Rotten fruit

The fruits of bad philosophy are rotten to the core.  This is not to say that all problems stem from bad philosophy, only that if the core principles which undergird a philosophical system are rotten, so too will be the fruits. 

We may approach the problem from either direction; which is to say, we can discover erroneous philosophical principles, and from them find our way to absurd positions on moral issues; or we may start with the latter and trace our way back to the former.

For instance, the Evil League of Reactionaries has recently been vanquished, and the metaphysical absurdity known as gay marriage has been accepted by the culture.  The legal system will no doubt follow.  In the meantime, the Forces of Progressivism have moved on to win "rights" for the transgendered. 

Note first that the term transgendered is a neologism of the Orwellian sort we have been discussing.  So long as people talked of sex, we resided in the realm of Science.  A male human was one who possessed both an X and a Y chromosome, while a female human possessed two X chromosomes. 

Hence the shift to gender which is, to repeat the cultural Marxist mantra, "a social construct".  Sex is determined biologically: it applies to the body of human being; gender is determined psychologically: it applies to the mind.  By ignoring sex and focusing on gender, a man could claim to feel like a woman inside and that claim was expected to override his biology. 

In other words, we've split the human being into two and allowed the mind of man to reign over his body.  This is the rotten philosophical core of modern progressivism.  The ostensible argument was that gender was a social construct; the actual argument was that the real social construct was biology.

This is rank nonsense of the highest order.  A man can no more cease to be male than he can jettison his humanity and become a bird.  Both his maleness and his humanness are fundamental to his nature.  Sure, quack scientists can shoot him up with hormones; they may even treat him as a walking laboratory in which to implant a human child.  But they can't even pretend to alter his genetic structure so that he no longer possesses the dreaded Y chromosome which threatens to call him back to reality.  He cannot become a woman; he can only become a sad freak, upon whom we may look with pity.

If we accept the fiction that the body is only a prison for the mind, there is no end to the silliness which we can assert.  Not only sex, but age, race, ability, all attributes of the body, can be substituted at will.  No longer am I an evil white cismale--the idiotic modifier cis implies that I do not suffer from mental illness, only bad prose--I am actually a gay black trans grandmother.  Please address me accordingly.

Of course, no one is ready to take that sort of nonsense seriously, even though it follows logically from this mind body split.  Sex is held to be amorphous because it further undermines the natural law and healthy human relations.  Sexual autonomy is a goal in a way that racial autonomy simply isn't.  Anything that furthers the illusion of sexual autonomy--for, after all, one can never completely separate sex from procreation--is desirable.

It follows, then, that while it is beneficial to point out the contradictions inherent in what passes for progressive metaphysics, we should not be too troubled when our criticisms are brushed off.  For bad metaphysics are only a means to an end.  We preach to the indifferent, and to the convinced who do not yet realize what is at stake.