So-called male bodies?

Roz Ward has been working with the Department of Education here in Victoria on a new transgender policy. She was quoted in the papers as complaining that those who were "assigned male at birth" have a hard time participating in girls sports because:

There is a perception that so-called male bodies are physically superior.

James Campbell, writing for the Melbourne Herald Sun, was struck by her use of the phrase "so-called male body":

I was taken aback by Ms Ward's claim that there is no such thing as the male body, or to borrow from Hamlet - that there is nothing either male or female, but thinking makes it so.

You probably think that if someone wants to believe something as obviously crackers as the idea that objectively there is no such thing as a man or a woman, only what we each want to be, well, that is their business. The rest of us will still be free to go on thinking there are men and women, just as we always have.

Go to the website for minus18, a taxpayer outfit that helps same-sex-attracted and transgender youth cope at school and you will see where we are heading.

In a section devoted to the vexed question of the pronouns he, she and they, its website tells the state's youth that while it's an easy mistake to make that "genitals and bodies in general don't reflect anything about a person's pronouns or gender." ["Gender Politics Distorts Reality", 28/01/2016]

James Campbell is criticising here a liberal mindset in which the aim is to make our biological sex not matter. It can be made not to matter either by insisting that what liberals call "gender" - the social expression of our biological sex - is fluid and not dependent on our being male or female, or else by denying that there are only two sexes, male and female, or else by blurring the lines in both respects.

The problem is that this mindset can't just be dismissed as crackpot as it is the state ideology. That's why Roz Ward is being allowed to help write the curriculum for Victorian state schools and James Campbell isn't. The transgender movement is triumphing everywhere because it fits into the "operating system" of society. So we either change the operating system or we can expect crackpot ideas to go mainstream over time and to move beyond criticism.