Just when it seems that the world is spinning off its axis and could not possibly get any more absurd, I see an article that takes “absurd” to a whole new level. This week, in fact, it was three articles. The first was a video of students on a Washington university campus being asked how far they should go to accept a person’s self-identified physical traits. The interviewer, a 5-foot, 9-inch white guy, told students that he was a transgender who believed that he was a woman. In a display of tolerant one-upmanship, the students all said that that was fine and he should be allowed to use any campus locker room or restroom that he chose. Then he took it a step further and said that he was actually a Chinese woman. Clearly, he was not. He looked more Scandinavian. The students, in an effort to be politically correct and not offend, granted that he might actually be Chinese even though he did not appear to be. The interviewer then went a step further and said that he self-identified as a 6-foot, 5-inch Chinese woman. As I said, he was clearly a white male, no more than 5 foot, 9 inches tall.  And still, the students refused to call his bluff and agreed that if he self-identified as a 6-foot, 5-inch Chinese woman, then who were they to say any different?

On college campuses, this is considered virtuous and tolerant, but in reality, it’s neither. It’s an example of students preconditioned to check all reason and logic at the door in an effort to avoid conflict at any cost. They have been taught to ignore truth and accept as fact anything that they’re told. Now, obviously, none of these students actually believed the interviewer was 6 feet, 5 inches tall. They were simply unwilling to point out the obvious. What we’re raising is a generation unwilling to say that the “emperor has no clothes.”

Once we proceed down this path as a society, the absurd can be taken to new extremes, as evidenced by the second article that I read about a Washington couple raising their child to be species-less. They skip right past the whole gender question choosing instead to call “him” an “It,” and refusing to even say that “it” is human. At seven months old, he seemed interested in squirrels so they built him a squirrel nest outside, where he spent the next six months communing with squirrels to see if he would identify as a squirrel. Eventually, he outgrew the squirrel phase and seemed more connected with the family’s Rottweiler. When asked if he would be disappointed if his child eventually ended up self-identifying as a human being, the father said yes and that it would have been a waste of time exposing him to other possibilities.

Our third and final example takes the absurd to the bizarre when a man first decided he was really a transgender woman, then went a step further and now self-identifies as a genderless dragon. He had his ears surgically removed, his nose reconstructed to give him dragon nostrils, and scales tattooed on his face and body. He doesn’t want to simply LOOK like a dragon, he believes he really IS a dragon stuck in a human body, and he wants society not only to accept it but to affirm that fact.

This is the logical end game of the transgender debate and it begs several questions. If a man can say that he’s a woman, then why not a dragon, or a Rottweiler or a squirrel? And what about the laws that will have to be changed to accommodate those beliefs? Does political correctness have a limit? And the most important question of all: When will society rise up and say that the “emperor has no clothes”?