Hey, my brain is up here, buddy.

Guest opinion columnist and professor of English at Barnard College "Jennifer" Finney Boylan wants you to understand that you need to abandon all the obvious signs that have been used throughout the entirety of human history to determine if someone is a man or a woman and instead "look at the brain."

I can kind of see how he'd prefer that.

What's particularly interesting about his argument is that he is not referring to gender, the concept that so many trans activists have latched onto like a life preserver in a sea of objective reality, the better to lecture us about "social constructs" and the like rather than have to address the immutable, demonstrable, and visually obvious realities of biological sex.

No, Boylan is not prepared to concede that "biological sex" is different and that a trans women is still a "biological male."

Boylan is arguing that trans women and trans men are indeed biologically women and men, as long as you look at their brain.

This is the next frontier of gaslighting.

Boylan begins the piece recounting a Chevy Colorado commercial from 2004.

There they are, in their Chevrolet Colorado, five dudes bouncing up and down as the truck grinds through the rugged American high country. Two guys up front, three in the back. Shania Twain is blasting. The fellow in the middle is singing along. "Oh, I want to be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!"

It's a very funny commercial from saner times.

Boylan goes on to describe the commercial and then pivots to the ceremonial performative virtue "tsk tsking" of our social betters.

This commercial aired back in 2004, and even now it's not clear to me if it's offensive or empowering, hilarious or infuriating.

It's worth a moment to pause on this bizarre mismatch of choices.

Offensive?

Only to the humorless or perpetually aggrieved.

Empowering?

This was 2004. The only thing it was intended to empower was Chevy Colorado sales.

Hilarious?

Well, at least he got that one right, but he threw that in there for the juxtaposition, the set up for where he really wanted to go.

Infuriating?

Ah, there it is, that's the good stuff: The warm pleasure of righteous rage washing over you like a comforting bath.

Seriously, if you find yourself infuriated by a joke, you ought to seek the services of a medical professional.

But this 2023, of course, and your psychologist will likely affirm whatever delusional episode you are experiencing because therapists no longer try to cure patients, they try to cure society.

It's a fun tune, and I admit I kind of loved seeing that commercial. But at its heart is an issue central to our current political moment.

No, at its heart is joke wrapped in a takeoff of an iconic Robert Palmer video from the '80s. To try to spin some greater social meaning from a 26-year-old pop song used in a 19-year-old one-joke truck commercial is among the shallowest of modern-day "think piece" tropes.

No matter, buckle up because here we go!

When someone says they feel like a woman, what exactly does that mean?

When "someone" says.

Across the country, conservatives are insisting that — and legislating as if — "feeling" like a woman, or a man, is irrelevant. What matters most, they say, is the immutable truth of biology.

Yes, conservatives are insisting on reality, as opposed to fantasy.

That's what sane people do.

Boylan goes on to detail various legislative efforts and then gets to his point.

This term, "biological males," is everywhere now. And it's not used only by right-wing politicians. People of good faith are also wrestling with the way trans people complicate a world they thought was binary.

Trans people do not "complicate a world [we] thought was binary," any more than a lunatic screaming on the corner about being Jesus complicates our understanding of the Bible.

Boylan then launches into a series of tired and ridiculous arguments that appeal only to people who long ago abandoned even the pretext of intellectual honesty or rigor.

So what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It's about chromosomes, right?

You know what's coming. A recitation of how ackshually not all chromosome pairs are XX or XY.

The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on...

How can this be, if sex is only about a gene?

It's not, but by all means, keep setting up those straw men and knocking them over if it makes you feel "empowered," like a child razing an army of toy soldiers.

There are all kinds of genetic mutations. Most are benign, including some of the ones Boylan details and some are medical disorders.

He kind of skips over that last part.

He's not done quite yet.

Some people respond by saying that sex is about something else, then — ovaries, or testicles (two structures that begin their existence in the womb as the same thing).

He thinks he just made a point.

Hey, if you like that, here's something that will really blow your mind: We all start out as the same single fertilized cell meaning we were all non-binary once!!!!!

What do we do then, with the millions of women who have had hysterectomies? Have they become men? What about women who've had mastectomies? Or men with gynecomastia, or enlarged breasts?

Are these people not who they think they are?

He thinks he's being profound. He really does.

If you have a hysterectomy, you're still a woman, just as if you had your legs amputated you are still a human being.

This is not complicated.

Unsurprisingly, Boylan has the standard collection of meaningless awards academics give each other hoping no one notices how intellectually vacant they are.

At this point he moves on to his main hook. The brain!

In the past decade, there has been some fascinating research on the brains of transgender people.

This part takes up barely a quarter of the piece, and for good reason: There is little to no science backing it up, and what there is is contradictory, including the studies he cites. The best he can come up with among the "fascinating research on the brains of transgender people" is that, and this just might upend your world and change the way you think about everything:

They perceive one specific odor slightly differently.

A study described by author Francine Russo in Scientific American examined the brains of 39 prepubertal and 41 adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria. The experiment examined how these children responded to androstadienone, a pungent substance similar to pheromones, that is known to cause a different response in the brains of men and women. The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender.

A study that examined one substance that's kind of sort of like a pheromone using 80 kids. That's pretty much what Boylan is hanging his hat on. That's it.

Oh, and he kind of buried the lede, as they say.

(The results were less clear with prepubescent children.)

Oh?

First, that means only the 41 kids who were older demonstrated the results the researchers were looking for, a pretty small sample size, but more to the point, there was no such response among younger children.

So, maybe, just maybe, wanting to mutilate younger children isn't heroic, but rather monstrous, and particularly so?

Interestingly, Boylan seems to abandon the brain argument as quickly as he raised it.

The years to come will, perhaps, continue to shed light on the mysteries of the brain, and to what degree our sense of ourselves as gendered beings has its origins there. But there's a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance

Then whey did you just bring it up?

— it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.

He goes on like that for a while, concluding the passage with this.

All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.

Well, no, but let's accept that for a moment. What Boylan is saying is that there is no scientific or factual basis for his position. I think it's stunning that he would concede this.

So, what is his point, then, now that the headline of the article, likely not even written by him, but an overeager editor, has been rejected?

Feelings.

When the person in that Chevy ad sings, Oh, I want to be free … to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!, the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.

What Boylan wants is for us to abandon millennia of what constituted our understanding of what a woman (or man) is, and replace it with… how he feels.

As with so much that is going on in the world today, this is an explicit attempt to replace reality with fantasy, to strip the world of objective truth, the better to shape it in a manner more to our liking.

This is, in short, insanity.

My libertarian instincts are such that I have little to no interest in what you call yourself and will largely leave you alone to live whatever fantasy you want.

But they don't want to accord me the same courtesy. They require I believe it, too.

And that our children believe it.

It is the normalization of delusion, the mainstreaming of a purely subjective world.

It's O'Brien's four-fingers test.

This is a test we should all endeavor to fail, and fail loudly.