First, it must be understood up front that in the grand scheme of things “transgender” people constitute a statistically insignificant portion of the population. They’re so exceedingly rare as to make almost any public-policy or political argument about their treatment by society a sideshow in a true sense.

We’re not talking about 10 percent of the population who suffers from “gender dysphoria,” or even one percent. We’re talking about a small fraction of one percent. There may be more Amish people than transgender people. Somewhere there might be a transgender Amish person, who is sure to be interviewed by 60 Minutes.

So to discuss the transgender movement in this space is, admittedly, to delve into the realm of hypotheticals and triviality. We’ll admit this, but only if the reader will recognize we live in an era of hypotheticals and triviality when it comes to American politics. As an example, last week’s column discussed the hypertrivial Mitch Landrieu, who presides over the abject ruin of New Orleans thanks to the orgy of violent crime his city’s underclass is wreaking across the city with no discernible effort to stop it; Landrieu today is unveiling his plan to fight climate change, because his political advisers believe the key to making him a contender for the 2020 Democrat nomination lies in combating fantasy threats rather than real ones, and in taking down historical landmarks rather than building up a middle class tax base.

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture, and conservatives have yet to effectively internalize and apply this lesson. The Left is still firmly in control of the institutions which shape American culture despite the hard-to-deny truth that very few if any men or women of the Left are any good at anything they do. This is why Hollywood makes mostly brainless, propagandistic and under-performing movies, it’s why journalism has reached its nadir, it’s why American public (and higher) education is descending into quicksand, and it’s why the Democratic Party presides over the ruin of every jurisdiction it controls.

They control the culture and they destroy it. Donald Trump’s election can be understood as the public’s protest of that record of performance, and yet the Democrats and their friends in academia and the other cultural institutions have steadfastly, stubbornly refused to learn the lesson. I’ve said in this space that a good rule about the Left’s never-ending cultural aggressions is that if you take the current one, whatever it is, and apply to it the logical progression into absurdity you will in a short time identify the next cultural aggression.

Proof of this is the transgender movement, in which something which has long been considered as insanity by virtually every civilized society in human history — the failure to accept one’s sex as defined by one’s plumbing — has now been converted into a civil rights cause by a movement which has run out of proper clients.

We’ll leave aside some of the hilarity which has ensued surrounding the idea that the transgendered must be afforded a place on the postmodern totem pole of victimhood, perhaps chief among which is the existential destruction the transgendered offer to the gay rights movement. After all, society has largely come to terms with the contention that gay people were “born that way,” and should therefore be treated with the requisite understanding. But the transgendered were clearly not “born that way”; the presence of certain body parts at birth make one either male or female, and any change in that status only comes about by choice and action. If we’re to accept one, it becomes quite difficult to accept the other using anything like logic.

We can do that another time. For today, though, let’s just say this might be the end of the line for the Left and their efforts to drag us away from our civilizational moorings.

The end, because here is the state of the argument made by the transgender movement. We bring you one Zinnia Jones, a biological male identifying himself as a woman working as a “gender researcher, content strategist and technical author,” who is apparently afforded status as an activist and expert on transgender rights.

And Jones had this to say in a series of tweets last weekend…

“I don’t see a problem with telling straight guys who are exclusionary of trans women partners that they should try to work through that.

“Nobody has to be with anyone they don’t want, AND it’s okay to have a baseline social norm of treating trans women as the women they are.

“Being exclusionary of trans women partners should be an outlier and marginal position for straight men, not some commonplace expectation.

“These angry declarations that they have some absolute right to not want to be with trans women are just misplaced and inappropriate.

“You have the right to be a rude asshole, to refuse to examine your own beliefs at all, but that’s not something to be proud of.

“I also don’t believe the blanket claim of ‘straight men don’t want to be with someone who has a dick!’

“There’s some baseline rate for that as an actual true preference. But it’s artificially inflated by social stigma and biases.

“It’s subject to the effect of *incredible* numbers of straight men who want us but refuse to ever admit to it, and cover it with transphobia.

“Turns out touching a trans woman’s body or genitals is probably way less of an issue than most people think it is.

“It’s absolutely possible to work through this. It’s a dick? Yes — a woman’s. It’s part of her body.

“All genitals are sort of funny looking. It’s just flesh. You can probably deal with it.”

Now, we can all hopefully agree Zinnia Jones is quite obviously insane, not overly intelligent and quite likely attempting to be outrageous in order to get attention. As said above, we’re dealing with trivialities here.

Except this is, as best your author can tell, a summation of the transgender activist argument. This is the absurd destination to the cultural aggression we were hit with when the transgender movement first came to the scene. Before, it was drag queens in the ladies’ room. That, most people thought, was bad enough. Then it was employment discrimination in circumstances making it impossible for anyone to run a business when one of these people came around.

Oh, but that wasn’t all. Now we’re in a different place. Now, as Mr. Jones and others tell us, there is something wrong with straight men who refuse to engage in homosexual relationships so as to accommodate other men who choose to identify as female. You’re a bigot if that’s your position, and you’re being discriminatory.

This is quite literally where we are — the transgender activists are demanding to be accepted and romanced by a straight male for reasons of social justice and an end to bigotry and intolerance.

No, it’s not necessary to describe the ways in which this entitled insanity, marinated in radical academia and set loose on the population, cuts at basic human liberty to love whom one chooses. (Isn’t that the fundamental demand of the gay rights movement? Does it no longer apply to heterosexuals?) I’m going to assume everybody here recognizes all of that.

What I’d like to leave you with is this — can there be any more mind-blowing overreach than for the Left to present this to the public? Is this not the exposed flank from which the rout may commence?

Let’s start asking Democrat politicians if they think straight men are bigots if they don’t want to date shemales.

Stop laughing for a second, and think about this. We’ve now stumbled on what might be the greatest wedge issue in modern American political history. How are they going to answer the question? If they repudiate the transgender movement, they also repudiate the tactic of shaming as intolerant those people who reject the latest fad of social radicalism, and how far back can that be rolled?

But if not, does the entire Democrat Party not fall off the deep end to the disgust and rejection of the American public?

If that sounds like wishful thinking, and if this entire line of inquiry strikes you as painfully stupid, I can only say I don’t disagree. But this is where we are. And to date the Democrats have shown no ability to reel in their crazies. We’re already deep into the territory of the absurd — the Obama administration, after all, has completely upended the military over the prospect of admitting the transgendered, and the pediatric profession has been largely blown apart on this issue, to the extent pediatricians are now suborning what can only be described as intense child abuse on the part of radical, incompetent, or simply beleaguered parents.

Here’s a quote which hopefully explains why winning the politics on this issue matters. We bring you the great Gertrude Himmelfarb, who said…

What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized…. As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral — the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called — is now seen as pathological.

The Left has gone crazy, and they’re attempting to impose a crazy world on the sane. This may be the most vivid example. Can we not call them on it, please?