George Orwell famously observed that some of the most absurd ideas in history originate among academics. Consider the belief, widespread among college teachers, and even many serious researchers, especially in the realm of medical science, that a man who says he is a woman is a woman. In his “Notes on Nationalism” (1945), Orwell writes, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Although he was writing about a particular belief, the observation is generally true.
Orwell’s observation captures a recurring phenomenon: highly intelligent people possessing the unique ability to rationalize away common sense. Intellectuals, equipped with sophisticated language and conceptual tools, have acquired the capacity to replace a workable metaphysics grounded in observable reality—and therefore accessible to science—with an alternative framework that denies, undermines, and warps empirical inquiry. The contemporary paradigm of this tendency is gender identity doctrine.
As I have shown in essays on this platform, for centuries, “sex” and “gender” functioned as synonyms, entering the English language via different routes, both reflecting the straightforward biological reality of sexual dimorphism in humans. This dimorphism is among the most conserved and unambiguous features in mammalian biology: an organism is either male or female based on the type of gametes it produces, with rare disorders of sexual development representing developmental anomalies rather than a spectrum that dissolves the binary.
Academics, however, initiated a decisive separation. They first declared gender a social construct, independent of biological sex. From this premise, it followed that gender could be whatever an individual wishes it to be. Traditional gender roles and stereotypes were recast as oppressive, necessitating the rejection of the “gender binary” for authentic self-expression. Postmodernist terminology reframed gender as a “performance,” elevating subjective feeling above material reality.
This initial step quickly cascaded into a broader epistemological assault. If gender is culturally and historically relative—a social construct—then science itself becomes merely another belief system, equally contingent on time and place. The binary understanding of sex, rooted in Western scientific tradition, is dismissed as Eurocentric or patriarchal.
Consequently, human behavior is no longer interpreted through a biological foundation that establishes parameters for behavior and cognition, requiring analysis rooted in the incontrovertible. Instead, it is analyzed through a nihilistic lens in which all beliefs constitute projections of power. There are no rules save one: that there are no rules. The gender binary is thereby portrayed as an artifact of a patriarchal, heterosexist worldview that enforces hierarchies of oppressor and oppressed.
What emerges is a metaphysics that renders rigorous inquiry in biology and physics, as well as anthropology, psychology, and sociology, either impossible or “essentially contested” to the point of paralysis. In this space, science yields to ideology. An accessible metaphysics is replaced with an ideology that denies the very foundation of scientific inquiry. It thus represents a new metaphysics, one that is unreachable by reason and disconfirmation. Thus, the academic has become unreasonable. And not just the academic, but the public he has indoctrinated.
This substitution of metaphysics is vividly illustrated in personal narratives circulating among academics. Many describe initial skepticism toward gender identity theory dissolving after encountering a student who recounted their “journey.” A life of anxiety and depression was resolved only upon realizing they were “born in the wrong body,” followed by social transition and often medical interventions.
Such accounts mirror classic Christian conversion testimonials—“I once was lost, but now am found”—with the body as the site of redemption through hormones and surgery rather than spiritual transformation. This is not speculation. I had a fellow academic describe how a student’s conversion tale convinced him to subscribe to gender identity doctrine. It is a salvation cult.
The apparent parallel is instructive. Christianity, whatever one thinks of its metaphysical claims, has historically fostered a commitment to ethics emphasizing care for family and neighbors. As Max Weber noted in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), much of Enlightenment humanism represents the “blushing heir” of Reformation Christianity. Belief in a Christian ontology, or the ethical system derived from it, is associated with prosocial outcomes that align with observable human flourishing.
In contrast, the new ontology underlying gender identity ideology demands alienation from community and family, along with physiological alteration—cross-sex hormones, surgeries—to reveal one’s “true self.” Absent a grounding moral framework akin to Christianity, this ideology functions as a destructive pseudo-religion. It prioritizes subjective internal states over material reality, often with irreversible consequences for physical and psychological health, particularly among adolescents.
This dynamic helps explain broader cultural patterns, such as the surprising affinity some secular humanists and progressives express toward Islam. Despite surface-level incompatibilities regarding individual liberty, both frameworks can share an antipathy toward Western liberal traditions, a collectivist emphasis on group identity and power dynamics, and a willingness to subordinate empirical inquiry to doctrinal purity. From such a worldview, the reasonable becomes heretical and then is cast as an existential threat. Never mind that the threat is to the imaginary. The imaginary has become truth in the woke mind.
The academic embrace of gender identity doctrine thus exemplifies a deeper problem: the abdication of reason in favor of a metaphysics hostile to science and human nature. By severing concepts from their biological and natural-historical moorings, intellectuals do not liberate the individual but enmesh society in a metaphysics of confusion and harm.
Recovering a metaphysics that respects observable reality—biological sex as foundational, human psychology as embodied, and social relations as emergent, moreover morally adjudicable norms with ethics oriented toward verifiable flourishing—remains essential if we are to navigate the complexities of modernity without descending further into ideological fantasy.
Orwell’s warning endures because the academy retains its disproportionate influence over the stories societies tell about themselves. When those stories deny reality, the consequences extend far beyond the classroom.
freedom and reason 