To anyone with an ounce of respect for freedom, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, is a bright light in an otherwise dark decade of woke censorship. Liberty, on this conception, is not the socialist, Nazi, communist, fascist, Rousseauian, Hegelian, Marxist idea, which claims that freedom is only possible when individual conscience is subsumed within a state or a community, but the notion that individuals, ceteris paribus, should be able to articulate their beliefs without being censored or punished.

In other welcome news, Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he is following Musk’s lead, removing the disingenuous fact-checkers, and implementing community notes on Facebook. Suddenly, forbidden topics are being discussed on social media – the modern version of the public square.

One of the effects of this loosening of previously forbidden speech is that the logic of those who guided, or more accurately propagandised, the discourse for decades has been revealed to the public and exposed as nothing more than an ideological chimera. People are analysing the reasoning of those who provided the moral, ethical and institutional frameworks governing our societies, and are, to quote the immortal words of tennis star, John McEnroe, exclaiming, ‘You cannot be serious!’

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the sacred triumvirate of gender, class and race. A recent thread on X is a perfect example of the gatekeepers of a discourse outing themselves as ideologically driven rather than evidence-based. Their imperviousness to reason was reminiscent of an infamously antisemitic provost of Harvard University who, after accusing Jews of all sorts of malfeasance, replied to the eminently reasonable point, that everyone is guilty of bad behaviour, by stating, ‘We’re only talking about the Jews,’ which is a dictionary definition of prejudice. On this understanding, no matter what the subject or the empirical evidence, a one-dimensional thesis explains everything.

In the recent furore on X, it was feminists who were the purveyors of an all-encompassing explanation for the ills of transgender ideology and its history. Their overall criticisms were correct – transgender ideology is a disaster for logic, women’s and children’s rights, and for free speech – but their explanation of why this was so was a classic example of being right for the wrong reasons. The monocausal explanation for the grotesque phenomenon of transgenderism was – wait for it – men. This claim is ridiculous because, while identity politics has many parents, feminism is as responsible for the unleashing of transgender lunacy as any guilty party.

If feminists reject the idea that they espoused gender as a social construct, which would be dishonest, they can’t reject the idea that they propagated, with gusto, the idea of relativism, which is the fundamental philosophy that underpins social construction and hence transgender ideology. Without the idea that we can make a ‘new man’ (or ‘new woman’), in other words, deny human nature and biological reality, which is an idea feminists have solemnly argued for decades, transgender nonsense would not exist.

No matter what they now claim, many feminist perspectives eventually led to men entering women’s spaces and the mutilation of children under the Orwellian term ‘gender-affirming care’.

It was feminists who folded postmodernism to their collective bosoms and ran with the ideology simply because it gave them a weapon with which to attack the ‘patriarchy’. There are mountains of feminist doctoral theses, articles and books arguing mind-numbingly stupid relativist ideas about gender.

The proof of this is everywhere. There’s probably not one law in any liberal democracy worldwide that doesn’t reflect feminist ideology about discrimination, which revolves around the idea that any gap in achievement between men and women is because of misogyny and is never the result of biological or psychological differences between the sexes. If that’s not gender-relativist bollocks, nothing is.

Transgender ideologues, to be clear, took that illogic one step further, and said, if there’s no difference between the sexes and biology is a social construct, then, look at me, I have a girl penis, or a boy vagina.

The melancholy result of this saga is that utter fatuousness has taken over the world. Hordes of half-educated university graduates believe that indigenous, disabled, neurodiverse, transgender lesbians invented everything (an idea that is reflected everywhere in popular culture), and that men and the patriarchy took the credit for their innovations. And in case feminists fool people with their sudden adherence to free speech, it was feminists who labelled anyone who cited a difference between men and women as misogynists, which is a term so drained of meaning that saying any general statement about women that is negative is automatically deemed objectionable – even if, logically, every positive affirmation has a negative side, and vice versa. In other words, it’s impossible for any rational human being to be completely positive or negative about either sex. We’re both the heroes and villains of our story. To prove this contention, just reverse any generalised claim about the sexes whether positive or negative. Yes, women are more kind than men, but they’re also concomitantly more two-faced. Yes, men are physically braver than women, but they’re also more stupid.

What, you ask, was the X thread about? J.K. Rowling tweeted, ‘The number of men who don’t see women as fully human can be measured by their indifference to trans-identified males invading women’s spaces.’ This claim is complete nonsense. Only a small percentage of men believe in transgender ideology. A majority of feminists, though, support transgenderism; and an overwhelming majority of young women are its most vociferous advocates. When the American political scientist and data nerd, Wilfred Reilly, posted a graph proving this point, Sall Grover, of Tickle v. Giggle fame, (who I completely support in her legal battles), called it, ‘moronic’. She is one of many feminists who know why the world is a vale of tears. The answer is men, specifically, after decades of identity politics, white, heterosexual men, who are the perennial villains of the world, which is essentially the one-trick pony of modern feminism writ large. Men are bad and everything is their fault.

Feminism means never being wrong, never apologising for past mistakes – or being rational. Even on X.