The pansexual Left is daily making deeper inroads into the very heart and soul—and loins—of Western culture, intent, it seems, on sexualizing our children as if they were already mature and capable adults. Along with militant hatred of traditional customs, prurience masking as liberal complaisance has become one more ideological force eating away at the established and time-tested norms and usages that have characterized Western civilization and that have provided for its (now-threatened) durability. Traditional and even biological partitions have grown porous and some have fallen altogether, a phenomenon increasingly symbolized by the prefix “trans.”
One thinks of the European movement to dissolve nation states and replace them with a “transnational” entity, and now of the social and educational recognition of a new category of human beings, known as “transgenders” or the “transgendered.” Cultural and natural distinctions are in process of being wiped out and supplanted by a fetish for collective and undifferentiated existence—which is to say, we are toiling in an untenable paradox. We are all equally different, we all possess the same rights to be what we want to be and to expect the world to acknowledge us as such, in defiance of both social and empirical reality.
This is especially the case for something as biologically given as gender identity. Alluding to Tom Wolfe’s notion of the “Victorian gentlemen” in The Right Stuff, Michael Walsh comments on the unfortunate breaking down of “institutional barriers between men and women… barriers erected not out of sexist animus or irrational prejudice, but in recognition of…biological reality.” Perhaps the most salient instance of the rejection of reality which typifies our pseudo-enlightened epoch involves precisely this issue. Just recently, the Toronto District School Board furnished a prismatic microcosm of the depths of imbecility to which we have plunged, an illustration in little of the larger _zeitgeis_t.
The fiasco began when the TDSB, for the presumed benefit of its students, provided links to a website that, among other suggestions for sexual experimentation, “explained how to use vegetables in sexual play.” A carrot a day keeps the doctor away. A week later it issued a set of guidelines noting that all students can use their washroom of choice, since gender identity is supposedly unrelated to “the student’s sex assigned at birth.” According to the poster it distributed, “Masculine and feminine are labels, not definitions”: gender is not assigned at birth but freely chosen. Evergreen State College in the U.S. is clearly in agreement with this pixilated assessment, allowing a 45 year-old male student who claims transgender status, despite the fact that he is biologically a man, to use the female changing room facilities. Responding to parents’ complaints, the College Administration argues that it “cannot discriminate on the basis of gender identity,” a devious way of begging the question.
The redefinition of gender identity is a godsend for pedophiles and sexual perverts of all stripes. No matter. Students are encouraged to decide for themselves which gender they feel they belong to and are to be perceived as members in good standing of the transgender community, immune to criticism and heroically rebellious against both common sense and the genetic code.
Although transgender students represent an insignificant minority of the school population, their sense of grievance and exclusion, Administration believes, should determine intramural policy for all students, and teachers as well, despite the havoc bound to be unleashed. The travesty doesn’t stop there. As the National Post reports, “Gender identity is currently not a protected status under the Canadian Human Rights Act, but Bill C-279, under debate in the House of Commons, would change that.” Indeed, no less an authority than Joe Biden regards transgender discrimination as “the civil rights issue of our time.” And as we are all aware, when Joe Biden speaks, the age listens with rapt attention.
The larger issue, of course, involves the rejection of the heterosexual norm, including its associations with the traditional family unit, the rearing of children within the family, the proper function of the state, the importance of traditional morality and the assertion of anarchic but also state-sanctioned and regulated non-reproductive sexuality in its place. These elements form part of the Left’s defining project, which is nothing less than culture-change. It is essentially an attack on what it regards as the hetero-patriarchal nature of Western civilization, and the directives coming down from the Toronto District School Board enjoy exemplary status in this respect.
Like many school boards across the nation, it attempts to regulate everything from the traditional usages of the culture to the sexual identity of its students. The TDSB swims with the sewage, not only in the washrooms, but, for example, in renaming Hallowe’en as “Black and Orange Day” in order not to offend wiccans or immigrants for whom the custom of trick or treating is foreign or potentially unsettling in some way. But the TDSB is merely a symptom of the age in which, as I have written elsewhere, “the individual is no longer understood as a nexus of thought, energy, moral conviction and spiritual autonomy, with a biological identity furnished by Nature, but as a malleable lump of helpless suffering and justified desire to be pitied and served.” Our schools in particular have succeeded in turning us into creatures of ideological fashion rather than autonomous agents capable of self-reflection and resistant to social and political manipulation. Forget about math, science, literature or history; it’s all about social activism now. The signs of cultural decadence are everywhere around us, and the educational system has become one of the principal engines of moral and intellectual decay.
This is social engineering with a vengeance. Our schools, like our cultural institutions in general, believe they are breaking down barriers, but what they are really doing is erasing differences—that is, unequal differences, the differences that make us who we are, not who we imagine ourselves as being, and that allow for the preservation of our integrity, in both senses of the word. And in proceeding to gut the culture they despise and to render it sterile, they have even robbed us of our gender.
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