Transition To Truth

The Supreme Court will uphold Bridget Phillipson’s guidance to schools, because it was always going to uphold whatever Phillipson had put in front of it. When he has not been supporting David Lammy’s attacks on trial by jury and on the right of appeal, then Lord Sumption has been trying to tell you that the Court had permitted separate facilities on the basis of biological sex, but had not required them. 

“You have gender dysphoria,” I used to think, and even say. “I have depression, but that doesn’t mean the doctor should give me something to kill myself, never mind suggest it to me.” Part of resisting the second atrocity, against which Phillipson voted, is reversing the first.

Without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth.

Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but economic inequality is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but biological sex is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line cannot hold the second, and those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first. Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has too often failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it.

What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of much of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification. Phillipson knows this. She needs to act on it.