Has the world gone mad? Men who undergo operations to butcher their own genitals can now compete as "women" in the Olympics. Australia allows citizens to change their birth certificates to reflect the sex they desire to be identified as--no matter what sex they actually are. American college professors regularly refer to the "seven genders."

Australian Keith Windschuttle appropriately takes such silliness seriously in his excellent article, Language Wars.

"[S]exual differences are grounded in biology," Windschuttle writes. "They are determined at conception by the distribution of X and Y chromosomes and cannot be altered, no matter what identity a person assumes, how many hormones someone ingests, or whatever surgery is performed."

Sex is a precisely defined biological category. But gender, as we discover in grammar, is flexible. It doesn't always mirror sex distinctions. Sex is male and female. Gender is masculine, feminine, and neuter. The two concepts are often mistakenly equated. But they are definitely not the same thing.

Activists recognized, Windschuttle points out, that "if sex was redefined as gender, it too became arbitrary and changeable. Hence, masculinity, femininity and homosexuality were transformed from the realm of biological necessity to that of custom." This is why the accepted term "sex" became discarded for the politically loaded term "gender."

Getting breast implants, injecting yourself with estrogen, and having your penis surgically removed doesn't make you a woman. It makes you insane.

Consider a theoretical person who lops off his arms, fuses his legs together, and surgically forks his tongue. He demands that we call him a snake. Some people do, and accuse those who don't of intolerance. Special laws are passed to protect snake-man's tiny community.

Is the man undergoing the "species-change operation" really a snake, or just totally nuts?

Granted, this scenario is more than a bit preposterous. But why should we view someone who undergoes a sex-change operation any differently? The man surgically taking on the characteristics of a reptile no more becomes a snake than the man undergoing "gender reassignment" surgery becomes a woman.

Activists can change laws, alter customs through social pressure, and impose Orwellian constraints on language. They can't repeal biology.