Democrats have co-opted the term “big lie” to refer to former President Donald Trump’s state of denial over his 2020 election result. But for their “big” lie, they have chosen something of only temporary and transitory importance. The fact is, elections come and go, and election denialists are everywhere, doing their little part to undermine democracy every election cycle. They are mostly laughed at and scorned by reasonable people.

There is, however, a much more profound big lie at work in modern life — that a man can become a woman by sheer force of either his will or his own delusions.

Transgender ideology has been fully embraced by a deranged news media and other unmoored cultural institutions only very recently. New reasons keep arising that show the urgency of forcefully rejecting it. Transgenderism is a lie that says your everyday experience of humanity, and all of the habits you have naturally developed from that experience, are but illusions. As hard as so many have tried to force this nonsense on you, you can still can trust your senses, think for yourself, and see through the lie.

Fortunately, the legal system can help save civilization from such nonsense.

The Women’s Liberation Front — which is, notably, a radically liberal organization — sued California late last year, arguing that the state’s prison system endangers women by housing them with male inmates. This cohabitation arrangement based on the flimsy notion of “gender identity” has already led to sexual assaults against female inmates involved in this lawsuit. These are surely not the only ones, either. This situation is quite obviously not safe or sane.

Take Krystal Gonzalez, for example. Gonzalez was sexually assaulted by a male inmate who identifies as a woman and has a penis. “Crystal does not believe that women have penises,” the complaint states, “and the psychological distress caused by her assault is exacerbated by the prisons refusal to acknowledge the sex of her perpetrator.” For bringing this lawsuit, WoLF has reportedly been excluded from fundraising websites GoFundMe and GiveButter. Those doing business with such websites should think carefully about with whom they are doing business — people so timid and ignorant that they would rather push obvious and enormous lies about day-to-day existence than allow others to speak the truth.

Men cannot have babies. Women do not have penises. It used to be that every kindergartner understood this, but today, even adults fear to speak the truth.

It apparently requires even more courage to say that women and girls are entitled to privacy in their own safe spaces. It is with good reason that employers and public institutions have offered them that privacy in order to make them a bigger part of society. It has helped teenage girls experience menstruation without humiliation at school. It has helped mothers pump breast milk and feed their infants without having to give up their careers or stay home at all times.

Female privacy represents progress — it removes what had in earlier days been obstacles to female education and professional advancement. This privacy is meant to exclude men, even those males who adopt stereotypically effeminate affectations and say they are women. But this progress is currently being undone.

And there are already consequences, as the lawsuit referenced above makes clear. As female swimmers at the University of Pennsylvania can attest, university administrators ignored and even criticized their complaints about being exposed to their teammate Lia Thomas’s male genitalia in the female locker room before and after every practice and meet. This is sexual harassment by any definition.

Women deprived of their rightful privacy and subjected to such treatment should relentlessly sue the institutions involved until such policies are discontinued. This is one way to make wokeness a prohibitively expensive luxury.

It would also be a mistake to think of this as a problem that begins or ends with athletics. After all, at least women who play sports have the choice to quit. Women in prisons cannot. Women in the workplace do not and should not have to interrupt their careers in order to avoid harassment from males, even the ones playing up their feminine side.

Those who defend housing male inmates with female inmates probably think they are doing something good. So, perhaps, do Loudoun County’s lying school board members, who helped make possible one rape and one sexual assault in their school bathrooms by allowing a boy wearing a skirt to enter the girls’ restroom. The oft-invoked trope is that they are somehow making teenagers feel less awkward about their gender confusion. But what they’re really doing is rejecting common sense and endangering girls’ and women’s lives and well-being.

Women deprived of their rightful privacy and subjected to such treatment should relentlessly sue the institutions involved until such policies are discontinued.