We often tend to shrug off horrible and revolting ideas as outlandish, keeping them beyond the realm of the possible. ‘Arrey, aise thodi hota hai’ (These things can’t happen). But then, as the Adidas tagline says, ‘Impossible Is Nothing’, for the sad truth about life is that while good ideas may never come to fruition, evil ones often do. The ideas propounded by the postmodern ideology of transgenderism are among those that have escaped the fantasyland of left-wing academia and invaded the world of sports. Indeed, they have begun to hurt sportswomen—even literally. No one knows this better than Italian pugilist Angela Carini.
She exchanged a few punches in a 46-second bout with Algeria’s Imane Khelif at the Paris Olympics. “They were enough to persuade Carini that her Olympic debut was finished,” reported AP. “The Italy boxer abruptly walked away from her Algerian opponent and went to her corner Thursday, abandoning her bout—an extremely rare occurrence in Olympic boxing.”
Khelif was disqualified from the world championships last year as she couldn’t clear a gender eligibility test, but was allowed to compete at the Paris Olympics. This was primarily because the crazy idea of transgender ideology has entered the real world.
Transgender ideology has a couple of cardinal principles: first, gender identity may not be congruent with the ‘sex assigned at birth’; second, a person can choose their gender, regardless of the biological facts.
This is how the World Health Organisation, which is badly infested and infected with left-wing bugs, distinguishes between gender and sex. “Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth” (emphasis added).
This is the Left’s new project: to differentiate between sex and gender. Commenting on the subject, conservative political philosopher Ryan T. Anderson wrote in 2018, “We live in a postmodern age that promotes an alternative metaphysics. As I explain in When Harry Became Sally, at the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person—in particular, that people are what they claim to be, regardless of contrary evidence.” He went on to demolish the claims of transgender activists which “are confusing because they are philosophically incoherent.”
At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality, he wrote. “From this idea come extreme demands for society to play along with subjective reality claims. Trans ideologues ignore contrary evidence and competing interests, they disparage alternative practices, and they aim to muffle skeptical voices and shut down any disagreement.”
This is not hyperbole from a conservative thinker; the Left’s ideological terrorism claimed a victim eight years ago when University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson was hounded and persecuted by radical teachers, students, and kindred spirits. His crime was the refusal to use gender-neutral, alternative pronouns like ‘ze’ and ‘zir.’
The transgender ideology is also destroying the careers of sportswomen, as many of them struggle to compete against males and transgender males. There have been cases where males or transgender males, taking advantage of the growing acceptance of transgender ideology, have been able to masquerade as women and subsequently rape and molest women.
As I mentioned earlier, the left-leaning Biden administration nominated Judge Sarah Netburn for the Southern District of New York, even though she was a believer in this ideology. She had earlier placed a six-foot-two-inch biological male serial rapist in a women’s prison just because he claimed that he was a transgender woman.
As mentioned before, the Carini-Khelif match may have highlighted the perils of men or transgender males hurting women’s sports and sportswomen, but the abomination is not new. Quite apart from being an affront to commonsense and decency, it underlines a major disease left-wing thinkers are afflicted with: solipsism. Encyclopedia Britannica describes it “as an extreme form of subjective idealism that denies that the human mind has any valid ground for believing in the existence of anything but itself.”
This is an essentially epistemological description of solipsism; left-wing solipsism also has moral and axiological aspects. It not only disputes alternative explanations of reality; it also deprecates, diminishes, and marginalises any version of the truth that is at variance with its own. So, anyone who questions or challenges the transgender ideology, faces calumny and canards from the Left-liberal establishment. They are also de-platformed; Amazon, for instance, refused to sell When Harry Became Sally.
The International Olympic Committee has simply succumbed to the dictates of the Left-liberal establishment over the gender issue. Much to the chagrin of Carini and other sportswomen.
The author is a freelance journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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