OPINION:
The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut was a man ahead of his time when he observed, “A sane person, to an insane society, must appear insane.” Only a society that has lost its marbles would find the need to enumerate more than four dozen “genders” above and beyond the trusty male and female options.
Facebook announced last week that it would no longer limit users of the social-networking site to self-identification in the standard, biologically binary way.
Facebook allows users to select a “custom” sex from a drop-down list that would seem to cover every conceivable option — and more. Possibilities include: Agender, androgyne, androgynous, bigender, cis, cisgender, cis female, cis male, cis man, cis woman, cisgender female, cisgender male, cisgender man, cisgender woman, female to male, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender questioning, gender variant, genderqueer, intersex, male to female, neither, neutrois, non-binary, other, pangender, trans female, trans male, trans man, trans person, trans woman, transfeminine, transgender, transgender female, transgender male, transgender person, transgender woman, transfeminine, transmasculine and two-spirit.
A custom sex selection comes with the choice of a preferred pronoun, so that when someone identifying as a “two-spirit,” whatever that is, makes the switch, Facebook will say that the person “updated his profile.” Or her profile. Or their profile. Anything goes.
Numerous websites offer a glossaries that attempt to explain the often-overlapping options. The “cis” prefix was made up to identify the vast majority of boys and girls and men and women who have “the gender identity commonly associated with their biological sex.” In other words, the 99-plus percent of the population.
Distinctions without a difference are the byproduct of entire university departments devoted to “queer studies” and “gender studies.” Professors must come up with ever more creative projects to justify those government grants.
No administration has been more willing than the current one to spread around the federal cash, as it elevates homosexual behavior while pandering to a key demographic that donates generously to Democrats.
For example, Mr. Obama on Sunday wrote that he opposed a legislative proposal in Uganda that would criminalize homosexual marriage and impose life sentences for repeated homosexual acts, because “as a country and a people, the United States has consistently stood for the protection of fundamental freedoms and universal human rights.”
It’s all designed to make fringe groups feel better about their choices. “There’s going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to mean nothing,” Facebook software engineer Brielle Harrison told The Associated Press. “But for the few it does impact, it means the world.”
Harrison, who helped compile the list, is in the process of swapping his male parts for female ones, and it’s not clear which of the 50-plus boxes he, she or they checked.
Facebook is, of course, free to do whatever it wants. The problem comes when the Internal Revenue Service catches on to the fad and starts printing gender selection instruction books along with its forms. As if Tax Day weren’t crazy enough already.
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