Perhaps the most insidious form of tyranny is that which compels us to pretend we believe in things that just aren’t so.

If I were to claim that I’m King Richard III you’d refer me for psychiatric treatment, right? But if I were to claim that I’m a woman in a man’s body, i.e. that I’m “transgender,” you’d be expected to nod understandingly and praise me for my bravery, wouldn’t you? That there’s really no discernable difference between the two claims matters not at all. Transgenderism (if that’s a word) has become an article of progressive orthodoxy. Unless you’re prepared to be reviled as a bigot, you must accept not only its reality but its goodness and virtue.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s a matter of profound indifference to me if Harry wants to rebrand himself as Harriet or if Stephanie wants to transform herself into Stephen. Such people have been around for a long time: Check out the bio of the Emperor Elagabalus in The Augustan History. I do, however, object most strenuously to the demand that I accept as reality something that is quite obviously a mental disorder.

To be sure, human sexuality is a complex phenomenon. We’re still not sure why it is that a minority of men and a smaller minority of women are homosexual. Back in the day homosexuality sometimes went by the name of sexual preference. Later on it became politically convenient to claim that gay people are born that way. But there’s no hard evidence on way or the other and very likely there’s no single explanation. Nature, nurture, whatever…

Still, a gay male remains male regardless of his sexual orientation. But what are we to make of a biological male who insists that he is, in reality, a woman?

According to our progressive elites, we’re supposed to take his claim—or her claim—at face value. This includes permitting such people to use the public restroom of their choice, i.e. to let a male use the female facilities. You may say that’s no big deal—it probably happens all the time. A transgender male may present so convincingly as a female that no one would ever remark on her use of the ladies’. True enough. But now that we’ve made transgenderism a civil rights issue profound questions arise. In public schools is a transgender male identifying as female to be allowed to use the girl’s shower, locker room and rest room? Is she to be allowed to play on girls’ sports teams? Think about that last one. Most transgender males never surgically transform themselves into females. Biologically they remain male with all the physical advantages over women thereunto appertaining. So would it be fair, for example, to permit a transgender male identifying as female to participate in the LPGA Tour?

As the pronoun difficulties in the above paragraph attest, just thinking about this transgender business is exhausting. And, of course, using the wrong pronoun (the list seems to get longer every day) is an unforgivable offense. You find yourself pitched headlong into the world imagined by George Orwell, where two plus two sometimes make four, sometimes three, sometimes five and sometimes all of them together. Doublethink might have been invented to deal with transgenderism.

If this smoggy cloud of soft tyranny possesses anything in the way of a silver lining, it is this: Over the years the charge of bigotry has been so often hurled by progressives that it has largely lost its sting. I got into an online discussion of transgenderism with one such progressive and when, inevitably, he defaulted to the charge of bigotry I found myself unmoved. The predictability of his sally combined with the absurdity of his position—one moment transgenderism was an inborn trait, then suddenly it was a personal preference—provoked from me no more than a mocking smile that it was just as well he didn’t see.

The downside of the progressive promotion of transgender rights is that it will inevitably increase the pain and misery of people who need real help, not phony and self-serving expressions of approval. The statistics regarding personality dysfunction, substance abuse and suicide among transgender people makes sobering reading. And as ever, our enlightened progressive elites are out to make a bad situation worse.