



We’ve all been repeatedly told that gender is only a “social construct.”

We are also asked to believe that this particular social construct just so happened”what are the chances?”to have been artificially constructed almost precisely the same way across the globe in every culture throughout history. All those penises and vaginas”you know, not only the ones on male and female humans, but also on barnyard animals as well as the filthy and lascivious insects that prey upon their furry hides”are merely visual phantasms conjured from the fraudulent meanings that privileged patriarchal capitalistic corporate-sponsored heteronormative societies foist upon oppressed peoples.

Or something. There seems to be no end to the inane, reality-defying mantras of modern progressive education, mantras that seek to build and sustain”through force if necessary”a world that makes absolutely no sense.

It can’t possibly be that those pesky and elusive “social constructs” are often derived from biological realities, and this artificial thing called “gender” has some basis in those palpable things called “genitals.”

While we’re at it, I should remind you that race isn’t real, although racism is.

And rape is all about power and has nothing to do with sex, despite, again, the persistence of all those penises and vaginas.

Right. And I have some upside-down urinals I’d like to sell you.

“There seems to be no end to the inane, reality-defying mantras of modern progressive education.”

By the way”I like urinals. I’ve always liked them. It may be going a little too far to say I “enjoy” them, but, yes, I like them. I like going into a public restroom and knowing they have contraptions that allow me to void my bladder without sitting on a sticky ocean of germs and waste material. I savor the fact that if I’ve had one too many coffees, I can dash into a public Men’s Room and drain the main vein without having to sit. I realize that women can’t do this, but that’s what nature intended. I’m OK with all that.

And yet there are those”mostly young, mostly naÃ¯ve, mostly gay, mostly devoid of rudimentary reasoning skills”who deign to come and take away my urinals in their mad quest to make everything “gender-neutral” so the ridiculously tiny minority of genuine biological hermaphrodites can live their lives not feeling quite so uncomfortable as they otherwise would in situations requiring them to either urinate or defecate in public places.

Most disturbingly, the people who push this nonsense are clustered most stubbornly in our places of higher education.

I graduated from college in the mid-80s, and even then nearly all my teachers, especially in journalism, were self-admitted communists or at least “sympathizers.” In the intervening years, I’d had a vague sense that American education had drifted ever more slowly and stubbornly toward the rancid and insatiable pieties of cultural Marxism.

This became all too real for me about a year and a half ago when my son, only three years old and attending some kind of pre-pre-preschool, received a homework assignment where he had to honor his favorite figure in black history. (We made him do DJ Kool Herc just to confuse the teachers.)

But mind you, they were requiring that he honor black idols before they started teaching him to read and write. There’s something very, very wrong there. You might even say they have it all ass-backwards.

Through careful examination of leaked documents and rigorous interviews with confidential informants, I have recently fallen under the impression that the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a place where parents blow about $40K a year so their kids can go dumpster-diving for rotted vegetables, play bongos late at night, and distribute free bagels to the homeless, with whom they often have unprotected sex.

From all appearances, it’s a place where the liberal-arts curriculum consists of teaching art students to be liberals, where the scourge of critical theory has entirely displaced critical thinking. It’s also a place where young and freewheeling spirits tell one another to check their privilege and to always use appropriate pronouns that sensitively reflect one another’s self-designated gender identity. You wouldn’t want to “misgender” someone, after all.