Change Your Species, Race? Why Not?

File this under “Oh, for crying out loud.”

There was a time when planning a family was a relatively straightforward process. A young wife might ask her new hubby, “How many children should we have?” To which he might reply, “Let’s just try for one of each.”

A few years later—and with a bit of luck—little Timmy and Tammy are at each other’s throats, contesting rightful possession of the fuzzy wuzzy brown crayon.

And all is well in the time-space continuum.

Not so in today’s “progressive” land of make believe. Political correctness now requires that objective reality sit the bench while subjective silliness takes the field. For today’s uber-“tolerant” mom and dad—ahem—“mom and mom” or “dad and dad,” having a child of each “sex” (or acquiring one as biological limitations may dictate) apparently means a “family” that looks more like the bar scene from Star Wars than The Donna Reed Show.

Yep, it’s a brave new world.

The Washington Examiner reports, “The 60,000-strong Thomson Reuters media empire, in an effort to determine its diversity success, is asking its staff of reporters, researchers, marketers and others to pick their sex from nine choices, including ‘genderqueer,’ a category for identities other than man or woman.”

“Identities other than man or woman?” You mean like turnip? And only nine choices? Why not 10, or 37, or 3,654?

“According to the company’s annual employee survey, choosing a sexual identity doesn’t have to be based on a worker’s actual sex, but instead ‘a person’s innate, deeply felt psychological identification,’” notes the Examiner.

The survey “asks employees to choose from male, female, transgender, genderqueer/androgynous, intersex, transsexual, FTM (female-to-male), MTF (male-to-female), and prefer not to say.”

Reuters proffered the questionnaire to achieve a 100 percent rating in the “Corporate Equality Index,” a political extortion scheme created by the so-called Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a Washington-based sexual extremist outfit launched in 1980 for the sole purpose of pushing the radical lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender political agenda.

OK, first, the smaller question. How can anyone now be expected—as if anyone ever did—to take Reuters seriously? How can we trust this media giant to objectively report the news without bias when, as a matter of course, its “diversity” policy is rooted in hopeless absurdity?

How can anyone ever again depend on Reuters to accurately and impartially report on matters of human sex and sexuality when it can’t even pass a second-grade biology exam and, more importantly, has clearly chosen sides in an ongoing and highly contentious sociopolitical debate?

But there remains a larger question still. If a person’s “actual sex” needn’t be rooted in biological reality, then why should anything be rooted in biological reality? If we’re playing relativist Texas Hold’em, let’s go all in. As long as we’re tinkering with scientific and moral truth, why stop at a person’s biologically determined and fixed sex? Why stop at “gender identity”?

I’ll wager that next year Reuters scores a 150 percent on HRC’s “equality index” if it offers a category for “species identity.” If “a person’s innate, deeply felt psychological identification” is all that matters, then who is Reuters—who are any of us—to discriminate if an employee wants to get in touch with his inner horse and run the Kentucky Derby?

For that matter, what about “racial identity”? Again, why the intolerant and arbitrary “gender-identity” narrow-mindedness? Roseanne Barr is a short, obnoxious white woman today, but who’s to say that tomorrow she won’t develop an “innate, deeply felt psychological identification” as a 7-foot black man? Watch out, NBA. (I think we can stipulate that, as regards Ms. Barr, “obnoxious” remains a fixed variable under any conceivable scenario.)

Merriam Webster’s defines reductio ad absurdum as “disproof of a proposition by showing an absurdity to which it leads when carried to its logical conclusion.”

You’ve just experienced reductio ad absurdum. “Species identity,” “racial identity” and, to no lesser extent, “gender identity” each represent comically absurd contrivances.

But only one of these comically absurd contrivances is actually taken seriously by an alarming number of at least superficially intelligent people.

Really, today’s LGBT activists, along with their sycophantic allies (like the frightened little toadies at Reuters) signify the embodiment of reductio ad absurdum. When one objectively contemplates the logical conclusion of each their “progressive” propositions, one is left contemplating the absurd.

It’s a brave new world, indeed. And “progressivism” sets the bar absurdly low.

Matt Barber (@jmattbarber on Twitter) is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as vice president of Liberty Counsel Action.