If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, those intentions include the status of transgenders in society.

A transgender person is someone who mistakenly thinks he is a she, or vice versa. Mistakenly? Those who advocate the radical policies attached to transgenders object. There is no mistake about it, they insist. These boys who think they are girls are not misguided. They are girls, trapped in the bodies of boys. They must be accommodated, including in medical procedures, in civil rights laws, and in the general culture. (The complement is held to be true for girls who think they are boys.)

Wherever societal Hell is, it is at the end of this road. Any society that cannot distinguish between males and females abandons the vital concepts of manhood and womanhood.

Those on the left claim the high road, because they regard themselves as compassionate, caring, and even scientific. Anyone who disagrees with them (sigh) must be evil. In leftist ideology, if you are evil, you are not merely mistaken. You do not have an honest difference of opinion. You are a hate-monger. Not only that, but you are then defined by a long list of additional pejoratives, including racist, sexist, homophobic (fear of same?), Islamophobic (fear of not just radical Islamic terrorism, but of hijabs and turbans), a climate denier, and too many more to mention here.

The trans-advocates ask, what could be the harm in accommodating people who claim to be of a sex not identical to their anatomy?

Unfortunately, there is a great deal of harm, some of it only recently emerging in the news, but much more of it below the surface, undermining the fabric of society.

As usual with radical ideologies, they tend not to be well thought out. Unexpected consequences arise. The ideology that first was portrayed as being logical and compassionate begins to contradict itself and become the opposite. Two recent news items illustrate that.

In the first case, transgender policy has gone so far as to allow males to compete as girls in girls-only sports competition in high schools. Entirely unsurprisingly, the males handily out-compete the most accomplished girl athletes. These competitions are not merely for olive wreaths; they are for valuable scholarships, upon which many of the girls depend for their further education.

In the second case, a seven-year-old boy is being potentially subjected, by a court, to irreversible hormone treatments, over his father’s objections, to prepare the boy for the surgical mutilation known euphemistically as a sex change operation. The boy’s mother has indicated an interest in ordering the procedure. The absurd term "sex change" was more recently modified to “sex reassignment,” an equally absurd description that regards sex as, in leftist terms, a “social construct.”

Therein lies much of the problem. Social advocates, with power all out of proportion to their numbers have managed to instill their incoherent definitions not only of sex, but of compassion into the legal, educational, and legislative functions of society. Common sense be damned. Common sense is considered the archaic remnant of an evil America steeped in slavery, war-mongering, and the oppression of victimized minorities.

Inevitably, incoherence leads to self-contradiction. For example, the federal civil rights law known as Title IX, although not solely a sports equity law, does have provisions that require most educational institutions to provide equal opportunities for women in sports, equal to those afforded to men. In short, in layman terms, girls should not be excluded by law from sports opportunities on account of sex. Clearly, the intended effect of the law is to give girls status in sports, so as not to suffer from male competition. But the incoherent result has been the opposite: to allow boys to declare themselves girls and thereby to defraud the girls of their opportunities in sports scholarships.

While photos of very masculine "transgenders" overpowering girls in competition,is dramatic proof of the idiocy of current policy, there is an even deeper problem at work, one that is convoluted enough to allow leftist advocates to scream discrimination at those who would end discrimination.

The deeper problem is that when society tries to delegitimize biological reality, it has embarked down a rabbit hole of policies that portend unexpected and destructive consequences at every level. If we consider the malady to be healthy, and any cure to be forbidden, then we blur the line between abnormality and the normative. We vilify people who propose true compassion, the kind that demands that people adjust to reality instead of to fantasy.

Gender dysphoria, a politically corrected term for gender identity disorder, is a truly tragic malady for those who suffer from it. A cure should be sought. The disorder is in the brain, not below the waist. Therefore, the cure will be found in the brain — but only if the necessary research is conducted. That research will not be conducted, because the problem is considered not to be a problem at all, but rather a condition to be celebrated, yet another stripe on the multi-culture flag of rainbow politics.

For the moment, the problem is not the confused adolescent boys who, with the support of political vampires, have been led to honestly believe they are girls. The problem is with the abandonment of traditional moral absolutes, without which no society can long survive.

The danger may not yet be clear and present, but it is no less dangerous.