[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Did anyone ever really believe that men could become women? ‘Tipping Point’ author Malcolm Gladwell helped answer that question when he recently apologized for publicly asserting that men could change sex and fairly compete against women in sports because he was “cowed”.
No one bothered to follow up with the more interesting question, ‘What is Malcolm still too cowed to say in public’? It’s a question that also ought to be addressed to the various public figures, politicians, intellectuals and talkers, who have recanted the transgender heresy.
We know that they claimed to believe in one obviously wrong thing because of some combination of social pressure, manufactured consensus and intellectual incoherence.
What else do they hypocritically assert in public while privately doubting?
The intellectual crisis that led to Gladwell publicly asserting something that a small child, never mind a respected thinker, knew was wrong has its roots in the dual collapse of the western mind. Every preexisting moral and rational system, whether the Judeo-Christian ethos or the scientific method, is being dismantled as reactionary and is in the process of being replaced with the moral imperative of a revolutionary power shift from the oppressed to the oppressors.
This permanent state of moral emergency may not be questioned and its specific assertions are not subject to any of the religious or rational tests that once provided people with a consistent worldview based around clear principles rather than hysterical assertions that the crisis of the moment, ‘trans kids’, global warming, police shootings, Gaza or any of a grab bag of causes, is too grave to subject it to the rules of evidence in a search for the actual truth.
The Left claims that its various ideological flavors are rational and scientific, but they are nothing of the kind, instead they use ideology to pick and choose their science. That was why the Soviet Union could champion Lysenkoism and lock up actual scientists because the pseudoscience fit the Communist conception of how life should work. Not how it did work.
That is why skeptics are right to question environmentalist claims of human industry causing planetary destruction for matching all too closely with traditional leftist anti-capitalism, its luddite obsessions and the romanticization of the pre-industrial countryside, no matter how many PhDs assert that they represent expert opinion that just happens to match their politics.
The bizarre notion that men could become women by identifying as women fit a ‘Lysenkoist’ notion of human plasticity. There was and is nothing scientific to the entire thing. Doctors and researchers have brushed away past subjective claims of patient experiences with various medical conditions, even when those claims were later substantiated, chose to entirely discard basic biology here not because of any new data, but because ideology demanded it.
The transgender case rested on nothing more than special pleading, on long since discredited claims that ‘validating’ delusions about gender spectrums prevented suicides (and where else are doctors willing to prop up patient delusions, let alone perform highly risky unnecessary cosmetic procedures to validate those feelings) and its assertions about men being born with ‘female brains’ were the subject of feverish fantasies in online fetish groups, not research.
The ‘science’ of the transgender case lay not in its assertion of the positive, that men could become women, but in the negative, in its radical destruction of what (as part of this process) it dubbed the gender binary. The Left never really proves its points, rather it uses conspirational agitation, turning that which it seeks to destroy into a strawman, picks out-of-context pieces of information to poke holes in it, asserts conspiracy theories in which the strawman represents a broader systemic form of oppression and then politicizes the debate into a binary choice between supporting the victims or being one of the oppressors. That is what sucked Gladwell in and so many others liberals who fear being ‘on the wrong side of history’ more than a big lie.
Intellectuals and public figures who fell for an ideological case rather than a factual one and who confused ethics and morality with the tenets of leftist ideology rationalized the unreasonable and now that the case has collapsed have to rationalize why they did it.
Did anyone really believe that men could become women? It’s the same question as whether anyone really believed that redistribution of wealth by a centralized government could make society fair. They may not have believed that it was really true, but they believed that it was right. That is the tribute that liberals pay to leftists, agreeing to see the world not as it is, but as it can be made to be, and confusing their monstrous totalitarian delusions with idealism.
Modern liberals (rather than classical liberals) and leftists both share a belief in the overwhelming power of social transformation to make society ideal. The liberal border line used to be that the transformation had to be voluntary, rational and based on the realities of human nature. On the other side you had Marxism with its morass of conspiracy theories, hypothetical economics, tyrannical bureaucracies and grad student power fantasies. Liberals could accept socialism as long as its implementation was plausible and appeared to be voluntary.
The border line is long gone. As is for the most part any distinct liberal identity. The Democrats, a party of which liberals were once a fringe, base their plans for total social transformation on the same conspiracy theories, fantasy economics and power grabs that characterized Marxists. The only way such nonsense can hold up is with total ideological conformity. Shutting up opponents, whether timid liberals like Gladwell or vocal conservatives like Charlie Kirk, is the only way that any of what now passes for liberalism can continue to control the discourse.
Believing in a dozen impossible ideological things before breakfast is not a bug, it’s a test of the communications system. Extraordinary claims used to require extraordinary proof until it was reversed so that extraordinary claims like men can become women, there is no such thing as inflation unless companies choose to raise prices and the police are committing genocide against black people became overwhelmingly accepted by liberal institutions with no proof at all, only ideological emoting, while the existence of women, inflation and crime required extraordinary degrees of proof and were denounced as dangerous backward notions.
In 2024, Democrats lost an election built on all three of those arguments. The general public continued to believe in the existence of women, wanted police to protect them from criminals and refused to believe that inflation was a figment of their imagination or could be solved by blaming companies for raising prices. As consequential as each of these three issues are, encompassing economics, society and the rule of law, the lies are crucial for understanding the corruption of the intellectual class and their role in corrupting our discourse.
The nation’s intellectual class has been divided for the most part between radicals who will assert anything, such as that looting is a public good, that castrating children is best for them and that AI will soon bring us ‘fully-automated luxury communism’ so that no one will have to work, and timid liberals who will pretend to believe anything to keep their class and station.
Universities, publishing, nonprofits and the other venues for intellectuals have become echo chambers in which any ideologically correct absurdities, no matter how manifestly irrational, false and mad, can take hold, thrive and then be used as a purity test to purge heretics. They are venues where only liars, idiots and those who pretend to believe them can earn a living.
It can be hard to tell apart the liars from those only pretending to believe their lies, and both are easily confused with the idiots who may only be pretending to be idiots, but in the final analysis all three are members of a political class pretending to be an intellectual class. When a lie becomes sufficiently unpopular, the people who pretended to believe the liars apologize for that particular lie alone, rather than for the moral and intellectual failings that led to it.
What other lies do they only pretend to believe? We’ll never know until those lies become unpopular too. But transgender ideology offered the simplest possible common sense test to people who claim to be able to tackle the most challenging scientific, ethical and philosophical dilemmas. They failed. And the entire edifice of an intellectual class failed along with them.