Fans of the grotesque don’t need to read the stories of Flannery O’Connor, or flip through art books savoring the paintings of the great Hieronymus Bosch. Everyday reality will scratch any sane person’s itch for the lurid, the twisted, the ludicrous. Sometimes the spectacle is funny, sometimes baffling, but often it’s genuinely sinister. Especially if you remember the stakes for which we’re playing, both in this life and the next.

A Tragic Farce in the Senate

Perhaps the most outrageous recent exchange in our public life took place in Senate hearings, when the pro-family patriot Sen. Josh Hawley was questioning U.C. Berkeley Professor Khiara Bridges. As The Guardian reported:

During the judiciary committee hearing, Hawley, who has previously co-sponsored a bill which would prevent transgender children from competing in sports, questioned Khiara Bridges, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law who was invited to testify on reproductive rights.

“You’ve referred to ‘people with a capacity for pregnancy’,” he said. “Would that be women?”

Bridges replied: “Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy.”

…

Hawley said: “So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue. It’s … it’s what?”

Bridges said: “We can recognise that this impacts women while also recognising that it impacts other groups, those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.”

She added: “I want to recognise that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.”

A New Cult with its Own Inquisition

We can’t just lazily wave at Bridges’ position and point to it as madness. Of course it is, to you and me. We know with all the certainty of biological science and thousands of years of human civilization, plus the testimony of Scripture, that the divide between the sexes is real, crucially important, and tied to reproduction.

But that’s not enough. We face a new ideology that bears all the force of an evangelizing religion, backed by activist billionaires, which has captured all the high ground in our culture.

So we must think through clearly, even ruthlessly, the full implications of the dogmas taught by the Transgenderist cult, which public school teachers are preaching to our children — and Democrats are enshrining into law. (Don’t worry, Establishment Republicans will be obediently repeating the same superstition, just a few years later. They always do.)

We must follow the truth relentlessly, without flinching for fear of triggering thin-skinned activists. And we absolutely must parry the heavy rhetorical cudgel which Bridges wielded at Hawley. Namely, that some opinions may not be expressed, and must be simply censored, because airing them “opens up … people to violence.”

Let the truth be told, though the heavens fall. We must not live by lies, and cannot let the government uses its bayonets and bullets to cram lies down our throats. That’s how countries end up with gulags, as Solzhenitsyn warned us.

A Pyramid of Lies, Built on Gibberish

All that by way of background to my central argument, which I’ll lay out here in clear, inexorable steps.

1. Transgenderism is incoherent and its claims are literally meaningless. Its political demands are arbitrary and shifting precisely because it is grounded in mental confusion, willful obfuscation, and a pride-driven hatred of God’s creation. That is, of material reality, the world, and our human place in it.
   
2. Transgenderism demands, with the force of a powerful Oligarchy which includes social media giants and the State, that we repeat lies and force ourselves to believe them. It further demands that we strip people (real, biological women) of God-given rights they really have — in order to confer fake, made-up rights on fake, transgender women.
   
3. Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, period. Like anorexia and bulimia, it entails a person accepting and embracing false claims about his body, then engaging in self-destructive behavior as a result. We are naturally repulsed when we see the starved bodies of anorexics, and likewise when we see the botched, grotesque results of transgender surgery and hormones. This is natural, and good. It does not mean we intend violence toward the victims of these disorders. Nor that we fail to love them as Christians should.
   
4. Real love for people suffering from gender dysphoria would not entail encouraging them to mutilate their bodies and medicalize their entire lives — becoming addicted to dangerous hormones to force their mortal frames to conform (if unconvincingly) to their mental delusions. If your daughter were anorexic, the loving thing would not be to agree with her that she looks fat, even though her ribs are showing like a concentration camp victim’s.
   
5. Real love for children would not entail encouraging them to develop gender dysphoria, by making it fashionable, inserting inappropriate material into school lessons, or otherwise “grooming” and sexualizing them. But this is what Transgenderism demands.
   

Do the Research

Obviously, a whole book could be written, to unpack all these claims. And good ones have been written, such as Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, and Abigail Shreir’s Irreversible Damage. I encourage people to read them. And also to listen to testimonies from people who carried the heavy cross of gender dysphoria, unwittingly subjected themselves to medical malpractice at the hands of today’s lobotomy doctors, and now regret it. Walt Heyer is perhaps the most eloquent among the “ex-trans” community.

But for today, I think it’s sufficient to explore just my first claim, since all the others logically follow from it. If this premise is true, so are the conclusions.

Transgenderism Is Incoherent and Its Claims Are Literally Meaningless

I already wrote a column on this topic to mark the sad “transitioning” of the gifted actress Ellen Page. Rather than re-invent the wheel, let me quote the key sections here, then add some new reflections.

Let me violate good Gnostic manners and ask a few vulgar questions. Is Page going to have her perfectly healthy breasts removed? Will Page use some crude simulacrum of male genitalia to render her lesbian “marriage” now suddenly heterosexual? Will Page dose herself with male steroids, and undergo all the health risks? I hope none of the three, for her sake.

But we know that none of these things are necessary for greedy, shameless biological males who wish to scoop up all the prizes in women’s sports. Or lurk in their locker rooms. Or leave a male prison where they’re locked up for raping women, and move to a prison full of women whom they can rape.

No, precisely because biology is irrelevant, you need do none of these things to be a “trans.” You just need to … declare it, and everyone else must honor that choice. But what are you choosing, exactly? If you’re not making dangerous, destructive efforts to mutilate your body, what are you doing? What are you identifying with, or as, and how?

If the capacity for real motherhood or fatherhood is not part of “gender” then what is? Lipstick, high heels, and a high-pitched voice on the one hand — and lumberjack shirts, work boots, and unashamed farts on the other? By “identifying” as some gender at odds with your genitals, are you simply indulging a stereotype? If so, must strangers honor that? Must we blow up women’s sports, strip women of privacy, and subject some to physical danger (like the fellow prisoners of a suddenly “female” rapist, or girls on a rugby field mowed down by a 6’ 3” “girl”)?

All so that a few mentally ill people can LARP? And we as a society have to nod along with them and agree to pretend to believe them? At this point I insist on saying two things: “No,” and “H***, no!” A society that can force us to say that Bruce Jenner is a woman and Ellen Page is a man can force us to say anything at all. Including that 2+2=5.

Imagine Instead of Sex We Were Talking About Money

Nobody asks whether a chicken, or a gorilla, “identifies” as the opposite sex. Only fallen human beings, with our big, complicated brains, come up with sophisticated delusions like gender dysphoria. Or paranoid conspiracy theories about “the Jews.” Or bizarre means of mental self-torture like Scientology.

When Transgenderists and their dupes demand that we respect the “gender identity” of a “pregnant man,” or a bearded “transwoman” rapist in prison, what are they telling us to do? They’re insisting that we must cater to false cognitions, to psychological distortions. That we must remake all of society, and change how we speak and we act, to placate people trapped in illusions — who wish to conform to external stereotypes of the opposite sex. And ruin their health, mutilate their bodies, and trample on the rights of others to accomplish that.

Imagine things were different. Visualize a world where Trans ideology applied not to something trivial like the only means of reproducing the human species, but to something really important, such as money.

So people who claim to be billionaires with perfect credit scores and vast assets in real estate and stocks can walk into banks … and demand lines of credit worth $500 million. And bankers would have to comply, or else be accused of encouraging “violence” against the Transfinancial.

People who believe that they know as much as Harvard MBAs can claim that degree on their resumes — and employers have to hire them. And so on. Any hobo who puts on an ascot is now a Rockefeller heir, and you must treat him as such or face “cancellation.” Someone’s Transfinancial identity must be respected.

Now such things would never happen, because certain subjects are sacred.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”