OPINION:
The left’s war on women continues unabated, and it’s racking up victims. As we bend the concept of gender and society along with it, we must consider the wreckage being left behind. Like so many others the left claims to help, it will most certainly hurt transgender people as well. Leftists started by eroding the work ethic, they then moved to eliminate religion and the two-parent family structure. Now they are going after science and gender.
Lia Thomas deserves our empathy, our compassion and our prayers. Those of us watching this troubled young man have no idea of the internal struggle he faces. What he does not deserve is special treatment that leads to discrimination against actual, biological women.
Believing that you are something that you are not is a sign of mental illness. Wanting to mutilate or otherwise change your body as a result of that belief is also a symptom of a serious psychological problem. It is not to be made light of, nor is it to be dismissed as somehow normal behavior, especially for the sake of advancing a political agenda.
Mental health issues in this country are at a crisis level, and they deserve our attention. Normalizing or mainstreaming gender dysphoria isn’t a solution to help ease their pain. It makes particularly gender dysphoric or confused young people pawns of the left in their dangerous game of upending basic societal foundations. Forcing this ideology on society is needlessly divisive, and that divisiveness hurts the transgender community and even the homosexual community, now oddly lumped in together with the gender dysphoric by the moderators of “wokeness.”
We shouldn’t doubt Lia Thomas’ intentions or motivations. Still, we should question the motives of those who have turned gender dysphoria into a political cudgel, a popular fad and a cottage industry.
The left’s recent fascination with this particular mental illness isn’t about diversity, equality or inclusion. It’s not about the health of gender dysphoric people either. It’s about control. Controlling how you think, how you perceive the world and what you believe to be true.
Their efforts to control you, as usual, also come with an unhealthy dose of fear. Fear you’ll be ostracized for believing in only two genders. Fear of being fired for saying someone who has male genitalia is a man. Fear of losing business for not toeing the line of the rabid woke mob.
The fear campaign and pressure from the media and the far left is real. This week a nominee to the United States Supreme Court, who was selected because she was an accomplished woman, was too afraid to articulate the definition of “woman” when asked.
The left’s war on truth is rewriting history, morality, language and now science on a scale that makes Russian war propaganda pale in comparison. They have conned everyone from bra-burning feminists to Disney that a man who thinks he is a woman can be an actual woman.
Genetics determines sex, and physiology determines inherent differences between the capabilities of male and female bodies. There are physiological facts that are indisputable and separable from afflictions of the mind. But not for the radical leftists afflicting our politics, schools, media and corporations.
As a biological male, you should no sooner be able to call yourself a woman and compete in woman’s sports than you can identify as a 65-year-old, walk into the local Social Security office and rightfully demand your check when you’re only 39.
Like Pope Callixtus III excommunicating Halley’s Comet, the relentless gender babble is insufficient to effect a change in that reality.
What is real and what is not are not dependent on someone’s state of mind. They are established through facts, science and demonstrable truths.
The concept that reality is defined by whatever we feel or perceive fits very much in line with the virtual reality future planned for us by Big Tech and the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. Social digital platforms and our carefully curated profiles are rudimentary versions of this world where reality can be bent on a whim.
As usual, the left knows exactly what it’s doing. In this scheme, nobody wins, least of all young women and girls and those who suffer from gender dysphoria.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax Television, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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