Kevin Myers: Secular theologians of the gender switching industry proclaim that gender is purely a psychological "construct"
Sometimes it's hard to believe that every day is not April 1. Take Monday, February 13, 2012, which could certainly have been April Fools' day, to judge from the story that broke that morning. This concerned a nameless person who is the first ever "male" to give birth in Britain, "despite his sex-change operation".
What do you think the word "despite" means there? Not what it normally means, that's for sure. Normally it would mean, "contrary to all the evidence"; but here all the evidence is biological, and that this supposed "man" still has functioning ovaries, and fallopian tubes, and a vagina and a womb, which their owner has put to full use. In which case, she is not entitled to call herself a man. I am certainly prepared to accept that some people feel themselves psychologically and emotionally to have been born of the wrong sex. I can't say I'm entirely happy that the solution to this problem is usually surgical, but when the sawbones do the necessary, thereby creating a semblance to the required body, I'm prepared to accept that a gender-change has occurred. Accordingly, the person is entitled both legally and individually to be known by the sex they feel they belong to.
But the secular theologians of the gender-switching industry are saying more than this. They now proclaim that gender is purely a psychological and cultural "construct" (that's the word such folk always use when they want to baffle the rest of us), which exists independently of physical attributes. And it is this which enables the woman at the centre of this column to be called a man. So really, this story is not proof of some "miracle", but rather, proof of what a fraud the gender-trading business has become.
Moreover, the obstetric revelations about this pseudo-male were accompanied by examples of other "men" who have given birth, beginning with Thomas Beattie of Oregon, who is a serial non-man, having given birth to three children, and Yuval Topper, an Israeli "man" who also had a baby, and Scott Moore -- and here, I'm afraid we truly enter a quite phantasmagorical world -- a Californian who lives with "his husband", and who gave birth to a child in 2010.
Yes, and we're all meant to stay straight-faced and solemn when we hear this rubbish, that someone who was born woman and then becomes a "man" nonetheless has a husband, yet remains a man, even after giving birth to a baby. And how did any of these creatures get pregnant in the first place? Not merely do they think that they can make idiots of us all with their absurd ideological fantasies about what constitutes a man and what constitutes a woman, but they also think they can make nonsense of the English language. And any resistance to this kind of absurd gender-politics and language-corruption is usually dismissed as "patriarchal" or "bigoted" or "chauvinist" or "homophobic" or some other such nonsensical term of politically correct abuse, which serves instead of a reasoned argument.
Journalism has been turned on its head with such intellectual gibberish, not least because most university media-studies departments show less interest in language than in post-imperialist feminist egalitarianism. The politicisation of the very tools of journalism -- namely of words -- has been one of the triumphs of the ideological warriors of what is called "post-modernism". This movement, in essence, declares that many -- if not all -- "realities" are in fact cultural "constructs" (there, I did warn you). Taken to the extreme, there is no such thing as race, or gender, or male, or female, or black or white, or most of all, meaning; everything is plastic, and can be shaped according to will.
The most influential prophets of this scholastic rabies were two French mad-dogs called Foucault and Derrida, whose guidance leads all their followers to an intellectual saltmarsh of mosquito-ridden ruin. In their demented world, the weakest woman is as powerful as the strongest man, because the word "woman" has absolutely no intrinsic value and therefore only means what we want it to mean.
And so on and so forth, until you are trapped in a hijacked airliner by some pre-medieval fundamentalists who are bumping their hostages off, and guess what? You'll pray to be rescued not by a woman who is renegotiating her culturally oppressed gender-identity, but by some pre-modernist Special Forces bloke, for whom manhood is the thing that enables him to blow the living bejasus out of the enemy.
Now, I can do nothing about the plague of post-modernist academics, or the grotesque fantasies that they both concoct and inhabit. For whereas a crow-bar across the nose is always a useful start when dealing with these idiots, in the present unsatisfactory state of the law, such a sensible measure would, incredibly, be illegal. But we humble hod-carriers of the written word must surely be allowed to say that a person who gives birth to a baby is a woman, and that accordingly, journalists absolutely may not say that she is a man, or imply it, even with inverted commas. That's that. Nothing more to be said. Argument over. Now Foucault off.
