‘Tolerant’ left seethes with hate if you don’t accept ‘gender theory’

I recently met a young woman who tells me that she’s neither male nor female. She refuses to use her given female name and wants to be called by a rather generic word.

I like the woman and find her easy to get along with. I call her by the name she prefers and I go out of my way to avoid any discussion related to gender, because I see no need to be confrontational. I have no desire to intentionally offend her if I don’t have to.

What I won’t do, though, is to pretend she’s not a woman. She’s entitled to the bizarre belief which she’s been taught, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend that this gender fantasy is reality.

In this dysfunctional culture, we are regularly lectured that we “hate” people if we refuse to pretend that reality is something which it’s not. The most peculiar part of it is that I feel absolutely no hatred for the people who have bought into “gender theory,” but the social justice warriors of the progressive left regularly express vicious hatred for those like me — those who have a serious and fundamental philosophical difference with them over the nature of reality.

I don’t hate people who call themselves “transgender” or “non-binary” or any of the other dozens of new and unscientific terms. But their leftist supporters hate me because I won’t deny objective reality as I rationally understand it.

And this is why millions of people today are afraid to be very public when they admit that gender is a biological fact, not a “social construct.”

At its core, this is an intellectual disagreement. What does the word “gender” mean? Until very recently in human history, gender and biological sex have been the same things. A hundred years ago, the most educated and progressive person around would have considered you a lunatic if you had expressed the opinion that a “man” can have a baby.

The notion that gender is completely separate from biological sex is called “gender theory.” It was fully developed by leftist scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. You can trace its origins to the existentialist philosophy of European thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre.

The fundamental doctrine of Sartre’s philosophy is that “existence precedes essence,” by which he meant that human beings create themselves — their meaning and values — because life itself doesn’t have any inherent identity or value. According to this line of thinking, a person has no meaning or identity until he creates it for himself.

His lifelong partner — though they never married — was French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who extended Sartre’s ideas to feminism. In her 1949 book, “The Second Sex,” she turned Sartre’s mantra — that “existence precedes essence” — into the idea that a person isn’t born a woman but rather becomes a woman. Her most famous line was, “One is not born but becomes a woman.”

In the decades to come, leftist academics would take the work that started with Sartre and then with Beauvoir and create what they called “gender theory.”

To the people who accept gender theory, all humans are born as essentially identical beings. Yes, they say, we have sex organs of one sex or the other (not counting the rare intersex person), but those aren’t essential to what we are. They say that any generic human can decide to be a man or a woman — or neither. Or any of the bizarre new notions of gender that they’ve created.

(If you’re interested in the philosophical roots of the idea, here’s a YouTube video which does a nice and civil job of explaining the background in more detail than I’m going to give here.)

Most people have no idea about the philosophical background of the idea and they have little notion — if any — that this is a brand new idea in human history. But for reasons related to leftist political activism, many angry people have decided that unless you agree with this new idea, you must hate certain people.

This is insanity.

They created this idea out of whole cloth. They simply decided — in light of their own beliefs about how they believed other people should see the world — that gender was a “social construct.” They claim that if you and I believe that gender is biological — instead of something that’s just created by culture — we are hateful bigots.

Not only is it insane, but it’s intellectually dishonest.

If philosophers and academics want to come up with a new theory, that’s a reasonable thing. New theories with which to interpret reality and human history come and go. Some are good and survive. Others die out. The problem is that this is new dogma which is being dictated politically, not through honest intellectual discourse.

You must believe this — and it must be presented to children as fact — or else you are labeled a bigot who “hates” certain people.

Yes, it’s irrational and dishonest, but it’s easier for intolerant people to scream about hatred than it is for them to win an intellectual argument for an idea which most people consider nonsense.

Over the last couple of decades, most decent people have learned to stay quiet about gender, because they knew that holier-than-thou finger-pointers would soon be telling them how hateful they are if they dared to disagree with the new dogma. So these reasonable people didn’t bother to engage in the argument anymore — leaving the field in the exclusive control of leftist activists who got what they wanted without having to engage in real intellectual discourse.

The truth of the matter is that there really are a lot of people opposed to gender theory who are hateful in one way or another — many who simply hate anything outside the bounds of what they were taught to be true. But most intellectually honest people who are presented with the idea — outside of a political context — tend to think it’s a mistaken idea. And that is not about hate, but reason.

Many of us have legitimate intellectual (and pragmatic) reasons for believing the idea is one big politically motivated sham. But for the “tolerant” left, dissent on some intellectual points is not tolerated.

It’s true that there are some hateful and intolerant people on the right, but at least they never set themselves up as paragons of tolerance, which the left has done.

On points such as this, it’s the so-called liberals who are highly illiberal and wildly intolerant of anybody who expresses disagreement with what has become their dogma. And they seem ignorant of the fact that this idea was created out of whole cloth by academics in the recent past. They can’t accept the fact that defining words and concepts is a legitimate function of honest inquiry which deserves real intellectual debate.

Because of this, it’s not worth engaging with them in casual online discussion, because these social justice warriors define you as hateful before the first words are exchanged. You can’t win, because they have condemned you before you ever start.

You can speak the truth in love — if you’re willing to — but you can’t expect to engage with them on the terms of engagement which they believe are normal and reasonable. So I rarely even try. This is one of my very rare attempts to express reason about a subject where reason doesn’t seem welcome.

There are many contradictions involved in gender theory and the way it is used and taught, but logical contradictions don’t seem to bother most of the left today.

What’s worst is that many people are being confused and damaged by a political agenda in which they are pawns. Young people are being taught that they don’t have any essential objective reality about them.

In truth, you are born as a child version of a man or a woman. You can choose to be as masculine or feminine as you choose. You can choose to live any way you want. You can choose to wear whatever clothes you want. But dressing like the opposite sex — or even cutting off your genitals and stuffing yourself full of sex hormones — doesn’t change your gender any more than going to McDonald’s makes you a hamburger.

I’ve known a few people who consider themselves transgender who seem to be normal and healthy people. If they choose to live and act as the opposite gender from the one they were born, that is absolutely their right. I don’t object to them believing whatever they want.

But I do object when I’m told I hate such people. And I do object when people scream at me that I should shut up about something which I believe is damaging many children. And most of all, I object when a politically motivated group of people tell me that I am “hateful” if I don’t deny objective reality as I understand it.