Braver, Newer World

Last year, Massachusetts—ever the nation’s leader in supplanting human nature with the bromides of left-wing grievance politics—amended its non-discrimination statute for public schools to encompass “gender identity” within the litany of protected characteristics. Now the state’s department of elementary and secondary education has published “implementation guidance” for schools seeking to bring their practices in line with the new requirements. The document has to be read to be believed.

The state board of education swallows every dogma of gender theory with which embattled college conservatives are familiar, most fundamentally the obnoxious divorce of “gender” and “sex.” (For the reader uninitiated in the arcana of gender ideology: “sex” is one’s physiological status as male or female, “gender” the identity one exhibits, which may or may not align with society’s expectations on the basis of sex.) Actually, the board does one better, referring not to “birth sex” but rather “physiology or assigned sex at birth” (emphasis mine). Instead of being an objective, intelligible characteristic present at birth, sex is now something “assigned,” presumably at the more or less arbitrary decision of parents and doctors.

Since “gender identity” can no longer be assumed to be cognate with actual sex, “the person best situated to determine a student’s gender identity is that student himself or herself.” As a result, teachers, principals, guidance counselors, and fellow students are now legally bound to treat any boy who wants to be treated like a girl as if he were one, and vice versa, in everything down to, and including, restroom and locker room arrangements.

Let’s be real for a second: Human beings come in two sexes, male and female, which are distinguished by the presence or non-presence of a Y chromosome. Between these two classes there exist physiological, biological, and psychological differences so profound that every society in human history has had to make provision for them in some way or another. The cultural constructs with which they addressed this fact of human nature have varied—like Aristotle’s prime matter, human nature never exists except in some determinate, i.e. cultural, form—but only in the decadent West has there sprung up the insanity of treating sex as so trivial a part of one’s identity that it can be ignored, denied, or altered at will. And yet so successfully has this pathology spread that the children of Massachusetts are now to imbibe it en masse.

In imagining his Brave New World, probably the most anti-human dystopia recorded in literature, Aldous Huxley did not even think to do away with gender. The male inhabitants of the World State are unmistakably male, and the female characters are recognizably female. Sexual reproduction may have been got rid of, but sex has survived—men and women have survived. It has been left to the Massachusetts board of education to out-Huxley Huxley, and to guide us into the braver, newer world, where the beauty, excitement, and profound meaning of sexual difference must be buried, lest it impede the construction of our more perfect equality.