Men and women fill each other’s lives.
Each is
the source of the greatest and most intense pleasure that can be experienced by
the other. And because of this, the human race is perpetuated.
But there
is much more:
Every man
has a mother.
Every
woman has a father.
Many men
have one or more sisters.
Many
women have one or more brothers.
Most men
have a wife.
Most
women have a husband.
Many men
have one or more daughters.
Many
women have one or more sons.
And then,
of course, there are also grandfathers and grandmothers, grandsons and
granddaughters, and uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces.
These relationships
add up to an enormous part of the lives of most people, requiring an amount of
time and providing a level of satisfaction comparable to and often surpassing
that connected with work.
If anyone
with a strongly held fantasy of belonging to the opposite sex is to be regarded
as an actual member of the opposite sex, then the very concept of
the opposite sex is destroyed. Opposite to what? Opposite to a feeling
that one belongs to the opposite sex, a feeling that allegedly then determines
the reality of one’s sex?
On this
basis, the opposite sex to a man who “identifies” as a woman, i.e., feels,
that he is a woman, and is thereby regarded as an actual woman, is, violà,
another man. So a man becomes the opposite sex of a man. Thus, the very concept
of opposite sex is destroyed.
If feelings
and fantasies are to replace biological reality as the standard for determining
membership in a sex, then all of the above relationships between the sexes are
rendered null and void. There is then no difference between men and women,
between mother and father, between sister and brother, between husband and
wife, between daughter and son. For on the basis of mere fantasy, any of the
instances of any of these concepts can be transformed into its opposite.
If one’s
father can be one’s mother and one’s mother can be one’s father, then the
concepts “father” and “mother” have no basis for existing. And, likewise, none of
the other concepts of familial relationships can have any basis for existing.
In
seeking to abolish recognition of the biological basis of the distinction
between the sexes, the pronoun movement reveals hatred of sex and a desire to
obliterate it. It seeks to remove sex from our vocabulary not only with respect
to pronouns, but also all other distinctions between the sexes. Thus, for
example, we are no longer to speak of waiters and waitresses and of policemen
and policewomen, but of “servers” and “policepersons”—anything to get sex out
of the picture, anything to find a substitute for any reference to the
distinction between men and women.
Acceptance
of fantasies concerning membership in the opposite sex as a standard, and their
imposition on those who do not share them but who are nevertheless to be
compelled to participate in them, by having to use special pronouns to refer to
those who are consumed by them, is certainly one of the leading mass insanities
of our time, or any other time. It is proof of the intellectual and moral
bankruptcy of the greater part of today’s academia and media, of our so-called
“intelligentsia.” As Ayn Rand saw decades ago, the world needs “New
Intellectuals”—a new intelligentsia—to replace today’s clutch of amoral
ignoramuses that have misappropriated such once dignified names as “professor,”
“teacher,” and “journalist.”