Alice in Genderland

or.. how much further down the rabbit hole will Sri Lanka go

image credit: U Kelaniya

The wife of President Ranil Wickremasinghe, Professor of English Mrs Maithree Wickremasinghe has a doctorate in Women’s Studies and has published extensively on the topic of gender.  It was reported that she made a keynote speech in mid-June 2024 on the subject of “sex-gender conflicts”,  to an audience gathered for the semicentennial celebration of the Sri Lanka Sumithrayo organisation.  Excerpts of this address were subsequently published for general readership.

Quotations from the publicly published excerpts have been extracted verbatim and included herein, and these extracts will be analysed so that a response might be offered.  The contents of the speech as found in these extracts are not at all original, but rather are components of the incessant narrative propagated in “gender studies” departments of universities around the world - and therefore the analysis may be received as an objective response to the general narrative, taking as an example the words reported from the speech, some parts of which have been italicisied by this writer for emphasis. 

MW has been used to signify words attributed to the First Lady in the publication referred to. CV is used to indicate the response of Cultura Vitae to the preceding referenced quotations. As Sri Lanka plunges into unreality amid a nightmare of misanthropic legislation and cultural sensitisation, let us being to unravel and clarify some aspects of gender ideology.

MW: “Historically, the word sex has been used to classify a person as a man or woman based on their external genitalia at birth. Thus, the male and female are perceived as binary and oppositional identities to one another, centred on differences in physical appearances and biology.”

CV: That the binary or twofold-ness of - and the complementarity of the male and female sexes is a reality of our species, is not merely a perceived impression or even merely an observed phenomenon.  Rather, it is an absolutely fundamental reality.  An argument could be presented that male and female is more fundamental than up and down. 

While one can agree with the fact that it is historic that man exists as male and female - and that sex is the correct word to describe maleness and femaleness, one cannot presume that what is historic is necessarily false.  Indeed yes, the male-female human sex binary is historic and based on biology - and it is true now as it was then. 

MW: “In other words, the way in which people feel about themselves and their gender, do not always match their biology. For instance, though born women, some people may feel internally that they are actually men trapped in women’s bodies and vice versa.” 

CV: It is correct that some people feel this way.  Such conditions are psychological disorders known as “gender dysphoria” and “body dysmorphia”.  Likewise, patients suffering from anoxia feel fat – but governments do not issue legal fat identity certificates for the emaciated.

MW: “The sex, or the biology, can no longer be taken for granted, as natural or static or even as irreversible, given that science has responded to alleviate the suffering of those with sex-gender incongruences with scientific innovations and interventions to physical bodies such as sex-reassignment, gender affirmation surgery and hormonal therapies.”

CV: This is not only an absurd and dangerous statement, but it is also logically inconsistent, and compoundedly so.  The primary logical inconsistency is the assumption that the advancement of proficiency in the execution of chemical and surgical interventions into secondary sexual characteristics, justifies the presumption that the sex of a human being is unnatural or fluid.  Development of technology can only become manifest as applications operating upon the underlying nature of materials and beings.  The crane that lifts a beam does not prove that gravity is reversible.  Likewise, cutting the wings off a confused bird and attaching a tail, does not make it a rat.

Aside: alarm bells need to ring, nay shriek, when confronted with statements such as “science has responded”, “research shows” and “scientists say”.  Science responded with the atom bomb for Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  Research papers are published in prestigious journals that are fundamentally flawed, frequently purposefully so - while authentic research findings are suppressed.  Let us remember that Dr Fauci, the recent - but now fallen, face of science told the world that the mRNA+ injection will save lives. 

One could agree that the brutal and mutilating surgeries and puberty-blocking, sterilising hormone treatments may well be referred to as “scientific innovations”, but they don’t and cannot make a man a woman.  Cutting off breasts and suppressing ovulation or even fixing non-functional penis-like structures on to women - after harvesting tissue from her arm to produce it, do not “alleviate the suffering” but only enhances physical and mental suffering - and makes it lifelong.

What people suffering from mental disease need is to hear the truth and receive psychiatric therapy – not medical or social “affirmation”.   This is not a novel proposition since physicians do not affirm PTSD patients by telling them that the voices are real, nor are scientific innovations employed to inject adipose into anorexics.

The second degree of logical inconsistency is that the refutation of biology and the assertion of the primacy of feelings over chromosomes, cannot be reconciled with affirmatory interventions that albeit feebly and disastrously attempt to reconfigure the very biology that is being refuted – such as making breasts grow on boys after castrating them.

MW: “In order to do so, we need to be open and ready to understand and to be conscious of the terms, vocabulary and definitions related to gender identities that are now being recognised and accepted globally as never before.” 

CV: Semantic gymnastics can only help to make dishonesty appear respectable.  People are being fooled with words that appear innocuous, but have egregious meanings and implications.  Addressing a gender-dysphoric or body-dysmorphic man with a new term such "transwoman" does not solve the problem, that he is sick. Calling a man a woman - trans or otherwise, makes the caller a liar.  Replacing sex with gender so that a myriad subjective “genders” can be substituted for the two objective sexes only enables confusion and confoundation between reality and fantasy.  Acceptance of newfangled terms will serve to silence the honest who find that popularised language can no longer serve truth. 

Moreover, global recognition and acceptance - were this to be achieved, cannot make a falsehood true, any more than vaginoplasty and the mechanical dilations required to prevent the wound from healing, can make a man anything other than what he already is.

MW: “Gender-phobia or transphobia may manifest in actions such as violence, harassment, misrepresentation and exclusion. Needless to say, the official sanctioning of gender diversity requires social transitioning as well, including changes in pronouns, adaptation of new names, changes to dress and appearance. It also involves legal transitioning including official name changes, clear identity cards and birth certificates.”

CV: Distinctions are lost when conflation is employed.  Harassment of or violence upon anyone are causes for concern.  However, it does not follow that privileges need to be accorded to a particular category of persons, or that compassion needs to be misguided.   One does not misrepresent a paedophile as a “minor-attracted person”, and include him wholeheartedly into the Boy Scouts.  Likewise it would be wise to exclude the muscular “gender-confused” boy from the girls’ netball team, and from the girls’ toilets.

It is huge step to move from concerns regarding physical violence and social exclusion, on to expect the State to sanction deviant sexual behaviour and the acceptance of the sick as healthy.  It would follow that alcohol addiction, the orientation towards drug use and kleptomania would also need to be sanctioned.  Furthermore legal recognition of a falsehood, does not turn a lie into the truth, or evil into virtue.

On pronouns, the requirement outlined is for changes to the way citizens shall speak - and to make a criminal of a reasonable person who will refuse to refer to a man or woman who identifies as belonging to one of a legion of the continuously expanding plethora of genders as “per” or “co” or “xe” or “xyrz” as the case may be, at the time. 

The call to register a mischievous manipulator’s or psychologically ill person’s self-identification on their official birth certificate or identity card is a national tragedy.  This is a means of supplementing the acceptance, affirmation and medical abuse of the vulnerable.  It confirms the tyranny of speech control and the criminalisation of the honest for using precise language.  It officially plunges the entire nation into the fallacious rabbit hole of genderland – where fundamental realities are legally inverted and whims and manifestations of personality disorder become sanctioned by law.  The world has been turned beyond up-side-down where a woman can be a man, yes is no, and good is evil. 

Even history is distorted when the certificate of birth will declare that a woman born half a century ago, was indeed born a cat half a century ago, and woe betide any one who says she wasn’t, even if that one person is her mother. Sri Lankans are on the verge of assenting to the fantasy that 2 plus 2 can equal anything, let alone 5.  Might this be the dream that this country may not awake from?

Read more in the Cultura Vitae archive at www.culturavitae.substack.com

Sign the petition against MP Dolawatta’s Sri Lanka Sodomy bill:

English version: https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/reject-the-sri-lanka-sodomy-bill