With societal turbulence all around us, many people feel that we are locked in some great and portentous struggle. But because it is so pervasive and multifaced, the nature of this struggle is not readily obvious. There are many fronts on which this struggle is being fought: racial relations, education, healthcare, popular culture, financial system, and freedom of speech, among others. It is not easy to make sense of it all, especially since the battles are highly pitched and emotions are running very high.

What characterizes these battles, besides their intensity, is deep polarization. The possibility of the warring camps coming together and meeting on some common ground seems to be growing more distant by the day. There is even talk that the two sides will either come to blows, or they will each go their own way in some form of secession.

Many have observed that the contenders seem to be separated by an unbridgeable gap, and yet no one has been able to explain the nature of this gap, or what exactly it is that separates the mindsets of the opposing sides.

In our view the great struggle in the grip of which we find ourselves cuts much deeper than the immediate issues we argue over. The real fight extends beyond any particular point of public friction.

The great battle of our time is a battle about the very nature of reality. More precisely, what the two sides war over on the most fundamental level is what constitutes truth and how it should be determined.

To shed light on this dynamic, let us take one of the heated controversies of the present time. For this we choose transgenderism. This is an especially suitable example for two reasons: this issue is highly divisive and polarizing, and it delineates the opposing camps sharply and clearly.

As you may know, transgender advocates claim that biological males can become women and vice versa.

Understandably, many people find this claim rather far-fetched. For one thing, it does not feel true, given that the evidence of our senses seems to refute it. When, for example, people look at transgender “women” – i.e., biological men who say that they are women – most people immediately recognize that these are not real females. What most people see is men who pretend to be girls. This is how the human mind – in the vast majority of instances – interprets sensory input that it receives upon encountering such persons.

Rachel Levine, President Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health. Few people would perceive Dr. Levine is a genuine woman. (YouTube screengrab)

And yet transgender advocates vehemently maintain that this is not the correct interpretation of visual data. They insist that what is in front of our eyes are not men who pose as girls but real girls.

The claims of transgender advocates thus run in direct contravention to what we perceive to be the case with our own eyes.

In other words, transgender supporters attempt to negate and override our perception of reality. They are in essence telling us this: “Reject the evidence of your eyes. What is in front of you is not a man who tries to appear as a woman, but a genuine woman.”

And they often insist on this point with great vehemence. So vehemently, in fact, that they want to punish and penalize those who dare to say otherwise. They call such people transphobes, among other things, and have them cancelled and fired from their jobs. They also charge them with the offence of misgendering, which has now become a crime in some places.

To put it another way, it is now becoming a crime to honestly declare reality as it is presented to us by our sensory apparatus.

But can it be possible that the senses may deceive us in some way? After all, sometimes our senses do paint an inaccurate picture of the world. For example, when we put a stick in water, the stick appears to be bent at the point where it touches the water’s surface.

The good news is that we do not have to rely on sight alone when trying to determine whether someone is a man or a woman. In this modern era, we are fortunate to possess precise and reliable scientific means for making this determination. As you may know, males and females are born with different chromosomal structures. Chromosomes are made of strands of DNA that are stored in the nuclei of our cells. Both sexes have twenty-three distinct pairs of chromosomes, of which twenty-two are the same but the last one differs markedly. In men the twenty- third chromosomal pair takes the form XY, while in women its form is XX.

Our sex is thus a biological reality that is encoded in the deepest physical level of our being. Nearly every one of some thirty trillion cells in our body bears witness to whether we are male or female.

This fact is incontrovertible and cannot be altered. As matters stand now, mankind does not possess technology or scientific means to change this fact, and it is unlikely it ever will. From the moment of conception our sex is irrevocably hardwired deep in the very physical substratum of our existence.

And yet transgender advocates claim that those with XY chromosomes – i.e., biological men – can suddenly and at whim become women and those with XX chromosomes – biological females – can become men. Transgender activists go so far as to profess that this impossible traversing of the man-woman dichotomy can be effected by mere wishful thinking via arbitrary self-identification with the opposite sex.

Thus, in addition to denying the evidence of the senses, transgender advocates also deny biological and physical aspects of reality as presented by science.

Because of this, the transgender movement represents a brazen and complete negation of reality in all of its aspects and dimensions: sensory, common-sensical, historical, biological, physical and scientific.

To fully understand the context of our larger societal struggle, it is important that we realize that the transgender ideology is a wholesale denial of truth. It constitutes a complete inversion of reality on all levels.

Because of its uncompromising negation of fact, transgenderism represents gaslighting at its most extreme.

Denial of reality is the contemporary Left’s ideological stance

If this flagrant subversion of fact was confined only to the transgender movement, that by itself would be reason enough for serious concern.

But here is something truly alarming: This kind of wholesale denial of reality is emblematic of the whole of the American political left as it stands in 2021. Whereas before such levels of absurdity were mostly the domain of the left’s fringes, today they permeate the whole of it. This, of course, includes the mainstream of the Democrat party.

If you think this is an exaggeration, contemplate this: on the very day of his inauguration, Joe Biden signed an executive order number 13988. Called “Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,” Biden’s directive seeks, among other things, to force schools to allow boys who declare themselves girls to compete in sports with genuine biological girls.

It is as revealing as it is significantthat Joe Biden did this on his very first day in office as President of the United States.

As soon as he assumed power, the standard bearer of the Democrat Party tried to impose by executive fiat a brazen negation of reality upon this nation. More alarmingly still, Joe Biden is widely considered to belong to the moderate wing of his party. The question immediately arises: if this is what moderates do, what are the designs and goals of the party’s more radical elements?

The fact that Biden issued the edict on his first day shows that transgenderism is not some peripheral cause held by leftist radicals. This issue is central to the Democrat mainstream.

This shows the deep moral corruption of the Party in its current incarnation, because wilful denial of truth is the most severe of transgressions. This apparently was the primary offence of the one whom the Good Book calls the Father of Lies. The Democrat establishment follows well in his path.

The well-being of so-called transgender people is not, however, what Joe Biden and his handlers really care about. After all, Joe Biden had never been known to be particularly friendly toward LGBT.  It is the movement’s proclivity toward reality negation that those who pull the strings of this frail man find so appealing. They have appropriated the transgender cause because it allows them to gaslight the American people, and gaslighting has become the left’s modus operandi.

Gaslighting is now an integral part of the left’s every move, and it is sowing confusion and wreaking havoc everywhere. The gaslighters have already managed to disorient many people and weaken their hold on reality. They correctly sense that if they can press sufficiently hard, they will be able to take advantage of the disarray and implement their godless, nihilistic, inhuman, love-deprived and freedom-negating agenda.

Should they succeed, we will find ourselves living in a dystopian nightmare ruled by totalitarians.

That’s why the great battle of our time is the battle for reality against those who aspire to negate it.

This is what the current struggle is ultimately about.

Vasko Kohlmayer was born and grew up in former communist Czechoslovakia. He is the author of The West in Crisis: Civilizations and Their Death Drives. You can keep up to date with his writings by subscribing to his newsletter Notes from the ‘Twilight Zone’ on Substack.

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