It’s a curious thing about modern leftism that the more its adherents gibber about ‘science’, the less regard they show for actual science.
In a way, ’twas ever thus. Marxism was supposedly the ‘science of sciences’. Marxist theories were ‘scientific’: Never mind that reality keeps disproving this ‘Marxist science’ and almost always at the cost of human disaster. The ‘Marxist biology’ of Trofim Lysenko led directly to the calamitous famine of the Great Leap Forward in China – perhaps the worst mass-murder in human history.
Still, no matter how much their nonsense fails the test of reality, the Marxists just keep at it. Critical Race Theory and Gender Theory both claim to be ‘science’ – while being resolutely at war with actual scientific reality.
Not to mention glaringly self-contradictory.
For instance, according to Gender Theory, ‘gender’ is a ‘social construct’, divorced from hard, biological reality. While some of the loopier ‘gender academics’ assert that even biological sex doesn’t exist, others settle for claiming that ‘sex and gender are different’. Which they aren’t: for nearly a millennium, the two words were synonyms. In normal English usage they still are. But, from the 1970s on, Marxist academics began to force an artificial divorce between the synonyms. This is classic Marxist methodology, in keeping with the Soviet delusion of the Marxist ‘New Man’: just keep telling people that something is so, shoot enough people who disagree, and, magically, it will come to pass.
Gender is, supposedly, completely fluid. Men can become women, and vice-versa, or both, or neither. A ‘trans-woman’ (to us Luddites, a man in a dress and some lippy) is every bit a ‘woman’ as anyone with two X chromosomes. ‘Trans-men’ (girls with butch haircuts and a mastectomy) are as manly as any man with an XY chromosome. In a true triumph of ideology over brute reality, ‘men’ can get periods, fall pregnant and breastfeed babies.
If that’s not whackadoodle enough, there’s also ‘non-binary’ and ‘genderfluid’. These magical gender fairies can be neither male nor female, or change from one to the other at will: from day to day, or hour to hour.
That’s not the only ‘social construct’ the wokesters are imagining. Another, they claim, is race. We’re now lectured that it’s ‘science’ that race is also a ‘social construct’, likewise divorced from biological reality. Which might come as a surprise to the millions of people who’ve taken an Ancestry DNA test.
But there’s a notable difference between how Wokeists treat these two ‘social constructs’.
It would make sense, after all, that if people can ‘transition’ from one socially constructed gender to another, then they must equally be able to transition from one socially constructed race to another?
Oh, hell, no. In a stunning act of cognitive dissonance, Wokeists who embrace trans-gender are appalled by trans-race.
Yes, people have indeed tried on the trans-race gambit – and the Wokeists are outraged.
When YouTuber Oli London surgically ‘transitioned’ from a white English lad into his preferred ‘self’ as a Korean, he was only following the same logical path as thousands of boys who’ve surgically transitioned into girls and vice-versa. Surely, then, he should have been a woke hero: instead, he sent the Wokeists into pearl-clutching meltdowns.
London, though, was far from the first race-transitioner. A whole bunch of people have been transitioning their race for years. These are the so-called ‘race shifters’, also known as ‘box-tickers’, ‘Pretendians’ (in Canada) and ‘Fauxborigines’ (in Australia). Many are folk who claim to have suddenly discovered a long-hidden ‘touch of the tar’ in their family tree (although many seem oddly resistant to undergoing DNA testing to settle the matter for certain) but others don’t even bother with that. Rachel Dolezal, for instance, simply slapped on some fake tan and permed her hair. Beverley Jean Santamaria and Maria Louise Cruz changed their names to, respectively, ‘Buffy Sainte-Marie’ and ‘Sacheen Littlefeather’ and made their fortunes and careers pretending to be Native Americans.
The proliferation of DEI quotas, both in academia and business hiring, being able to lay claim to a suitably ‘victim’ racial or sexual status, became an immediate and lucrative career leg-up. The incentives are clear: Ivy League universities rate a Black underachiever higher than a White or Asian A-grader. Valuable scholarships are showered on ‘minority’ applicants. Even in such formerly rigorous industries as Air Traffic Control, a black applicant who failed maths or science in high school scores higher on hiring rubrics than a white applicant with a pilot’s licence or college degree. I wish I was making that up.
In the US, blonde, blue-eyed, Senator Elizabeth Warren made her academic career by claiming, against all the evidence of our lyin’ eyes, that the über-Nordic visage which would have made her Play-Madchen des Monats in Hitler’s Germany concealed a true Native American victim status. White woman apply with forked pen.
Similarly, the wattle-necked, pasty white Bruce Pascoe claims not one, not two, but four ‘Aboriginal’ ancestries. Once again, despite all the evidence of genealogy (every single one of his ancestors traces back to England and three of the four have publicly repudiated his claims), he’s making a fortune, not just from his ludicrous books, which make Erich von Daniken look like a rigorous scholar, but from government ‘indigenous’ grants, and an ‘indigenous’ academic posting.
Then there’s the plethora of ‘Aunties’ and ‘Uncles’ who, having ticked the ‘Indigenous‘ box on as many government forms as they can...these invariably pasty-faced folk enthusiastically don the full ‘indigenous’ paraphernalia. It’s all ochre facepaint, possum-skin cloaks and insisting on being a ‘proud (insert tribe) man’ or ‘woman’ – and, just coincidentally, reap in a small fortune in ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies (at upward of a few grand a pop for small-beans affairs, to five and six-figures for a big sporting match or government event).
But Pascoe and his fellow troughers are merely the most prominent and egregious of a wave of race-shifters across Australia’s suburbs and inner-cities. ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI)’ is the fastest-growing race in Australia. Similarly, in Canada, the Métis tribes of Nova Scotia have apparently exploded in numbers, growing from just 0.09 per cent of the population to 2.5 per cent in 2016.
This astonishing demographic explosion cannot be explained by normal population growth: clearly, many, many, people have only begun to ‘identify’ as Métis in the past two decades. Aboriginal Australians are not exactly breeding like rabbits, either: in fact, Aboriginal women’s fertility has plummeted in the last few decades, even as the ‘Aboriginal’ population has exploded. Aboriginal fertility is only just above replacement level.
Where are all these new ‘Aborigines’ in Australia and Canada coming from?
The new recruits to the ranks of Métis, curiously enough, often seem particularly interested in the right to hunt moose, which is restricted in some forests to Métis. The growth in ‘Aboriginal’ Australians is almost entirely down to the race-shifters. Astonishing numbers of Australians are coming out of the racial closet, it seems, and ‘identifying’ as ‘people of colour’.
For many, the attraction is no doubt simply the cachet of claiming ‘victim’ status. In Australia, notably, race-shifters tend to predominate in the big cities like Melbourne and Sydney. Many are university educated. These are people who’ve been inculcated in the Critical Race Theory milieu where ‘whiteness’ is a blemish. To the wokeist, whites are responsible for all the world’s ills. All the supposed glories of white culture, from classical music to science, are really the province of ‘People of Colour’. ‘White’ has become woke-speak for everything bland, boring and suburban.
What could be more exciting for a wokeist, then, than to discover a strand of vibrant colour in the otherwise blandly white fabric of their existence?
For the woke purveyors of identity politics, though, there’re some obvious problems with this outbreak of race-shifting. Not least that it threatens to overturn their bedrock dogma of ‘white privilege’.
After all, why would hundreds of thousands of people give up all that tremendous, unearned ‘privilege’ that simply being born white supposedly confers on them? If ‘white privilege’ were really a thing, it logically follows that people would be religiously scouring their ancestry of any trace of a ‘touch of the tar’, as the saying used to go. Why would anyone willingly, proudly and publicly even, shoulder the burden of ‘systemic’ racial oppression and discrimination in this ‘colonised’ society?
It just doesn’t make sense. No more than a Berliner in 1936, watching the Gestapo round up victims for the concentration camps, chasing after them, shouting, ‘Wait! I’m Jewish, too! Take me! Take me!’
Why would anyone willingly sign up for that?
Unless, of course, it’s all bullshit.
But… surely not.
It’s science, after all. Gotta respect ‘the science’.
