Thunder, Thunder, Thunderation

You will now have to be a girl to be a Girl Guide, but during the madness there were some good career moves. Gentlemen who were tired of being only moderately successful actors or comedians could declare themselves transwomen, and feel their careers hurtle into the stratosphere. Ladies who fancied a bit more prominence than they had attained through academia or the worthier sorts of journalism could make names for themselves as gender-critical feminists, and watch the new platforms build themselves. The latter have rarely used those platforms to advance economic equality or international peace. In what way are they still left-wing? In what way were some of them ever?

The leading gender critics bear more than a passing resemblance to the middle-aged, middle-class women who are conspicuous at trans events. Behind a small number of mostly older male transvestites march hordes of young women, a large minority but still a minority of whom think that they are men. Alongside those young women march a goodly number of their academic instructors and administrators of the same sex, as such instructors and administrators do now tend to be. Whether she likes it or not, Judith Butler is a woman. She is one of the most cited female academics in the world. And who is citing her? Humanities academia is ever more heavily female. But their days are numbered.

“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 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.