In a 1979 article, Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out how social science methodology had become a fundamental tool of power in managerial bureaucracy. Forty years later, it is no longer merely managerial bureaucracy over which it holds sway. The cultural disenfranchising of anyone who wishes to question transgenderism’s assumptions indicates that the same thing is now far advanced in society at large.

Nietzsche said that the nineteenth century was not distinguished by the victory of science but by the victory of the scientific method. His point was that once a claim could be dressed up as the result of a scientific procedure, it became culturally incontestable. Were Nietzsche writing today, he would need to modify the statement a little.

Take, for example, this intriguing 2016 article from Quartz, which was reposted last week. The writer, Thomas Page McBee, is a transgender person who claims to have experienced the workplace first as a woman and later, after transitioning, as a man. This modern-day Teiresias confirms what we have come to expect—that men are at a significant advantage in the workplace, at least according to the criteria she uses. More interesting than the predictable conclusions she draws, however, are the cultural pathologies she reflects.

The politics of contemporary social science now has an iron grip on what are deemed legitimate perceptions of reality. This is explicitly clear in what the article says and implicitly clear in what it doesn’t say. The article presents the assumption that workplaces are best explicated by gender specialists as a simple matter of fact. And its lack of any reflection upon the Promethean philosophical presumptions of transgenderism indicates that the culture is at such a point on this issue that the writer feels absolutely no need to do so.

Whether McBee has reflected on the philosophical foundations that make transgenderism plausible is not clear, but her last two paragraphs are replete with what should be contentious metaphysical assumptions. Here she transitions from Teiresias to Aristophanes, proposing that there is a male and female “version of ourselves” inside each of us—a tale worthy of an after-dinner speech at Agathon’s place. Then there is the fascinating comment in the final paragraph that “most of us have the bodies we occupy because of luck of the draw.” This is revealing because it makes clear that the distinction between sex and gender, now presented as an incontestable truth, rests upon an even more radical distinction: that between a person’s identity and their body. What is fascinating is that none of this comes in the form of argument. It is presented as obvious, something only possible because of its conformity to the spirit of our age.

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