A few weeks ago some conservative college students engaged in a bit of provocative street theater. They approached random people on campus and told them, in the course of a conversation, that they were something the manifestly were not, e.g. a 6-foot white guy says he’s an Asian woman. (the original version by Family Policy Institute is here. My cut is below.)

Absolutely no one contradicted them because objective truth is now illegal on most college campuses. “Identifying” as something makes that a reality. And now the federal government is trying to outlaw objective reality.

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee’s Task Force on Executive Overreach was holding a hearing on “The Federal Government on Autopilot: Delegation of Regulatory Authority to an Unaccountable Bureaucracy.” The subject of that hearing that the Office of Civil Rights bizarre guidance that mental illness constituted a “sex” under federal civil rights law. One of the witnesses was U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Gail Heriot, who is also a law professor at the University of San Diego School of Law.

Part of Professor Heriot’s written testimony included the following unremarkable and factual observation:

“If I believe that I am a Russian princess, that doesn’t make me a Russian princess, even if my friends and acquaintances are willing to indulge my fantasy. Nor am I a Great Horned Owl just because — as I have been told — I happen to share some personality traits with those feathered creatures.”

Apparently the fat, dwarfish, and none too bright Democrat Zoe Lofgren lives in a different world.

LOFGREN: I’ll just say this, I don’t usually call out witnesses but this is what the witness testimory says. And this is Heriot.

We are teaching young people a terrible lesson. If I believe that I am a Russian princess, that doesn’t make me a Russian princess, even if my friends and acquaintances are willing to indulge my fantasy. Nor am I a Great Horned Owl just because — as I have been told — I happen to share some personality traits with those feathered creatures.

I’ve got to say I found this rather offensive. And it says to me that the witness really doesn’t know anything, and has probably never met, a transgender child who is going through, in almost every case, a very difficult experience finding themselves. And I believe that the Department’s guidance will help schools all over the United States in preventing the kind of violence and harrassment these transgender kids find too often. So that’s all I’m going to say on that. You know, I think it’s very regretable that that comment was put into the record and I think it’s highly offensive.

Now I’d like to ask you a question…

HERIOT: Well, could I comment on that please?

LOFGREN: No, it’s just my opinion…

HERIOT: I think you’ll find that many people find it very offensive that the Department of Education…

LOFGREN: I think you’re a bigot lady. I think you’re an ignorant bigot and anti…

STEVE KING: The gentlelady (“gentlelady”? wtf? that ill-mannered suppurating bag of pus?) from California will suspend. You are out of order.

LOFGREN: She’s out of order…

KING: You don’t call names in this committee and you’ll not be recognized to do that.

LOFGREN: Mr. Chairman, it is my time and I would just like to say that we allow witnesses to say offensive things but I cannot allow that kind of bigotry to go into the record without a challenge. Now I don’t want to get into a debate about it…

HERIOT: Does that mean you think I am a Russian princess?

LOFGREN: I have no idea.

While the left is crowing about Lofgren’s great victory over logic and intelligence, the fact remains that when confronted with the question, “Am I a Russian princess?” Lofgren could not answer the question. Because to answer the question, or even to acknowledge it, serves as a refutation of the whole “transgender” nonsense because no amount of regulations by the Department of Education, for that matter, no number of surgeries or administrations of synthetic hormones, will ever make Chastity Bono a man or Bruce Jenner a woman or Zoe Lofgren coherent. It is a physical impossibility tarted up with psychobabble enforced by the coercive power of the state.

All Lofgren has is spit-spraying and name calling. She is helpless before the power of a Webster’s Dictionary because, as much as she and her ilk would like it to be otherwise, words to have meaning and most people understand that.