It's extraordinarily easy to get lost in the weeds of the transgenderism debate, given its countless obscure and opaque layers of bizarre terminology, cracked metaphysiology, and out-and-out craziness. Many people prefer not to engage with it at all, or else effect a sort of gentle acquiescence to the whole thing: "I'll call people whatever they want to be called, it's just polite," and so forth.
But most confusing are those conservatives who are brave enough to challenge the transgender zeitgeist but who nevertheless engage in a strange sort of self-censorship while doing so.
These conservatives will criticize transgender orthodoxy while still ostensibly conceding its core point about male-female mutability.
How?
By appending the word "biological" to many of their arguments.
Consider:
The list goes on, but you get the point: There apparently exists now a heretofore unknown subset of humanity that falls under the rubric of either "biological man" or "biological woman." This terminology appears not to have existed prior to the transgender debate, and only then because conservatives thought it up as a way to get around using the Left's language and avoid Big Tech censors.
But the convention is redundant: The terms "man" and "women" are themselves biological terms, insofar as they are meant to refer to male and female human beings.
You can't say "man" or "woman" without referring to biology itself. There is thus no point to add "biological" to any of our arguments against transgender ideology.
Conservatives try to make two good-faith but still misguided arguments in favor of their adoption of this protocol. First, they say that using the term "biological" is a sort of ad-hoc marker of respect: We're not prepared to concede on the merits of transgenderism, but we also want to be as respectful of other people as we can be, ergo we'll style our arguments along purely objective, inarguable biological lines as a rough compromise with people who believe themselves to be transgender.
The problem is this: Transgender activists do not agree with this compromise (not at all). They increasingly consider biology to be an irrelevant distraction at best; indeed, the tides are turning so strongly against "sex" as a biological qualifier that major periodicals have declared the absolute rock-bottom basic facts of biological sex to be "phony science."
This "compromise" only makes LGBTQ activists even angrier. They have rejected it. It's not working. There's no point.
Second, some conservatives argue that we're simply trying to state our position while getting around the more vociferous social media censors and cancel culture lunatics: If, again, we couch our rhetoric in purely objective biological terms, maybe we can get away with it, and Twitter and Facebook will let us keep arguing our points, and we won't get thrown off of college campuses, or what have you.
But that won't work either: The people driving the transgender zeitgeist are largely the same people pulling the levers of social media and indeed wider society. And they know what you're trying to do. When they see "biological man" or "biological woman," they understand that you're trying to make a science-based argument against transgenderism. They don't like that, and eventually they're going to start censoring you and cancelling you over it anyway. It is simply, inexorably, a matter of time.
Our two choices, then, seem to be thus: We can either avoid any controversy by ceasing to talk about this issue altogether, leaving a generation of children (and vulnerable adult men and women) to be victimized by a terrible and destructive ideology; or we can speak plainly about the matter, with truth and conviction – right now, immediately.
Otherwise, we'll simply keep self-censoring ourselves until our malicious overseers go ahead and finish the job for us, which—if we're being honest—will probably be within the next few months or so.
I vote for the truth. So should you. It's always better.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
