Giulio Meotti
Giulio MeottiCourtesy
"Denying the two sexes in humans is the most striking example of how ideology mistreats science."

Thus speaks a biologist at the University of Chicago Jerry Coyne, in the French magazine L'Express. The situation in the West would be comical if it weren't tragic.

We read from the Telegraph that the famous Science Museum in London had to remove an exhibition entitled "Boy or Girl?" which featured quotes describing the transition from the “wrong body,” gender as something “hard to pin down” that “may not match biological sex”. It had been accused, rightly so, of "propaganda".

Meanwhile, in Western universities it has become impossible to defend the classical and traditional (as well as scientific) vision of sexual difference. At McGill University, the most important venue for higher education in Canada, student protests have just canceled an academic conference on gender and sex. It happens everywhere, in Brussels as well as in Berlin and Paris.

And the "transgender Traviata" also arrived in Italy. Poor Verdi, the accusations of racism were not enough, they had to destroy his opera.. In recent days, at the Théâtre du Nord in Lille, one of the most important theaters in France, Molière's Don Giovanni, which has become the emblem of "violent masculinity" was staged.

And while a European country, Scotland, is discussing whether to allow eight-year-old children to change their sex after passing a law that cancels the biological woman, this petty ideological movement is also rampant in literature. There are the “sensitivity readings”. Readers who clean up the novels to be published from any prejudices about race and gender. Le Monde recounts: "Officially or not, all the major publishing houses use it and specialized agencies are multiplying".

But the West is an increasingly small, isolated place, crowded into its own "ship of fools," as French philosopher Michel Onfray calls it, where it also has "progressives for the burqa like in Orwell, where chains are freedom" writes Pascal Bruckner in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

This week in China there is the worst demographic data since 1961, when the terrible famine caused by Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" led to massive deaths. In 2022, for the first time in sixty years, China's population began to decline and deaths outnumbered births. China has an increasingly aging population, to which is added the "one child policy" carried out for decades that caused crazy gender imbalances so that today in China there are over 30 million more men than women.

“At best, China will lose a fifth of its population; at worst, two-thirds,” Niall Ferguson wrote in the Washington Post in August. “In 2018, there were 5.9 million more boys than girls aged 0-4, and 112 men aged 15-29 for every 100 women in that age group. This imbalance will only increase over the next 10 years.”

At birth, the "natural" sex ratio is approximately 103-107 males to 100 females. In China it is over 110 males, with peaks of up to 120 in some provinces. Translated: 30 million girls are missing in China.

But if boys and girls do not exist, as the Western establishment repeats, where have the Chinese girls gone? What do we need them for?

And if we put "woman" in quotation marks, why did Iranian women take to the streets to demand respect?

"The year in which women were erased": thus Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was infibulated in Africa and escaped a forced marriage and who lives in America iunder threats like Salman Ruhsdie does, wrote a few days ago in UnHerd.

In the West, the word “woman” no longer has a meaning.

Only a society that has become completely unencumbered by reason could devote so much energy to the ideology of gender. Only a society that has become completely myopic could speak of “women with penises” even if real women - without penises - in Afghanistan and Iran are beaten and murdered for wanting fundamental rights.

Is it really a coincidence that, in the same year that the West forgot what it means to be a woman (The Lancet now calls them “bodies with vaginas”), we decided it was acceptable to turn our backs on Iranian and Afghan women?

Giulio Meotti is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.