The Transgender Agenda: The War on Truth

Peter Hitchens is the brother of the late lamented Christopher Hitchens. While Christopher happily promoted leftist theories, especially those of the atheist variety, Peter represents the more conservative side of the sibling spectrum.

Today, writing in the Daily Mail,  Peter Hitchens takes aim at the latest appalling piece of leftist dogma. That being the transgender agenda. He points out that a vanguard of revolutionary fanatics are using the transgender agenda to take control of your thought. They are making themselves the final and ultimate arbiters of truth... thus relieving reality and objective facts of the burden. And they are of course using their superior wisdom to mutilate innocent children. If you cannot throw in a little human sacrifice, what good are you?

Hitchens writes:

I once thought the same about the transgender issue. But the idea that people are whatever sex they think they are is a terrifying weapon in the hands of modern Thought Police. Whatever you say, you cannot possibly be right about this. 

Express any opinion (apart from total submission), and within minutes you will be besieged by condemnation. It will be cleverly based on the idea that you are somehow being cruel to some troubled person, even though you aren't doing this at all.

Indeed, you are going to be attacked as a bigot, no matter what you think and no matter what you say. Whatever you say anything you are going to be wrong. It's not about right or wrong. It's about belonging or not belonging to the Party.

Even if you say that right thing the thought police will denounce you for not being sufficiently sincere. Hitchens explains that the transgender agenda is attacking biological realities, the realities of chromosomal sex difference. If your ideas supersede reality, they can no longer be tested. They must be accepted as transcendent truth:

But that is just a pretext. In reality, a whole moral and social system is being destroyed, and traditional ideas of male and female are the next target, now that husbands and marriage have been done away with. For once you begin down the road of sexual revolution, there's no end. There will always be someone more militant than you.

Hitchens suggests that it goes back to the French Revolution and to its corollary notion that human nature could be changed into whatever we wanted it to be. All great Revolutionary dictators, from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao, believe this. As did Marx, Freud and Heidegger. I discussed the point at length in my book, The Last Psychoanalyst:

Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive.

Today the thought police have taken out after a schoolteacher. The poor man slipped up and called a transgender girl a boy. He is going to be disciplined for his bigotry:

And that is why The Mail on Sunday's exclusive story, that a teacher has been disciplined for failing to respect the transgender gospel, is so important. His slip was small, and momentary. One of his pupils, who would once have been called a girl, has decided to be male. He called this person a girl. So he must suffer.

In the vanished world of absolute truth, the student's sex would not be a matter of opinion. People might (and I would favour this) treat the person's view of their sex with sympathy and try to go along with it. Who would want to hurt somebody on a matter of such delicacy?

But in the new revolutionary world, truth is what the revolution says it is. This works in many ways.

In a world where people respect facts and understand the difference between true and false this would not be an issue. In today’s politically correct world, it is a thought crime. And no thought crime can go unpunished.

Have you noticed that the people who constitute the Thought Police are up in arms when Donald Trump stretches and bends the truth? They refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag but they proclaim, for all to heat it, their eternal allegiance to fact. If, as has been definitively shown, transgender children and adults have no biological basis—aka fact-- for their belief—called delusional by some—they you are obliged to accept it unthinkingly, facts be damned.

If you think that Trump plays a bit loose with the facts, the transgender agenda seeks to obliterate reality on the bonfire of an ideology. Once reality has been erased those who hold the purest and clearest view of the dogmatic truth will be able to impose it on everyone. Power to the intellectual elites, even if they can’t think straight:

This leads down a very dark staircase. Reality must increasingly be forced to fit the beliefs of the new elite. Teachers must be punished for speaking the truth, so schools are no longer places where truth is respected or dissent allowed – which means they are dead to all intents and purposes.

As has often been noted on this blog, the transgender agenda tries to convert people during childhood, before the onset of puberty. It attempts to brainwash children into believing that they are transgender, then to subject them to puberty blocking treatments… leading up to gender reassignment surgery. One is constrained to note that the United States military, to its eternal disgrace, has chosen to pay for such surgeries-- in defiance of a presidential order-- and thus to legitimate the transgender agenda.

Hitchens writes:

And perhaps most grievous of all, teenagers are placed on a medical conveyor belt which leads to powerful body-changing drugs and possibly to surgical alteration.

It is not just crabbed reactionaries such as me who fret about this. In an eloquent article in The Times, the far-from-conservative commentator Janice Turner recently warned: 'But in a decade, when our adult children turn to ask, 'Why did you let me do this? Why didn't you stop me?' we may wonder if this was progress or child abuse.'

We are failing to stop this because we are afraid of the intolerant revolutionary mob, which would lock up dissenters if it could, but for the moment contents itself with Twitter storms and witch-hunts.

I can't laugh this off. It is not just a wind-up. It is a threat to free thought and, after many months of staying silent about it, I feel I have to say so.

That faint rumble you can hear is the mob assembling for another heresy hunt.

The war on truth, the war on facts is alive and well. It is even becoming more mainstream.