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple made this point in a 2005 interview when he described political correctness as “communism writ small.”

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better,” Dalrymple said, adding:

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Eleven years ahead of the game, Dalrymple provided the perfect description of the ridiculous Bathroom Wars, in which the majority is commanded to open wide and swallow the utterly ludicrous idea of letting men-women barge into women’s restrooms, on the vanishingly small chance that a transgendered individual might not be able to find a suitable private stall. It’s so insane that it caught normal people by surprise; they thought it was a joke, until Bruce Springsteen canceled that concert they bought tickets to.

The real game here is to break the will of those ordinary people so they won’t resist even more social engineering.

It’s like the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Captain Jean-Luc Picard is tortured by an alien interrogator, who says he wants only a simple, trivial concession from his prisoner: He wants Picard to look at a bank of four lights, and say that he sees five.  As Dalrymple warned, and Picard understood, that small concession would break his will and open the floodgates to many others.

Those of more advanced years might remember a similar dynamic at play in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, where the seemingly trivial concession involved a captive spy explaining why he quit his job–an answer he refused to give, no matter how many bizarre scenarios were constructed to break his will.

We’re all The Prisoner now, which is basically what McGoohan’s show was warning about, decades ago. Instead of killer beach balls, the enforcement system consists of equally faceless, thoughtless, relentless Twitter social-justice flash mobs.

The progressives’ goal is to humiliate and marginalize the majority—to make normal people feel abnormal, to be alone, to be afraid to dissent from what appears to be an overwhelming, media-magnified, Google-approved, Hollywood-polished, Obama-confirmed, irresistible consensus. As any competent military strategist can tell you, numbers count for less than morale. A demoralized majority can be subjugated by an activist minority when it refuses to fight.

That’s why every new social-engineering crusade is framed as an attack on the moral stature of dissenters.

You’re not insisting on your constitutionally guaranteed religious liberties; you’re “anti-gay.” You’re not saying men don’t belong in the women’s room; you’re “targeting the LGBT community.” You’re not exercising your moral prerogative to refuse to fund abortion; you’re “denying women access to birth control.”

In each case, the dissenter is plainly told up front that he cannot hold his sincere opinion without him also attacking and injuring innocent people. Dissent is dangerous is selfish is criminal. What is the proper name for a political system in which dissent is criminal?

It’s no coincidence the Bathroom Wars are phrased as a struggle over “identity” because identity is the fulcrum of natural order versus totalitarian politics. Certainly, we can all agree that some aspects of our identity are subject to revision–ours to define as we please, although it’s sometimes harder than we bargain for. But some aspects of identity are physical, biological reality.

The totalitarian mindset denies that scientific reality, and insists biology can be overridden by political will–rather like the way totalitarian economic plans assume the laws of supply and demand can be revised by political fiat.

Much of left-wing social engineering is a war between politics and biology, such as the biological truths that children are best raised by their married parents, or that men and women are different. The Left promises to overrule those verdicts of Creation through compulsive force, in a grotesque inversion of the “natural law” ideal, which holds the lightest and most just burden of law flows in accordance with human nature.

Why read academic papers about the Left’s war against identity when you can watch it hilariously demonstrated by the humiliated inmates at a university? Why shouldn’t a white guy of average stature be able to “identify” as a 6’5” Chinese woman?

“It shouldn’t be hard to tell a 5’9” white guy that he’s not a 6’5” Chinese woman, but clearly, it is. Why? What does that say about our culture? And what does that say about our ability to answer questions that actually are difficult?” Joseph Backholm asks at the end of his video.

I can answer that last question: It’s impossible to grapple with difficult questions when your character has been turned to tapioca by liberals, and you lack the courage to reason your way through the most obvious questions.

This has very much been done by design–because it produces a wave of young students and professionals who can be more easily programmed with political assertions that override objective truth.

Backholm’s masquerade as a 6’5” Chinese woman seems like a harmless lark … but if he pushed the issue and really insisted on it, every hour of his life, it would be necessary to use a great deal of compulsive force against the rest of society, to make people ignore the evidence of their own eyes, and to believe his imaginary height, race, and sex.

Most pertinently, you’d have to force normal women, and the men outside who love and protect them, to silently accept his presence in the ladies’ room.

That’s why progressive totalitarians humiliate, destroy, and reassemble people’s character–now known as their identity–to gain their victory.

To make progressives appear sane, all the world must be driven mad; to make them appear noble, all the world must be humiliated by them and their fellow progressives.

Originally published at Breitbart.com.