In Jonathan Swift's satirical 18th century masterpiece, "Gulliver's Travels," his sea-faring protagonist visits various fictional lands, whose inhabitants represent facets of human nature that range from the merely irksome to the grimly repulsive. In the final chapter, we meet the noble race of Houyhnhnms — clean, attractive, kind, intelligent horses who are capable of conversing with Gulliver.
The Houyhnhnms do not represent humans as they are, but as Swift wishes they were. They shine in contrast with the land's other inhabitants — filthy, human-like Yahoos (the origin of the familiar trope), a symbol of Swift's disgust for mankind's most irrational and aggressive traits.
Describing his species to the curious Houyhnhnms, Gulliver mentions the human penchant for "lying and false representation." The horses are baffled. Having no word for "lying," since lying runs contrary to the whole purpose of language, they express the concept as "the thing which is not."
Satire is the humorous exaggeration of reality as a palatable vehicle for warning of the dangers inherent in a social, cultural or political trend. When I consider the various domains in postmodern society in which "the thing which is not" prevails over objective truth, I find myself in old age more conscious of the warning than the humour that dominated my undergrad self's encounter with Swift's mordant view of humanity.
Our society's official understanding of gender ideology, for example, is predicated on the assumption that it is entirely normal for one's gender — a subjective and fungible sense of one's masculine or feminine or mixed identity — to float free of corporeal or genetic influence, even though the sex and gender identity of the vast majority of humanity is congruent. "A transwoman is a woman," we are instructed to believe. It is obvious to anyone who remains faithful to language norms that to say a male "is" a female is to say "the thing which is not."
Nevertheless, highly educated people, including trained legal minds, have not only endorsed this linguistic product of gender mysticism, they have endorsed its alleged attendant social crimes: "misgendering" trans-identifying males (TIMs) — even rapists and mass murderers — who claim to be female, and trans-identifying females (TIFs) who claim to be male; critiquing ideology-as-science in the classroom; resisting "gender-affirming" interventions that include fertility-threatening drugs to alter children's natural growth cycles or mutilate their bodies; and — worst of all, in some people's offence hierarchy — "deadnaming" them by publicly referencing their pre-transition names.
This last social crime is rather curious. An adopted child may consider her adoptive parents to be her literal mom and dad in every way that matters to her. She may fervently wish they were her biological parents. But have any adopted children ever filed a complaint to a human rights tribunal against someone who referred to them publicly as "adopted" or named their already known biological parents?
Trans activist Jessica Simpson, described as a "prolific litigant," has filed human rights complaints against media outlets for failing to deny reality. The complaints target journalists and publications that accurately report on sex and gender, refusing to affirm the notion that a person's subjective gender identity overrides biological sex. Simpson's actions are an attempt to silence critics of gender mysticism through legal intimidation.
Barbara Kay argues that this represents a dangerous trend where subjective belief is given legal precedence over objective truth. She draws parallels to Swift's satire, warning that society risks embracing "the thing which is not" as a basis for law and policy. The human rights complaints, she suggests, are not about protecting vulnerable individuals but about enforcing ideological conformity.
