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

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

What the line does

Isaiah diagnoses no specific misdeed. He describes a condition: a society in which the moral categories themselves come adrift. Not “they do something wrong” — but “they can no longer name the difference between wrong and good”. That is a different kind of problem. It does not stop through better arguments. It stops only when words are allowed to do their work again.

Five examples of the shift

A mastectomy on a fifteen-year-old is called care; a conversation with her about waiting is called conversion. A parent who asks for time is transphobic; a parent who says yes immediately to every affirmation request has “a safe child”. “Woman” is retranslated by policy into “person with a uterus” — and the term “woman” itself becomes suspect. A biology teacher who explains what an egg cell is receives a correction via a lobby group's lesson pack. The Conversion Practices Act criminalises the pen and leaves the knife untouched.

In each of these places the same mechanism is at work: what harms 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 compact sentence. Not because Scripture must carry authority — for those who do not read it as such, that is no argument — but because a pattern already recognised in 700 BC is apparently no passing fad. It is a form that keeps presenting itself anew. We have it now, and we would do well to name it.