---

... unless you believe hard enough.

Drawing different names on a map does nothing to actually materially change the territory, as many Canadians are now starting to recall. Calling Lake Ontario by a different name does nothing to change the fact that it has been, & will continue to be, Ontario's, & Canada's. Or does it? Substitute the word "man" for Lake Ontario, and "woman" for Lake America, and one can see that, as social constructs both, geopolitical boundaries can be redrawn just as readily as intersubjectival boundaries & psychological territories.

To dwell on the example only for long enough to segue out of it, the referent of proper names such as "Lake Ontario" is a physical reality; it participates in the regime of science, can be quantified, observed, measured, discussed objectively, and falsifiable claims can be made about some of its properties: the proposition that the maximum depth of Lake Ontario only goes up to your ankles can be readily falsified by going out for a swim; quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist trans philosophy professor, in her 2014 paper, "self-identities ought to be definitive in terms of the question of sex membership," i.e. falsification of one's gender identity is in other words known as transphobia, and thus by Popper's criterion, it is not a scientific notion; for simplicity's sake we will therefore call it a religious notion, where we interpret "religion" as broadly as possible to encompass everything not scientific, in the fashion of Dawkins and many of the New Atheists.

---

---

This can be shown in one of two ways: by assuming the "wrong-body theory" of transgenderism is true, we can show that what Bettcher calls the "ghostly, phenomenal body" is isomorphic to classical Christian dualist notions of the "soul" as distinct from the material body; otherwise, taking Bettcher's rejection of the many body theory as granted and opting for her alternative grounded in "multiple worlds of sense, worlds in which terms such as 'woman' have different, resistant meanings," we can show that transgenderism participates in the very same linguistic gerrymandering of psychological territory that Trump is participating in this week, i.e. the practice of magick.

What is it that causes the left to decry the assumption of someone's gender, formerly one of the msot cut-and-dry binary distinctions in biology, while they go on to happily assume all manner of other intangibles about a person - race, profession, character, things far less cut and dry - without the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance?

Rebecca Tuvel dared to explore this criminal line of thinking in her 2017 paper, "In Defense of Transracialism," published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. After being branded "double-plus-ungood" while never really being soundly refuted, its publication prompted multiple calls for its retraction & a purging of Hypatia's editorial staff.

Were I a practicing Catholic, or a post-modernist worshipping at the secular altar of social orthodoxy, I would certainly have accepted the received wisdom from the clergy, who had seen all sides of the argument for me, and could assure me that yes, our position was strongest, Tuvel's was schismatic, and that there was no need to let fallacious and heretical arguments into your mind lest you pollute your thoughts with propaganda and misinformation, or occult knowledge that damned your soul to hell.

As heretics, however, nothing behooves us to do any such thing, and we may freely enter into the source code of such arguments to judge for ourselves, with our own reason, whether or not they have any merit. Being already excommunicated, we no longer fear excommunication, and may now freely inspect the structure of such arguments on rational grounds alone; what the argument actually is, independent of what the modern secular clergy says it ought to be. Thus, without further delay:

This is essentially the crux of the argument. Not wanting to, in Tuvel's words, hold "the societal acceptance of transgenderism hostage to a biological account of sex-gender," we dispense with the notion that gender has really anything to do with the material body at all; this is where the popular hymnal response, "gender is a social construct" comes from: it has nothing to do with metaphysics or ontology, the study of what things are, and everything to dow ith the consensual hallucinations we have all politically and intersubjectively agreed to believe in; by our earlier dichotomy therefore, gender is a religious notion (whereas sex is a scientific one).

To illustrate how deeply Christian this line of thinking is, if not in orthopraxis, then at least in the basis of its thought, let's compare some of Bettcher's & Prosser's ideas of gender identity & the wrong-body theory to the writings of Aquinas:

---

---

Emphasis on the focus on "reality" in the last two passages; both thinkers admit of something "real" outside of, and even "more real" than, the body. The "soul" or "inward man" vs. the "inner body," or "real, hidden body (the body image)" or, the "ghostly, phenomenal body," or, most broadly, the "gender identity" are all so many different words in different languages - theological vs. phenomenological English - to refer to the exact same thing - "a mind, or a soul," to refrain Descartes.

Thus, if you believe in gender identity, you automatically believe in souls as well, given that they are both in some way, equivalent, modulo the Aristotelian underpinnings of one vs. the phenomenological basis of the other.

Applying Crowleyan agnosticism as to whether or not Goetic spirits, gender identities, "souls," are true ontological realities vs. mere illusions conjured by the human brain, both systems are otherwise structurally dualist, in which there exists some aspect of identity distinct and wholly apart from the material body; and what is not material, or physical, is not scientific, i.e. it is religious.

---

Naturally, such a conclusion would be repulsive to progressive & forward thinking atheists who view religion as, at best, antiquated; so it is unsurprising that Bettcher in fact rejects the wrong body theory in favour of María Lugones' concept of "multiple worlds of sense":

Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote recently that "naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario." Let's interpret these words in light of Bettcher's take on Lugones' "multiple worlds of sense." In particular, the social - which ownership and geopolitical borders are, as evidently sociopolitical constructs - as intersubjective; that is, reality is co-constructed, always is understood with interpretation, & is not immutable:

Since reality is mutable and subject to interpretation, collectively hallucinated into existence given sufficient biological compute, by altering the terms under which, and the terms with which we interpret the raw sensory & cognitive data our minds are subject to, we may mutate reality itself - which is nothing more than what a consensus of people agrees to believe is the case. Hence these "alternate realities" in which terms take on, quote, "different, resistant meanings:" in some strong Sapir-Whorfian way, if you redraw the linguistic map, you can terraform the psychological terrain - and since the terrain is made out of mind stuff, social constructs and interpretations, it is as infinitely malleable as the pixels on your screen.

This is what Baudrillard meant with his concept of fourth-order simulacra and hyperreality; representations have "precessed" from representing physical territories and objects faithfully, to unfaithfully, to pretending to represent something that doesn't really exist, to being purely symbolic and abstract. When maps referred to physical, objective realities, it was possible to use that shared reality to "guarantee the exchagne of meaning," to paraphrase Baudrillard. While the Earth played this role of guarantor in the material, scientific realm, God formerly played the same role in the divine, intellectual world of mind/soul; following the death of God, as proclaimed by Nietzsche, there is no longer a shared psychological reality with which to anchor our representations - hence the sprawling mesh network of "multiple worlds of sense," in which everyone is trapped in their own linguistic bubble & incapable of exchanging meaning across the gulf of representation - a modern Tower of Babel condition.

Our territories are now made out of the same stuff as our maps; redraw the latter, threfore, and the ground instantly shifts beneath your feet in response, just like magick. The principle that "alternate worlds of sense" and "different, resistant meanings" may be created from whole cloth to oppose a dominant narrative, or a consensus reality, or the "natural attitude" that Bettcher refers to cuts both ways; President Trump himself inhabits his own "world of sense" with clearly "different, resistant" maps & meanings of words like "Lake Ontario" & sovereignty, and without an objective, scientific basis from which his worldview may be soundly refuted, the only measure of its veracity is how many people choose to believe in it.