The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said ‘philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language’. We’ve just experienced the most remarkably lucid example, possibly in the whole of modern history, of Wittgenstein’s axiom. And the linguistic sorcery, extraordinarily enough, happened in a courtroom in Australia where a judge stated, in Tickle v. Giggle, that people can change their sex.

The negative repercussions of the Tickle v. Giggle judgment will impact the rights of everyday people in Australia, especially women, but it will also influence international law, not simply in relation to the ridiculous claims of ‘gender identity’ ideology, but in every facet of life, including, and most importantly, the understanding and application of science.

Reason, causation, rationalism, materialism, empiricism, whatever you want to call science, has been superseded in law by feelings and emotion. Sixty-plus years of ‘social justice’ activism (with a feminist hue – reason is a patriarchal construct), has replaced Enlightenment rationalism with superstition. That this happened in a courtroom in Australia, and not a totalitarian state like North Korea or Afghanistan is a disgrace.

Two trends have led to this ridiculous legal judgment. The first, a subtle, long-term shift from a negative conception of law to a positive conception of law, the second, the wholesale abuse of language by transgender activists. Both of which are the endpoint of a slow coup by left-liberal intellectuals that has been decades in the making. Friedrich von Hayek, Wittgenstein’s second cousin, dedicated his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944, to ‘the socialists of all parties’. And so his warning has come to pass.

These two ideas rest on the central ideology of the modern world: the notion of equality, which, when pushed too far, as in Tickle v. Giggle, can only end in absurdity. This incremental, deliberate shift in people’s relationships with the state has been wrought by a perfidious form of dishonesty that rests on the motte-and-bailey logical fallacy, which substitutes a commonsense and rational understanding of a concept – for example, everyone has the right to live according to their conscience – with a hyperbolic form of the same idea.

For instance, anyone lacking a good, on this understanding, is a victim of inequality, and thus not affirming a person’s gender identity, their conception of themselves, is unequal treatment, or, in the language of transgender ideology, hate speech or ‘genocide’. It doesn’t matter whether the issue infringes other people’s rights or is antidemocratic. All that matters is the lived experience or feelings of the aggrieved identity group.

The judgment in Tickle also rests on a circular argument and the triumph of linguistic propaganda, both of which Justice Bromwich fell for in spectacular fashion. ‘Cisgender’ is a linguistic coinage developed by extreme transgender activists to advance a cause that the majority of people reject – the idea that a person can change their sex and are consequently no different than biological women and men, and who subsequently can access the toilets and changing rooms, and play in sports, designed for one of the two biological sexes. It also leads to the absurdity of tampons in male toilets, women being checked for prostate cancer, and men ‘chestfeeding’ babies and being asked by medical professionals whether they are pregnant. Cisgender has no history in everyday language, real life, or in scientific discourse. In other words, it is a meaningless term designed to give substance to an invented concept. It has no more meaning, in reality, than the politically constructed ideas of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in communist ideology or the notion of Aryan and Jew in Nazi jurisprudence.

As we can see in the latter two cases, just as Wittgenstein said, a whole phantasmagoria can be conjured out of the bewitchment of language, and pure wind can be turned into a tangible reality. And yet, the judge in Tickle v. Giggle began his summation and built his judgment from an acknowledgment of the notion that cisgender and transgender are rational and accurate descriptions of reality. To give one example of how this form of reasoning works, a child’s belief in Santa Claus can create an entire reality based on a fantasy in the child’s mind which, using the logic of one invented term can, like a snowball rolling down a hill and gaining volume, produces elves, flying sleds, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, toy factories in Lapland, and children across the world receiving presents on Christmas night.

And so it is with the idea of cisgender. One term, unmoored from reality, jettisons us into a fantastical world where the words ‘male vagina’ and ‘female penis’ are uttered by intellectuals with a straight face. It’s no different in logic than Wilhelm Stuckart, the co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, codifying the idea of the Mischling, the part Jew, in Nazi ideology. From one small irrational belief great evil ensues. And so we currently have children being mutilated because they erroneously believe they have been born in the wrong body, which is described by ideologues like the Democratic party’s vice presidential candidate under Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, as ‘gender affirming care’.

The judge may as well have written the following which is a parody of many PhD’s in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The law is an ass, or, if we are to believe, as postmodernists claim, that language is unstable, an arse, (they’re only letters), hence obviously a back hole, because a vagina, when you queer the body, is a front hole, which linguistically is just a hole, and not a tangible whole, which means the female penis and the male vagina, being both hole and whole, exist and are interchangeable. Or something like that. It’s simple really.

(Forests have been cut down to provide the paper for university theses full of the type of nonsense that I’ve written above and this reasoning is the genesis of terms like cisgender).

What will ensue from the acceptance of cisgender as a rational category and the judgment in Tickle v. Giggle is an ever-shifting horizon of infantilised irrationalism masquerading as reasonable thought. The gay, fastidious, desperately serious Wittgenstein, who was sexually attracted to a biological male penis, and not a Halloween carnival of narcissistic masquerades, would be turning in his grave.