You see, "transgender" activists can get away with saying that gender is just "socially constructed" and more than "the sum of one's physical parts" because gender is a word that most people don't regularly use.

Substituting an obscure word, in this case, gender, for the more common one, sex, is intended to confuse and obscure. It's the kind of verbal tactic George Orwell, in "Politics and the English Language," compared to a cuttlefish squirting ink to confuse its predators.

Of course, what makes this squirting necessary is the denial of the obvious: "Living as a woman," whatever that means, no more makes you a woman than hiding a pot of gold makes you a leprechaun.

These verbal parlor games may wow them in the faculty lounge, but nature is unimpressed. They remind me of the hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. He submitted a paper to a leading postmodern journal filled with postmodern gibberish like "physical ‘reality’ . . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct."

After the paper was published, he revealed the hoax, that it was all gibberish, adding that those who believe that physics really is a "social construct" should test their beliefs from his twenty - first floor window.

Christians should not be shocked at any of this. Romans 1 tells us that God's truth is made plain in creation, and to deny this truth — in this case, "male and female created He them" — is to exchange the truth for lie, which Paul illustrates by an example of men lying with men, in other words, rejecting their God - given gender, which is a challenge to God's created order. Well, today we have renewed that old lie — that we can create ourselves the way we want, and peeking doesn't make any difference.