The time that Basil Zempilas thought the game was over.

Well by the time you are being threatened with sexual violence, your home has been graffitied, and your wife has been forced to shut down her Instagram account, you may begin to wonder whether life in the public square is for you.

Well that’s just what has happened to the newly minted Perth Lord Mayor, Basil Zempilas, for commenting on a talk back show on radio station 6PR, a show he still co-hosts, over transgender matters.

Here’s what he said:

If you’ve got a penis, mate, you are a bloke. If you’ve got a vagina you are a woman. Game over.

Turns out it wasn’t game over. Turns out it wasn’t just that there were a few minutes of extra time left. Turns out the game was just beginning. And Basil was set to lose big time.

The response over his comments indicate that his tenure as Lord Mayor will be cut short. And as for his other work at TV station, Channel 7, I’d say that for all the talk that he could hold down the Lord Mayor role and continue to be in media, he’s a goner.

Oh, they’ll come up with something about “conflict of interest,” or “not enough time to do both roles.” Something like that. Besides, in the TV industry he’s going to find that he’ll become a social leper. So the cafeteria at Channel 7 will empty pretty quickly when he goes in there.

Plenty in that industry probably agree with him, but as I said, it is this slightly frantic media/public response that will carry the day. People will now start to avoid him for the sake of their own careers not being sullied by association.

Never mind the fact that there is no “public” response really to anything, because the public is made up of so many contrasting ideas and opinions. The aim of activists, however, is to give the impression that their voice is the singular public voice, and that only a minority – usually retrograde types who hate – would disagree.

So people watching on who might agree with him will simply self-censor what they believe, wondering if they are in some small minority. Which is after all a well known activist tactic. Go in hard. Make it so intense and so brutal that your detractors will stay silent.

In the end it will come down to economics too.The fact that the upcoming Pride parade organisers are suggesting that the event be moved from the city in protest means that money will leave the city. Or Basil will. I know which one my money’s on! He’s about to experience a cancelling. The game is over for him.

I would be keen to talk to Basil. I happen to agree with him that if you have a penis you are a man, and if you have a vagina you are a woman. There are a very few cases of indeterminate sexuality, but the percentage is low. I hold to that viewpoint from my understanding of the biblical account of Genesis. I would want to talk that through with him.

I would also, if given the chance, show Basil that the issue of identity is so tied up in sexuality and gender in the Sexular Age, and the politics is so hot and so hostile, that even the deranged behaviour of graffitiing his house and threatening him with sexual violence is seen as acceptable, desirable even. After all if we are going to rid the world of the speed bumps on the road to Utopia, then the likes of Basil Zempilas are expendable.

There was, however, a flippancy to the comment “game over”, and his follow up contrition indicated he was having a boofy bloke laugh on a boofy bloke radio show that, for all its boofyness, or perhaps because of it, likes to scorn people who aren’t as boofy as they.

Basil’s mea culpa (which will in the end be useless so he might as well not have offered it) contained this:

I didn’t mean to cause any offence. One of our jobs as broadcasters is to entertain, I was trying to be funny – it was not funny – it was inappropriate and I apologise.

The problem in Boofyland however, is that penis and vagina jokes were always funny back in the 70s and 80s when men in Australia wore stubby shorts and wore double plug thongs (some still do apparently).

But Basil didn’t see the implacable identity train bearing down on the tracks. He didn’t seem to realise that the public square is less forgiving than before, and more hostile than ever. And now it’s too late.

On the issue of it being funny, this is where Basil and I would part ways. I don’t think what he said was funny, given the issue of Gender Dysphoria, which is a serious concern among many young people today. And it is accompanied by a whole raft of other sociological and psychological issues among many of them.

The issue has been exacerbated by the political agenda of many trans-activists who will brook no argument when it comes to the issue of gender being fluid. We’re seeing an explosion of transgender young people in our communities, and all too often the rainbow culture is keen to sign them up. Many young people with gender dysphoria will end up being pawns in a hostile zero sum game.

And if you’re willing to sit through the squeamish stuff, then read this article in Quillette by a long term GD sufferer who went through the process of full transition. The author, born a woman, but who now identifies as a man, has some brutal realities for those who think this is some sort of game or freedom bid:

I wasn’t “born in the wrong body.” I was born female. But I didn’t like it. So I changed my appearance, at significant monetary, psychological, and physical cost, with plastic surgery and hormones. My sex never changed, though. Only my appearance changed.

Anyone going through this is in store for a brutal process. Yet we now have thousands of naïve parents walking their children into gender-treatment centers, often based on Internet-peddled narratives that present the transition experience through a gauzy rainbow lens. Many transition therapies are still in an experimental phase—as you will learn if you become sick during or after these treatments.

Yet there’s more. Do you want to read it?

During my own transition, I had seven surgeries. I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.

I could go on, but read the article, it’s deeply revealing about what’s at stake for those who decide to go through a full transition. And let’s face it they’re not being done any favours by the hard core activists who wish to silence anyone who says that the glorious gender fluid future is all sparkles and My Little Ponies. It’s clearly not. It’s clearly painful, confusing and going to end in a lot of litigation. We’re only at the beginning or figuring out how to deal with it, and the Christian community is going to have to figure that out as well. It’s coming to a church near you, you better believe it. It probably already is.

So it’s not funny. Basil is right to concede that now, albeit too late to save his career. Lord Mayor of a city in the Western world now means that you have to smile, cut the nice ribbon, give the nice generic speech about all things being amazing, and keep your actual thoughts to yourself.

So it’s not funny. But it’s not wonderful either. It’s not the rosy picture we’re being given. So it’s sad that increasingly we have to keep our thoughts to ourselves, because even medical practitioners who have serious concerns about the lack of serious investigation into gender dysphoria, and the ideological rush to declare someone was “born in the wrong body”, are going to be shredded by activists if they challenge them. Well for the next couple of decades at least before the litigation starts.

The gender fluid omelette we are supposedly all going to feast upon clearly needs to crack a few eggs, graffiti a few houses, issue a few death threats, and shut down any dissent. Meanwhile parents struggling to make sense of their children will be increasingly sidelined in any decisions being made.

It feels like the game is only beginning. We’re going to need wisdom to play it.