A convicted sex offender in Michigan is heading to prison for 10–20 years after being caught with child pornography on his computer. What makes this case interesting is the defense that 45-year-old Joseph Gobrick offered in court. Speaking to a judge at his sentencing hearing, Gobrick claimed that he has a First Amendment right to look at child porn. He also claimed that he identifies as an eight-year-old girl.

“I’ve always been an eight-year-old girl,’’ Gobrick contended. “Even in my drawings and fantasies, I am always an eight-year-old girl. … There are adults having sex with me in an online forum as an eight-year-old girl.”

The judge apparently did not find this argument persuasive. No reasonable person would. But an obvious question is raised here. Why exactly can’t Gobrick identity as a young girl? On what basis can we deny or disqualify his self-identification?

Again, the reasonable among us know the answer. He can’t identify as one because he isn’t one. According to all available metrics, he is a 45-year-old pervert, not a third grader. He cannot choose to be a different age. He is the age he is, and that’s all there is to it. It is either insanity or willful deception that causes him to make this claim about himself. We therefore are perfectly justified in refuting his self-identity and refusing to play along with it. More than merely justified, we are in fact morally obliged to insist on truth over harmful fantasies and delusions.

But propagators of left-wing gender theory are not reasonable. Rather, they insist on unreason. They argue that a man can be a woman — not just symbolically or legally, but actually, literally — even in spite of the testimony of his own biological and chromosomal makeup. In the case of a man identifying as a woman, the only thing that matters, they say, is how he feels about himself. The objective facts are irrelevant. Biology is a moot point. He need provide no proof. We are to take him at his word, and that’s all there is to it.

Well, if biology and physical reality are irrelevant to the question of sex, why should they suddenly be relevant to the question of age? If Gobrick can identify as a female, why can’t he identify as a female of whatever age he chooses? At least a man who “feels like a child” can rightly point out that he was once a child, so he has some frame of reference for judging these feelings. And at least it does make sense, in the case of certain mental disabilities, to say that an adult “has the brain of a child.” None of this vindicates Gobrick to any extent at all, but my point is that transageism is actually more credible and makes more sense than transgenderism. It’s still bogus, but slightly less so. Age does change, after all. I will not be a 33-year-old man forever. But I will be a man forever. If my sex is a fluid characteristic, how much more fluid must my age be?

We have not yet gotten to the point where the Left will openly defend a man like Gobrick and his right to be accepted by society as the child he supposedly believes himself to be. But we will get to that point. We have to. They’ve already argued his case for him, even if they won’t admit it and maybe don’t yet realize it.