Man, I feel like a woman

This Shania Twain song takes on a whole new meaning in the light of an (arguably tendentious) news story that recently caught my attention, reporting on the introduction of a bill in California that bans from classrooms "any instructional materials that reflect adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, color, creed, handicap, national origin, or ancestry". As usual, it is not the race, handicap, national origin or even creed, but the "sex" part that worries me. Why? Here goes:

This bill SB777 (signed, incidentally, by our very own export, the Governator himself) might seem to fit nicely into the P.C. trend of our times. But if you take a closer look, you come across the following definition of "gender":

210.7. "Gender" means sex, and includes a person's gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth.

What does this definition imply?

1) There is no natural sex that is reflected in both the body and the mind. People are not born as men and women, they are assigned a sex at birth, according to a stereotype, or they assume an identity, meaning that they choose whether they self-identify as a man or a woman, regardless of their biological preconditions.
2) Consequently, there is no "normal" case of gender, meaning that one is wrong to assume that people that look like men are actually men, because sex now becomes a matter of definition, or even a matter of personal choice.

The implications of this bill reach from worrying (children will now be taught that it is discriminatory to naturally refer to parents as "mother and father") to freakish (a boy can choose to use a girls' locker room or bathroom if he self-identifies as female), but what really got me thinking is a point that reaches much deeper.

What we are faced with here is the introduction of an educational system that no longer acknowledges fundamental truths. Everything, according to this approach, is a matter of choice, a relative matter. There is no such thing as a natural man or woman, a natural set of parents (consisting of a mother and a father) - in fact, anything that one acknowledges as fixed, as eternal or natural is deemed discriminatory.

I don't only think that this approach is fundamentally wrong, I also think that it reflects the basic flaw of modern mentality very well: Everything depends on me, on my choices, on my will. There is nothing outside of myself that restricts me, unless I choose a set of rules among many that I will adhere to. But even then, there is no universal world order, no truth that exists for everyone, and independently of our knowledge of it, that even we as humans are subject to. Man has now truly established his (or wait, her?) position as the king of creation. The problem is, it doesn't end here. There are things that transcend human control and understanding, that we have no choice but to bow to in awe and reverence. And if the educational system keeps developing the way it is, children will have a very hard time finding out about them.

(PS: This would merit a whole other story, but read about the case of Bruce/Brenda/David Reimer as a disturbing example of what can happen when people mess with nature.)