A couple readers have made this case:

Jonah,

There are excellent reasons why academics are prone to desires for sexual

reassignment. The whole deconstructionist/poststructuralist ethos has bled

down throughout the humanities and soft sciences, covering the whole mess

like some sort of sex-change magic shell. In contemporary academia,

experience — all experience — is relative, subjective, and so forth. This

explains the politics of things like literary fiction — the vast, vast

majority of ‘quality’ literature produced today essentially lifts its moral

code from grad school seminars.

Me: I’m more agnostic on this sort of argument than I once was. But I wrote a column along these lines a while back that caused a stir at the time.