Isaiah 5:20 as a mirror — the great reversal in the gender debate

Sometimes an ancient text offers the sharpest diagnosis of a modern issue. Isaiah 5:20: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who present darkness as light and light as darkness, who present bitter as sweet and sweet as bitter.” Anyone looking at the Dutch gender debate today can hardly ignore that verse — even if they are not religious themselves. For the full biblical analysis, I refer you to gendersekte.nl; the piece below presents the secular core.

What the verse does

Isaiah does not diagnose a specific wrongdoing. He describes a condition: a society in which the moral categories themselves have begun to drift. Not “they are doing something wrong” — but “they can no longer identify the difference between wrong and right.” That is a different kind of problem. It does not end with better arguments. It only ends when words are once again allowed to do their work.

Five examples of the shift

A mastectomy on a fifteen-year-old is called care; talking to her about waiting is called conversion therapy. A parent who asks for time is transphobic; a parent who immediately says yes to every request for affirmation has “a safe child.” “Woman” is redefined by policy as “person with a uterus” — and the term “woman” itself becomes suspect. A biology teacher explaining what an egg cell is receives a correction through a lesson plan from an advocacy organization. The Conversion Practices Act criminalizes the pen while leaving the scalpel untouched.

In each of these cases, the same mechanism is at work: what causes harm is called care; what is care is called harm.

What an older lens adds

Modern analysis speaks of “definitional incoherence” or “categorical drift.” Isaiah expressed the same diagnosis in a more concise sentence. Not because Scripture must be authoritative — for those who do not read it that way, that is not an argument — but because a pattern recognized as early as 700 BC is apparently not a passing fad. It is a form that keeps presenting itself anew. We are seeing it now, and we would do well to name it. How faith communities relate to the subject is discussed under gender and religion.