If You've Been Hankering to Be a Cat, I've Got Good News.

But if you've been hankering to keep civilization from circling the drain, I've got bad news.

Paul wrote here about how bared-teeth transgenderism aims to transform the country and, as he memorably put it, to “rub our noses in their sexual preferences and to control how we say it smells.”

Paul’s post bears two characteristics typical of him: It’s insightful, and it’s a bit on the charitable side.

I just saw a story from the British journalist Melanie Phillips that tells you in blunt terms where we’re headed. I’m going to quote it because there is no way adequately to paraphrase it — and readers might think I’d be using paraphrase to make it up, which I wish I were. Here it is:

A Church of England school teacher told a pupil she was “despicable” after she refused to accept that her classmate identifies as a cat.

The 13-year-old girl and her friend were reprimanded by their teacher at Rye College, in East Sussex, on Friday at the end of a Year 8 class on “life education” in which they were told they can “be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you”.

The row, which has infuriated parents, was allegedly sparked by one of them asking a fellow pupil: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”

Their teacher told them they were being reported to a senior leader and were no longer welcome at the school, part of the Aquinas Trust, a Church of England network of 11 schools, if they continued to express the view that only boys and girls exist.

The Telegraph has heard a recording of the heated exchange taken by one of the pupils, in which the teacher starts by saying “how dare you – you’ve just really upset someone” by “questioning their identity”. The pupil responded: “If they want to identify as a cat or something then they are genuinely unwell – crazy.”

The teacher then asks the girls “where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders”, adding: “It is not an opinion.” The teacher said that “gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is about how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson.”

She added that “there is actually three biological sexes because you can be born with male and female body parts or hormones” and “there are lots of genders – there is transgender, there is ‘agender’ who are people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.  

The girls said they “don’t agree with that” and that you “can’t have” an “agender” identity: “if you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy – that’s it”.  

The teacher interjected in a raised voice: “What do you mean you can’t have it? It’s not a law ... Cisgender is not necessarily the way to be – you are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.”  

The teacher suggested they were homophobic and confused, which the girls denied. When the pupils said their mothers would be on their side, the teacher responded: “Well that’s very sad as well then.” 

The teacher said that “if you don’t like it you need to go to a different school”, adding: “I’m reporting you to [senior staff], you need to have a proper educational conversation about equality, diversity and inclusion because I’m not having that expressed in my lesson.”

This episode wonderfully captures a number of things Paul and I have been discussing on Ringside — the core weapons Wokeism owns and their deployment in the culture war that has been thrust upon us (and to which the Leftist press demands we silently surrender, lest we out ourselves as nothing more than red-meat wahoos). Three of them are (1) the insistence that there is no objective truth, (2) the hijacking of language, and (3) the menacing belligerence with which the first two are delivered to us lesser creatures.

I’ve sometimes wanted to let traditional, free speech-friendly liberals off the hook from the sickness now abroad in the culture, but in truth they bear considerable responsibility for creating the Petri dish from which the Woke monster emerged. It’s traditional liberalism that’s been telling us for decades (and now) that “lived experience,” personal autonomy and self-actualization sweep away everything before them. Ms. Phillips reminds us that, “I can be whatever I choose to be” has long been the grand catchphrase of western progressives.  So they can’t just walk away from all blame when their students throw back at them, “OK, I want to be a cat.” Having disarmed the culture of its means to retort, “That’s complete horsesh*t,” they find they’ve disarmed themselves as well.

And so now we are where we are. Individuals born as men can choose to be women; those born as women can choose to be men. But if they can change their sexual identity just like that, why stop at gender? Why not identify as a cat?…

The worst and most sinister aspect of this epidemic of coerced mass derangement is that our children are being groomed to it in their schools.

The Wokesters are shrewd enough, for the moment, to mostly keep things under wraps (although sooner rather than later their arrogance will get the best of them).

As Lottie Moore of the Policy Exchange think-tank’s Biology Matters Unit has written in the Spectator: 

Over 60 per cent of schools are failing to inform parents when a child discloses that they want to change their gender, according to a survey conducted in March by Policy Exchange. A third do not inform the Designated Safeguarding Lead, the standard procedure for all safeguarding issues within a school. Nearly three quarters of the schools we asked teach that everybody has a gender identity – and a quarter that some children may be “born in the wrong body”. Such ideas have no basis in scientific reality — and can cause serious harm to vulnerable children.

As is so often the case, our opposition is telling us where to strike. Glenn Youngkin picked up on it, or something very much like it, and it won him the governor’s mansion in Virginia. Ron DeSantis is picking up on it too, although he could use to refine his message. (You can tell he’s making headway with it from the increasing frequency with which the MSM sneers at DeSantis that he’s “Trump-lite”).

This next election is going to be about many things, but to me, the central question is just this: Do we want to deconstruct or to restore the foundations of American life? Some of the main sub-questions are: What are we going to teach our children and who decides; how much crime we aim to tolerate; and whether the majority of the American people — fair-minded people of good faith — can be bullied by every crackpot entitlement the Left can hatch, from race-rigged college admissions to billions in reparations to boys in the girls shower.

Our opposition is going label us retrograde hayseeds or worse for so much as asking these questions. Our intelligence and courage in answering them will spell our fate.