You’ve got to hand it to leftists. They’ve got tremendous empathy toward their fellow human beings, especially the less privileged among us. I’m thinking of the way they treat people born with conditions making hard to tell whether they’re male or female. Some people view those conditions as birth defects. They wouldn’t dream of seeing them that way, though.

Their first reason, I’m sure, must be their sensitivity to the sting of that harsh word “defect.” To pin that label on someone who had no choice, who was born that way, would be terribly stigmatizing. But progressives are more sensitive yet: They won’t even take the milder approach of calling these conditions abnormal. People in this situation are just as normal as everyone else, they’ll say, for there aren’t just two biological sexes, there’s a whole range of them.

It’s become “normal” enough over the past few years to rewrite centuries’ worth of “normality.”

Progressives have even assigned these intersex conditions a normality more normal than the usual maleness and femaleness. Here’s what I mean by that. Consider how long the world has believed there were only two sexes. It takes a lot to overthrow such a long-entrenched, seemingly common-sense belief. But that overthrow has happened, and part of the reason is because of the message, “There are people who are born neither male nor female, and that’s normal.” It’s normal enough to rewrite centuries’ worth of “normality”!

Which is proof, surely, of leftists’ deep concern for those who aren’t quite like the rest of us; their deep compassion for the disadvantaged, whom they always rush to protect, whom they would never think of dismissing, denigrating, or allowing to be harmed just for being “abnormal.” Why, the very word is an affront!

Unless …

Unless the abnormality is Down Syndrome.

Or spina bifida.

Or that rare disease afflicting young Charlie Gard; the disease whose name I need not mention because it represents so many other hard-to-recall conditions for which young people may be killed.

In those cases it’s fine dismiss the child. That is, to kill him. In the womb or out of it. Such killings have become another newly rewritten “normal” of their own.

Celebrate the baby’s condition, or kill the child for it? How do progressives know which is which? It depends on which answer fits their agenda. Transgender advocates really do use biological intersex conditions to argue that male and female aren’t the only two categories of human sex. Katie Couric spent a long opening segment doing just that in her recent National Geographic propaganda piece on transgender.

We are embodied creatures. But we are more than our bodies. We are more than the difficulties we face.

And just try to disagree, if you dare. Try pointing out that CAH, Klinefelter (XXY) and AIS syndromes  were once considered birth defects. Progressives will recoil in horror. They wouldn’t dare attach such a negative label to a fellow human being. It would be wrong.

And they’re right, in a way; except it’s the wrong way. The right way is to label the challenge, not the person.

Let’s recall what birth defects really are: sad, often even tragic hardships that afflict some young people right from the start of their lives. I’ve known the reality of two or three such birth defects, up close, in people I love and respect greatly. They’ve faced steep obstacles, but they’ve kept on going, and for the most part they’ve overcome.

We are embodied creatures, but we are more than our bodies. We are more than the struggles we face. One who has a birth defect is not a defective person for it. Indeed, to rise above challenges is to be the very opposite of “defective.” Helen Keller was so much more than her blindness and her deafness. So it’s okay to call the challenge what it is: It’s a birth defect, even if it’s CAH, XXY, or AIS. Again: We label the challenge,  the person.

But of course what’s really going on in all of this is that progressives have agendas to advance — transgenderism on the one hand, and abortion on the other. If you’re looking for consistency, you won’t find it in their sensitivity to all humans with birth defects. You’ll find it in the ease with which they pretzel-bend their arguments to fit their agendas.