The far left in Europe and America has attained the same phantasmagoric and orgiastic repudiation of reason as their predecessors, the leaders of the French Revolution. 

The hopes of egalitarianism embraced by the leaders of the French Revolution included eliminating real and perceived inequities by abolishing class distinctions, which project included killing off the aristocracy and clergy while de-Christianizing society.  They hoped by so doing to begin society anew. 

However, in their wildest dreams, none of the leaders of the mobs ever advocated the elimination of gender as a means of establishing liberté, egalité et fraternité.

But the addled progeny of the Revolution, here and abroad, are seeking to do just that.  The hope appears to be that the end of discrimination will be achieved by rendering the sexes fungible -- or better yet, nonexistent.  The elimination of gender distinction and the establishment of androgyny are to usher in communal utopia.

For example, the most recent Council of Europe convention on gender has defined gender as a purely social construct.  Eliminating biological distinctions as the determinative factor of gender, the Council has redefined gender as meaning "the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men."

Lest it be thought the Council's definition of gender is a mere aberration, its "advanced" sociological philosophies advocating the abolition of gender are to be found in academia, both here and abroad.

For example, Magnus Hirschfield, author of the The Sexual Revolution opines:

[I]n the bourgeois, capitalist societies of the West which are dedicated to individual freedom, the sexual revolution continues. The right to sexual self-determination is considered as important as ever, and, indeed, various sexual liberation groups are working hard to extend it.

Maya Andrea Gonzalez of the University of California earnestly exhorts in her treatise, "Communization and the Abolition of Gender," in rhetoric typical of anti-gender fanatics:

Since the revolution as communization must abolish all divisions within social life, it must also abolish gender relations - not because gender is inconvenient or objectionable, but because it is part of the totality of relations that daily reproduce the capitalist mode of production. Gender, too, is constitutive of capital's central contradiction, and so gender must be torn asunder in the process of the revolution.

In contrast to Hirschfield and Gonzalez, Patrick Fagan, family scholar at the U.S.-based Family Research Council, declares that defining gender as a mere social construct is "evidence of thought so divorced from reality as to be a form of mental illness."

Well, yes. 

Alas, the mental illness has metastasized, establishing colonies of the mentally deranged in North America, including the California Teachers' Association, which, as reported by the Christian Examiner, held a conference during which the association's conference presenters and program received materials advocating "gender liberation."

According to the materials, male-female distinctions must be eliminated in order to "liberate" children from unnecessary stereotypes about what it means to be male or female.  To be absolutely clear, the anti-genderists are not seeking "equal rights," but obliteration of the distinctions between male and female.

For example, the conference literature included this instruction on "gender etiquette":

• "Please do not assume anyone's gender, even people you may have met in the past. A person's external appearance may not match their internal gender identity."
• "You cannot know the gender or sex of someone by their physical body, voice, appearance or mannerisms."
• Pay attention to a person's purposeful gender expression. We consider it polite to ask: "What pronoun do you prefer?" or "How do you identify?" before using pronouns or gendered words for anyone.
• One way of acknowledging the needs of all people is to designate restrooms as gender neutral.
• "Respectful allies, who learn from and with everyone and then educate others, are important for successful gender liberation."
• Each of us can decide for ourselves in which bathroom we belong.

It appears that the powerful group of leaders within the CTA wants to brainwash children into believing that gender neutrality (androgyny) is the new ideal for society.

Maybe our children will learn the new androgyny in ways similar to those being advocated in British Columbia, where a gender coach recently was videotaped earnestly assuring elementary schoolchildren that they can be any sex they choose.  The video is found here.     

What does all this madness, now being inserted into our public schools, mean?

Quite frankly, if our society accepts gender redefinition as a merely societal construct, it means the end of civilization as we know it -- not mere reformation or transformation, but the abolition of civilization itself. 

The entire social construct of any given society is based on gender distinction -- man and woman.  The differences in gender are the first and most essential ways in which human beings relate to one another: mother and father, husband and wife; brother and sister, aunt and uncle, daughter-in-law, brother-in law -- just to name a few. 

The beginning of individuation is gender; the elimination of it ensures the destruction of individuality and absorption into an amorphous, indistinct communality. 

Elimination of gender distinctions means entering a Brave New World in which everybody belongs to everybody else, and all belong to the state.  It is to achieve the disappearance of the "other" that complements us.  It is to attempt to absorb all of humanity into the All by eradication of distinctions.

How ironic that those who purport to desire diversity actually are seeking the abolition of diversity at the most fundamental level.  That is because they favor the communal versus the individual.  The elimination of individuality starts with the elimination of sex, and the new unisex identity is always an indicator of tyranny, as faceless and sexless masses are more easily manipulated by an all-powerful state.  It is notable, for instance, that Mao Tse Tung's blue-suited masses were without obvious sexual distinction. 

The great philosopher/theologian C.S. Lewis, in his masterpiece The Abolition of Man, pointed out that constant debunking of the foundational pillars of Western society portends a future in which the values of the majority of citizens are dictated by a tiny group of people who believe themselves to be able to infallibly see through any system of absolute morality and reality and to debunk it.  That they themselves are ruled only by their own arbitrary system of morality is not apparent to them.  At the end, Lewis predicts, not even the controllers will be recognizably human.  They will be like robots, and the abolition of man will have been completed.

He writes, "If any one age really attains ... the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power.  They are weaker, not stronger."

Lewis predicted:

The power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.  [T]he manmolders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state ... They are men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what 'Humanity' shall henceforth mean. 'Good' and 'bad' applied to them are words without content.

As are the words "male and female."

A dogmatic belief in the objective (and ineradicable) assignation of gender is necessary to the very idea of what it means to be a human being.  If the anti-genderists succeed, the final debunking of what it means to be human will have been completed, and the word "human" made a mere abstraction onto which any meaning can be projected.  Man's final conquest will have proved to be the abolition of Man.  The descent of society into madness will have been assured.

How ironic to read the constant ridicule heaped on Jews and Christians who are accused of naiveté at best and insanity at worst for believing the reality of the great creation story when it proclaims that "male and female created He them."   

Proponents of the abolition of gender remind one of the emperor who wore no clothes.  They are deluded by fatuous intellection and dystopian phantasms that defy rationality.

It is high time rational observers, like the little boy in the story about the emperor, proclaim that the arbiters of education are out of their minds.

Fay Voshell holds an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where she was awarded the Charles Hodge Prize for excellence in systematic theology.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.