Bradley (aka Chelsea) Manning is no more a woman than traitors are patriots.

By blurring the distinctions among words, liberals have for many years now labeled terrorists as freedom-fighters, taxes as investments, and illegal aliens as immigrants.  At first, these so-called gray areas may seem trivial to some people, but they have enormous influence in shaping the life of the nation.

One of the most recent additions to the left's panoply of confusion concerns gender.  According to progressives, there really is no such thing as a man or a woman.  They claim that gender is a "social construct" and that one's gender lies along a spectrum where manhood and womanhood blend together on a gradual and diffuse scale.  Some genders are not even on the scale, but morph from day to day, depending on whether someone "feels like" a man today or a woman tomorrow.

This is not innocent idiocy, but a poison.

One malevolent feature of gender identity confusion involves so-called sex change surgeries or, more confusingly, gender reassignment.  Especially in children, a temporary condition of boys identifying as girls, or vice versa, can be misdiagnosed as a more deeply ingrained disorder that, according to liberal wisdom, should be treated with irreversible remedies, including hormones and surgery.

But the disorder of transgenderism is not in the lower body.  Rather, it is in the brain, where researchers should find and treat it instead of mutilating the body.

Here is a quote from a website that regards transgenderism as a surgically treatable condition but allows that oftentimes it is merely a phase through which children may grow.

The first signs of gender dysphoria can appear at a very young age. For example, a child may refuse to wear typical boys' or girls' clothes, or dislike taking part in typical boys' or girls' games and activities.

In most cases, this type of behaviour [sic] is just part of growing up and will pass in time, but for those with gender dysphoria it continues through childhood and into adulthood.

To understand why surgical measures are never appropriate for transgenders, we should examine a condition called BIID, or Body Integrity Identity Disorder.  In this condition, certain people have a strong urge to amputate certain body parts – say, an arm or a leg.  They do this because the human brain maps its own body and is able to identify certain growths on it that do not belong there – say, a large wart or an extra finger.  Those extraneous parts indeed do not belong there and are almost always non-functional.

But sometimes the brain itself has a disorder, and the victim of BIID feels an overwhelming compulsion to have a fully functional arm or leg removed.

According to this story, "People with BIID get trains to run over their legs, freeze dry their legs, or fall off cliffs to try to paralyse [sic] themselves. It's very very dangerous. And they need professional help."

I know of no civil rights movement that advocates the surgical removal of fully functional arms or legs.  I know of no "BIID rights" interest group that says we should celebrate it and give it legal status.  Yet there are such movements that insist that transgenderism should be recognized and even celebrated.

If it ended there, it might barely be tolerable, but it does not end there.  Today, the right of a man to enter a ladies' dressing room is, in some locales, enshrined into law.  Such laws override the right of women to have their modesty protected, even from potential predators who use the law as a ruse. 

Even high school girls may be subjected to showering with boys in the locker room.  Anyone, parent or student, who objects to this may be branded a bigot.

Is this an innocuous phenomenon?

Let us remember that the San Bernardino terrorist attack may very well have been prevented by neighbors – but they declined to report suspicious activities of the killers, because they were concerned that they might be accused of another progressive pejorative term – that of "Islamophobe."