The Gender Emperor's New Clothes

Many years ago, there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of tolerance that he spent all his time and energy making sure he was accepting of everyone and everything.

He cared nothing about consequences or even about reality. He cared only for showing everyone how open-minded he was.

He used social media every hour of the day to signal his virtue.

And instead of saying, as one might remark about any other ruler, “He’s doing actual things,” of him, the people always said, “The Emperor is very inclusive and many people like his tweets”.

In the great city where he lived, life was always gay. Every day many strange ideas came to town. One day the idea arose that gender was not a biological reality but a social construct.

Those who promoted the idea – academics, celebrities and the mainstream media – made sure everyone knew that this idea was the most magnificent idea imaginable.

The idea that people could change genders was not only uncommonly fine; it had a remarkable way of becoming invisible to anyone who was a bigot or just unusually stupid.

“This would be just the idea for me to promote,” thought the progressive Emperor.

“If I promote this idea I will be able to discover which men in my empire are bigots. And I could tell the moral men from the Nazis. Yes, I certainly must promote this idea right away.”

The Emperor paid activist organisations large sums of public money to start work on the idea at once.

They created gender studies courses and pretended to speak sense, though there was, in reality, nothing at all to what they were promoting. The funding, however, was lucrative.

After a surprisingly short time, the Emperor thought to himself, “I’d like to know how those activists are getting on with the idea.”

But he felt slightly uncomfortable when he remembered that those who were bigots would not see the logic of the magnificent idea.

It couldn’t have been that he doubted himself. Yet, he thought he it might be better to send someone else to see how things were going, rather than to go himself.

The whole town knew about the idea’s peculiar power, and all were impatient to find out how narrow-minded and bigoted their neighbours were.

“I’ll send my local church minister to the activists,” the Emperor decided. “He’ll be the best one to tell me how the idea looks, for he’s a seeker-sensitive man and his church is very contemporary.”