Thirty years ago, had one risen in a university seminar to announce that biological sex was a provisional label, that an inner feeling could overrule material reality, that hard gender categories were merely a social fiction, and that dissent from this doctrine constituted punishable harm, one would not have been investigated.
One would have been corrected. Possibly ridiculed. Certainly challenged. In any case, one would have been required to argue.
That was the point of a university. You would have been laughed out of the room.
The claim would have been seen as eccentric, even unserious — not dangerous, not criminal, not grounds for discipline — but simply implausible. You would have been dismissed. Across civilizations and religions, sex was regarded as a material fact. Masculinity and femininity admitted cultural variation; the male–female binary did not.
Then, in scarcely two decades, we were told that history had been asleep and that we, uniquely enlightened, had awakened.
We have see…
