“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” —George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty Four
As many people know, I’m an atheist. This means I don’t believe there is a soul that shapes and defines me. But even if I did believe in a soul, I’m at liberty in a free society to not follow the conception of the soul posited by another religion. I don’t have to affirm another religion’s dogma, follow its rules, or rehearse its slogans. So why am I expected to affirm the dogma, follow the rules, and rehearse the slogans of gender ideology, which is in every way a species of religious faith? Gender identity is the construct of a soul of a new religion. How did it come to be in a secular nation that I risk discipline or punishment for refusing to address a man as if he were a woman? Why must my wife tolerate men in spaces established and policed to safeguard her?
It is just as offensive (in the second and more serious usage of that word) to a man who believes in the soul of a particular religion as it is to the man who believes in no soul to be forced to believe in one chosen by the state. Yet this is our situation today. We are living at a time in America where in places a state religion has been established in clear violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, its religious character (poorly attempted) dissimulated by medical and psychological jargon. The United States is established as a secular nation, one in which citizens are free to believe in a religion or believe in no religion at all. We cannot be legitimately compelled to believe supernatural things that are antithetical to our own spiritual beliefs or to the nonspiritual life, which, by definition, means the rejection of supernatural things.
Imagine a world in which we are compelled to affirm the dogma, follow the rules, and rehearse the slogans of Islam. Imagine a world in which parents are required, because the clerics of this religion interpret their scripture to require it, to surgically alter the genitals of their male children, and in many places their female children, as well. Imagine a world in which their daughters, upon reaching puberty, have to cover their heads. Imagine being told you can not criticize Islamic doctrine and practice because that is blasphemy. Imagine being compelled to rehearse, or at least appear to not disdain, the slogan “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger, peace be upon.”
You don’t have to imagine something like this. You are currently living in such a world. It’s not the religion of Islam dictating the terms of your existence, but the religion of gender ideology, which demands you believe the slogan “Trans women [men] are women.” today, parents are required to submit their children to ritual procedures because the clerics of this religion sanction the altering of physiology and genitalia based upon the detection of a construct they themselves admit is not scientifically discoverable. To be sure, they claim, just as the Muslim cleric does about the soul in Islam, that gender identity is an existing thing. But, like the soul in Islam, the ontology of the soul in gender ideology must be taken on faith—it is an entirely subjective thing. One must believe the religion to be true to accept the supernatural things it posits are real. Like Islam in so many places and times, gender ideology enjoys the force of the state at its back. The state can remove your children from your home because you don’t accept the queer religion.
When I write about “near-future totalitarianism” on this blog, I use that modifier because elements of the total system of control are already present in our culture, institutions, and systems. To be sure, the establishment of the queer religion is not everywhere complete. There is a growing resistance movement. The religion of gender ideology is in its absurdity revealing itself for what it is, a more destructive religious notion designed along the lines of Scientology does some of this work itself (gender identity is the thetan analog, gender affirming care auditing—and millions pour into the bank accounts of both camps). Moreover, while many of today’s youth have found their religion, there are enough people alive who cling to the old-time religion. The atheists have allies.
To be sure, resistance to gender ideology has come too late and is not yet forceful enough to save scores of children from being mutilated and sterilized. To repel the New Dark Ages that the techno-religion of gender ideology brings, we will have to become more strident in our opposition to it. Here, in America, the Constitution provides the torches to force this religion out of public institutions and out of our family life. Elsewhere torches in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Liberties await their lighting. But we must light them up. Otherwise, Orwell’s prophecy will become our reality. Driving the religion out of the medical-industrial complex will be more difficult. Here we will have to do more than assert our right to be free from religion imposition. Here we will have to use the force of positive law against the cleric.
freedom and reason 