I got to 3:50 and had to stop. A woman — and she is clearly a woman, acting not at all manly in any way that I can discern — glories in her “coming out” as “non-binary.”

Dr. LocoFoco, on Twitter, expressed the standard case against my reaction to such things: “The goal — even if it means transhumanism as a tool to actually achieve it — is everyone deciding their lives for themselves. Why not help people get there instead of criticize them because they don’t fit with your idea of what’s right, proper, scientific, or whatever else?” First off, “living for ourselves” is not at issue. What is at issue is whether you are living “for yourself” or for anyone when you misidentify reality in a consistently irreal way. Pretending that you can “become” something you cannot become is no advance for anyone. That is just witless fantasy. It is madness. Men cannot become women, and vice versa. Sure: dress as you will, talk as you will, whatever — even chop off your penis and have the surgeons try to create a fake vagina, no skin off my nose — but there are consequences for actions that are devastating, making the acts themselves foolish, and it is no service to anyone to encourage such atrocities.

Are good, “well-meaning” people not aware of the horrors of sexual reassignment surgery? It is not uncommon, now, to take the malpractice of Seventies’ “sex change” quacks and continue it: helping a “non-binary man ‘feel’ more womanly” [which is my translation of what they actually say] by keeping the penis but removing the testicles and inverting the scrotum for the fake vagina, leading to horrific medical consequences. I think we can all agree that real vaginas do not have hair inside.

The sheer insanity of the sexually confused is interesting for many human reasons. Take “The Libs of TikTok”: I inflict these people on myself for good reason. This shows a hugely influential element of the social world we live in. Filled with fantasists. Lost souls who are grasping for some relevance. Or have they been so unloved or so ignored or so actually abused that they join the bandwagon of pretend sexuality. It’s pathetic, and I do pity them. I do not hate them. Indeed, it is in part for their interest that I deny them the reality of their fantasies or the health and wisdom of their choices. I have no specific answers for what ails them, but my philosophy — which does pointedly investigate the roles of fantasy in human life — insists upon acknowledging the actual and the materially real. And warns against the unintended consequences of actions taken under the mantle of the pretense of what they absurdly call “their truth.”

So why is this at issue now in our culture?

Maybe it’s all the loopy, unthinking naturalisms of the past that have spawned this insanity, in reaction. I opposed slippery naturalism most of my adult life — it’s why I’ve been so Stoic-resistant, Epictetus’s ethical naturalism being such a bundle of prejudice and loopy non sequitur. But I’d run screaming to Epictetus’ hirsuite arms before I accept the idiocy of today’s “gender” obsessed.

Maybe it’s those loopy naturalisms that spawned this, but I don’t think so. I think it is the logic of the memeplex of leftism and cultural Marxism, the pathetic need always to find outsiders and make them a “cause.”

But that is the social frame of the malady. At bottom, surely, these people are wounded souls suffering from insignificance or worse. “Trans” is like most religious manias: it puts them deep into the warp and woof of reality. And like religious manias — Hobbes called them “enthusiasms” — they say more about their suffering than about reality.

A conscientious, caring person would try to alleviate the real causes of suffering, not get caught up in the religious mania that is Trans Soteriology. There is no salvation here. It is only human folly taken to the remotest level of crazy.

Regardless: this woman’s purple stuffed animal does symbolize the ridiculous and wacky nature of this anti-naturalist movement.

And regardless: sex is a binary in the human biology, and a people that refuses to make the most of it is doomed to die out. This trans-genderist nonsense is decadence all the way down to its nuttiest kernel of falsity.

Further: my friends who are “soft” and even “supportive” of this trans acceptance movement are playing into the neuroses and psychoses of deeply damaged people, causing great, great harm while solidifying these souls’ detachment from reality, unfitting them from leading happy lives.

And doing this disservice in the name of liberty and autonomy is a grave indecency. An affront not against nature but against philosophy, against wisdom.

Oh, and then there is the parade of the pitiful. Do you have the stomach to go beyond 3:50?

twv