Asserting biological notions of sex and sexuality, an aegis once heralded by progressive activists, is now being used as a basis for labelling others as Nazis.

I live in a town called Hope, in British Columbia (BC), most famous for being where the movie First Blood was shot. A recent analysis at the Vancouver School of Economics, using survey responses on life satisfaction across hundreds of Canadian urban and rural communities, ranked Hope the third happiest community in Canada. There are a little over 6000 people living here and in the midst of this idyllic setting, simply asserting facts of basic biology can get one brandished as a Nazi.

In June, a local group called Culture Guard was scheduled to speak at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch, on the street where I live. It related to concerns about a program called SOGI (Sexual Orientation Gender Identification), recently introduced into BC schools. Having researched similar progressive social programs in the UK for my next book, Vice of Kings, I inquired about the event on Facebook. I was told it had been cancelled after the Legion received 900+ email complaints—including threats.

I went to the Culture Guard site, read a bit, and watched one of their videos. They represent concerned parents and regard SOGI as indoctrinating children into values they don’t necessarily agree with. A few days later, I saw a thread at the FB Hope Bulletin Board about the event’s cancellation. It was followed by a steady stream of comments. Comments like:

Thank you so much for NOT giving a platform to hateful rhetoric and practices! A hate group masquerading as concerned citizens. They spout fear and hate mongering and have done no actual research into what sogi is. a hateful agenda recruitment meeting these people are insane and that’s the scary part. This disgusting group doesn’t need a platform in our town to convince the uneducated that SOGI 123 is anything but beneficial. I take a very dim view of anyone who supports groups like Culture Guard. Just a small bunch of small minded terrified people. I pity them really. Hate under the guise of Christianity is a very thin veil. Hope we’ve run these poisonous haters out of town. No bible thumping flatlander would dare show their face because hate has a weak foundation. Go to their page, report as hate speech towards a gender or orientation. If enough people do it the page will be deleted by Facebook. No time for homophobes Culture Guard equates LGBTQ with pedos, animal f***ers and murderers. The best part of this post is that I can see what homes my children and our family will not be visiting.

I made a comment about Culture Guard not seeming especially like a hate group. I was told this: “someone who agrees with what they are saying would obviously not think there was anything wrong with it, that’s like asking a white supremacist what part of the KKK meeting was the most offensive.”

So Culture Guard was a hate group and if I didn’t agree then I was a hater too, and worse, I didn’t even know it because I was so hateful. Hmmm. Someone added: “You just have to read their Facebook page to see the hate they spew.” There wasn’t a single Culture Guard quote or citation on the thread to back up these accusations, so I checked the CG FB page, found nothing overtly hate-spewing, and asked for an example. No one provided any. I also pointed out that anyone can comment on a Facebook page or at a website but it didn’t necessarily represent CG views. That was met with a laughing smile.

I wondered if it struck anyone else as odd that parents who were concerned about their children were being denounced, by a majority, not just as misinformed but as delusional, ignorant haters comparable to KKK members, Nazis, and (wait for it) Charles Manson (really)? Ironically, the hate spewed at CG involved mostly accusations of hatred and intolerance. Some of these people were so proud of their tolerance, they felt morally obliged not to tolerate anyone who didn’t agree with them—even for a second.

I wonder how many people in my town who support SOGI could even define the difference between sexual orientation and gender identification? Are any of them aware that, not only are they not the same, but in some cases are actively opposed? I am sure most of these people assume that homosexuals are all pro-transgender, and vice versa, and that all of them come together, like hues of a magical rainbow, to make up something wonderful called LGBTQ+ that is, of course, fully united behind SOGI and other similar programs. If so, they might be surprised.

One of the strangest things about the discourse around gender identification and sexual orientation is that it is not, as the angry haters of hate on Facebook assumed, a simple question of progressive vs. regressive, right vs. left. It’s not even about tolerance against intolerance. It may be true that most right-wing and conservative people, Christian or not, tend to be opposed to sexually progressive policies like SOGI, sometimes in moderate and informed ways, sometimes not.

What’s not true is the reverse, that more liberal, Leftist, or progressive types are unanimously in favour of these programs. A couple of decades ago, that might have been the case; but as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, LGBTQ+ jumped the rainbow shark some years back, and took the Liberal wing along with it. The whole movement is currently devouring itself from the inside, and one of the main reasons is that “gender identification” is a jealous god that recognizes no god beside it.

Every turf attracts a top dog, and the realm of identity politics is no exception.

Imagine a five-year-old boy who acts effeminately, or an adolescent boy who likes to put on lipstick and flirt with other boys. Homosexual, or transgender? Sexual orientation or gender identification? It used to be that a boy who was effeminate and attracted to other boys was discovering his sexual orientation (gayness), breaking the “norm” and departing from stereotypical boy behaviour. Identifying that same boy as transgender—a girl “trapped inside” a boy’s body—removes sexual orientation from the equation and makes it all about reinforcing the gender stereotype, which is that only girls are attracted to boys. Only now the identity is divorced not only from social convention but from physical reality (biological sex). Progress progresses in funny ways, and ours is not to question why.

Identifying [a] boy as transgender—a girl “trapped inside” a boy’s body—removes sexual orientation from the equation and makes it all about reinforcing the gender stereotype, which is that only girls are attracted to boys.

Yet homosexuals fought long and hard, over many decades, to break free from the social mold. Now transgender activism wants to put them back in it. Transgender activists not only claim that sexual reassignment surgery makes them as completely their new sex as someone born that way; they are now claiming the same without even having had the surgery. It’s all about identification. You are what you feel yourself to be, and it’s literally a crime for anyone to say otherwise.

You may ask (if you are keeping up with these dangerous curves) what happens when a man who self-identifies as a lesbian wants to have sex with an actual lesbian? The lesbian says thanks but no thanks, I don’t sleep with men because I’m a lesbian. Sorry. Wrong answer. Seriously wrong answer. The lesbian is now a transphobe and “vagina fetishist.”

One Trans-Activist group, the Degenderettes, is a branch of Trans Dykes: the anti-lesbian Antifa. They consider themselves male lesbians while targeting (female) lesbians as “oppressors” of men—because they exclude males from their dating pools. The Degenderettes also create “art” encouraging patrons to punch feminists, riot shields inscribed with the slogan “Die Cis Scum,” pink baseball bats covered in barbed wire, and pink axes designed to kill feminist women.

If some women have penises, men now have as much (or more) right to say what defines a woman as women do (a sentence which becomes literally unsayable under these new definitions), so ‘Bang’ goes several decades of feminism. When once-celebrated proto-feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch in 1970, opined that men who have sex changes don’t actually become women, she was deemed a “vile bigot” unfit for public life, with “no place in a civilized society.” Violence against women by “Women with Penises” (nope, not a new Canadian band) is now a “legitimate” form of Trans-activism. TERFs is a hate-term coined by Trans-Activists that means Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, like Greer, only it has since expanded to include any women who are worried, say, about permitting women with penises into women’s shelters. As it would be to Nazis, TERFS are not only Open Game, it’s considered a social duty to commit violence against them.

If some women have penises, men now have as much (or more) right to say what defines a woman as women do

How did we get to this point? Perhaps not surprisingly (considering how central language modification is to political correctness and identity politics), the term gender comes from linguistics, as in words that have masculine and feminine gender. Later it was used in animal breeding. During the 1950s, sexologist and surgeon John Money reinvented it to mean “the social performance indicative of an internal sexed identity.” By doing so, he laid the linguistic and ideological foundation to justify treatment of transsexualism with sex reassignment surgery and for the medical and surgical interventionist market that is currently booming in the Western world (and for the “gender clinics” currently sprouting all over Canada).

Today, gender refers to an essential self that exists independently from biology and has priority over the body . Ironically, this concept is similar to the Christian idea of a soul, though GI advocates are generally anti-religious, and instead talk about “brain gender” and how the body sometimes doesn’t match the neurology. Studies of twins don’t support this, however, nor does data on brain plasticity, testosterone, etc.

Until recently, 80 percent to 95 percent of children with gender dysphoria (GD) had accepted their biological sex by late adolescence. Now that children are being “affirmed” in their dysphoria and encouraged to undergo medical intervention, the figures are changing. The common assumption is that this relates to increased tolerance.

Asking exploratory questions in a therapeutic context and attempting to understand possible causes of a person’s gender identification is now banned in 9 US states as being evidence of “discrimination.” Parents are routinely told that, if they do not support their child’s choice, the child will likely commit suicide. Parents who try to refuse medical intervention for their children can be threatened by the Child Protection Service and lose custody. The increased resort to medical intervention in gender dysphoria is not due to evidence-based medicine but to parent demand. Diagnosed transgendered individuals who undergo sex reassignment surgery and have their reproductive organs removed are rendered permanently infertile.

SOGI’s educational program introduces children at an early age (5) to ideas about gender that are not merely unsupported by medical data but are mostly contradicted by it. Primary among these ideas is that of gender identification, which rests on a confused theoretical amalgam of ideological assumptions and preferences, and on the subjective testimonies of distressed children and adolescents, rather than clearly substantiated scientific or medical evidence, of which there is none.

Children being taught about GI aren’t just being taught to accept psychosocial anomalies or their own identity confusion. There are other ways to achieve this that don’t require ideological indoctrination. They are being taught that physical reality has no inherent correlation with their perceptions and that it doesn’t need to, because we now have technologies that can oblige reality to conform to subjective feelings. By implication, they are being taught that they can’t—and don’t need to—trust their bodies, that biology gets it wrong but human beings (such as state-sponsored programs like SOGI) know how to make it right, using ideological coaching, “affirmation,” drugs, deeply invasive surgery, and other technological marvels.

It’s a brave new world out there. How could you not be happy about it?

Here’s another question: How did we get to the point where—in the third happiest community in Canada—concerned parents are being instantly branded as narrow-minded fanatics no better than Nazis for asking questions about a new school program? I would have happily attended that Culture Guard meeting, and I know there are others in my town who would have too, and not because they are “a small bunch of small minded terrified people.” (Though sometimes being afraid is the right response.) Now it’s been clearly communicated that, if they admit it, they’ll be seen as advocating hatred, persecution, backward thinking, bullying, and oppression—in a word, deplorables—chances are good that they won’t complain. The gag order has been effective.

It doesn’t take a majority to achieve this: just an especially vocal, reactive, and intolerant minority. Yet ironically, it’s also a minority that represents state policy on the need for “tolerance.”

Doublethink is de rigueur in 2018.