IDEAS SO FOOLISH ONLY AN ACADEMICIAN WILL BELIEVE THEM.

No, dear reader, my scorn for people who think they are being clever when they deny coherent beliefs on the basis of convoluted argument is not hyperbolic.  Consider what happens when a journalist called Matt Walsh asks some gender studies types what a woman is.  (Spoiler alert: "adult human female" is the correct Cold Spring Shops response.)  But what do I know?

Walsh, for instance, effortlessly gets Michelle Forcier, a “gender affirming” pediatrician and assistant dean at Brown University’s medical school, to assert that what makes a chicken female is the fact that we “assigned” it that sex at birth, not the fact that it can lay eggs. Asked to explain what makes chickens different from kids, Forcier insists that chickens don’t cry or commit suicide. At the University of Tennessee, Patrick Grzanka, a professor of women’s studies, avows that he cannot—or will not—define the word that appears in his professional title. When Grzanka asks Walsh why he cares so much about the definition of woman, Walsh responds that he is interested in the truth. Grzanka, a taxpayer-funded employee of a state university with a motto that says, “You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” becomes irate. “Getting to the truth,” he asserts, is “deeply transphobic.”

There it is, dear reader, an experiment against reality in plain sight, and never mind the nuance.

For Western feminists, being a woman means having certain equipment as well as having the “lived experience” that comes with that equipment—but that “lived experience” need not include, and perhaps should not include, any of the traditionally female roles. One strand of feminist thinking even holds that women’s “lived experience” could be boiled down to their vulnerability to male predation.

We can insist that a woman is someone with XX chromosomes and a certain type of anatomy, but only a fact-value extremist would leave it there. Walsh’s interlocutors are probably right to wonder why he—or anyone else—should care who qualifies as a woman. It is a question Walsh dismisses but perhaps should not. In the last scene of the movie, he returns home to find his wife taking care of the kids and making lunch. “What is a woman?” he asks her. Seemingly baffled by the question, she responds: “An adult human female . . . who needs help opening this” (holding up a pickle jar).

Deny those coherent beliefs ... enjoy the incoherence.

And what we see is people in a state of profound cognitive dissonance, who readily condemn their own common sense and endorse ideas that they must know, deep down, are absurd. “Gender ideology” turns out to be a form of mass self-delusion. So insular and self-referential is transgender activism, so inflated by faux confidence and saturated with garbled clichés, that it needs little help from Walsh to turn itself into an object of mockery.

Or, perhaps, hold that part of the academy up for mockery.  As the review notes, that's a productive start.