Eddie Marsan’s objection is nonsense. Sex and gender are synonyms. The man Kay Burley interrogates can’t tell you why they’re not because he’d have to be well-versed in the jargon of an anti-scientific ideology (“gender identity” and all that) to appear to differentiate them, and then he’d either be a cultist or a liar. As it is, his thinking is muddled because he’s heard they’re different.
What he actually means to say, I think, is that a man can pretend to be a woman. To be rational, he’d have to be mean this because gender is objective, unchangeable, and binary. Rishi Sunak says a man is not a woman. That’s a statement of fact. A woman is an adult female human. She can’t be a man. If the law denies this fact, then it is an irrational law and must be changed. But surely, at least, the man can have an opinion. How would he otherwise convey an intent to negotiate an irrational law?
How on earth did it ever come to pass that a government in the civilized world allowed people to legally change their sex in the face of the material reality that people can’t? Somebody came back at me with “Except the materially can and do,” to which I responded: “No they can’t and don’t. You’re making an argument against natural history. This is an unscientific belief you’re advancing. Queer theory is a quasi-religious standpoint. You can’t expect rational people with integrity to go down an ideological road.”
Sex and gender are synonyms. Gender is binary and unchangeable in our species (all mammals, in fact). There is no spectrum. Gender identity, the spectrum, and all the rest of it are constructs of a pseudoscience designed by crackpots seeking to normalize paraphilia.
Is the Gender Recognition Act on borrowed time? I hope so—and that this experience provides a lesson in the importance of fact and reason in making law and the peril of trying to legislate ideology. ***
A man chimed in on X to scold me for my “quasi-religious” characterization of queer theory, saying that psychology, sociology, etc., have validated gender ideology.
I know. I have degrees in psychology and sociology and taught college for thirty years. I have watched in real time as these and other disciplines fell prey to ideological corruption. The university has become a cathedral and the professoriate and administration a clergy.
It all started with poststructuralism and postmodernism bringing radical sexology into the sciences. Today, academic and professional conferences, journals, and publishing houses strictly gate-keep with queer theory their guide to prevent science from appearing in order to manufacture the perception of hegemony.
It’s heartbreaking to see. We are entering Dark Ages 2.0 where people believe there are gendered souls inhabiting wrong bodies. It’s batshit crazy time in academia. If there isn’t a revolt by scientists with integrity soon, I fear we will lose one of the great institutions of Western civilization.
freedom and reason 