Several common cultural assumptions underlay this article. One is the idea that things and people have merit, or value, if and only if a specific person says so. Worth is not objective, it is relative. We are not all created equal, endowed with our creator with certain unalienable rights; we are all amorphous creatures for whom truth does not exist or is ultimately unknowable, and therefore subject to our circumstances.

This, by the way, is the inherent conflict between the old civil rights movement and the new “civil rights” movement: the old insisted that men (and women) of every race were created equal, and objectively so. Its beliefs were based on objective, external truths that were to be applied equally to all: rule of law. Justice. The equal humanity and dignity of every person. The new, Black Lives Matter-style “civil rights” campaigns” instead say we cannot ever be equal because some have more privilege than others. We have no common basis for determining a single standard that applies to all. We only have our subjective, individual experiences, our self-determined “identity.”

Apparently this identity can change at will: from mother to “not a mother.” The fact that one has birthed a child and is therefore objectively its mother (and, if we continue in this train of thought, objectively has a duty to care for this child she has created whether she feels like it or not) does not matter. The mother “feels” she is not a mother. She rejects an outside, objective standard. She rejects reality and substitutes her own.