When does 2 plus 2 equal XX?

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”

With those words, the enigmatic agent of the Thought Police known as O’Brien begins his education of Winston Smith, the doomed hero of George Orwell’s “1984.”

O’Brien is holding up four fingers, as Winston correctly reports during his interrogation. But this is not the answer which Big Brother is looking for, so O’Brien asks Winston, “And if the party says that it is not four but five — then how many?”

Winston still says four, and thus gets his first blast of pain from the torture device in the interrogation room — Room 101 — the room of lies and of nightmares.

Several blasts of pain later, and still clinging to his knowledge that O’Brien is holding up four fingers — no more and no less — Winston asks pleadingly “What else can I say?”

At this point, Winston still believes in objective truth, but O’Brien and his pain machine still have a lot to teach him — even though O’Brien laments that Winston is a “slow learner.”

“How can I help it?” Winston asks. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”

O’Brien is bemused by Winston’s innocence. “Sometimes, Winston” he replies to him. “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

Not too much longer, after numerous shuddering bouts of pain, Winston confirms what he has been told to think — four fingers is actually five. Under duress, he has given up the evidence of his own eyes. Objective reality has been replaced with political reality, or as we call it today, political correctness. This is the state whereby reality is adjusted to fit the politically convenient “truth,” rather than the truth reflecting what is objectively called reality.

George Orwell, of course, was writing a novel. So far as we know, the Western democratic republics are not inflicting pain on their own citizens in order to extract politically correct slogans out of them. Nonetheless, Orwell was a prophet whose Thought Police actually prefigure the modern media as a force used to condition the citizenry to reject objective truth (singular) and accept multiple convenient truths in its place.

A remarkable example of this came to my attention last week when I was scanning the Associated Press news wire and read a story about the indictment of 13 members of the Internet hacking group called Anonymous.

Zipping along to see how the government was handling these cyber-terrorists, I stumbled over the following paragraph:

“In December 2010, the conspirators discussed possible targets related to WikiLeaks, which received more than 700,000 documents and some battlefield video from Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the largest-volume leak of classified material in U.S. history.”

Being relatively well-informed about the WikiLeaks case, I was surprised I had never heard of Chelsea Manning. Yet there was something troublingly familiar about the name. Then I remembered that the main leaker in the WikiLeaks case was named Bradley Manning. Could there be a connection? Sure enough, a quick Google search turned up an entry for Chelsea Manning in Wikipedia, and when I clicked on it, I came to this description:

“Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after releasing the largest set of classified documents ever leaked to the public. Manning was sentenced to confinement for 35 years and to be dishonorably discharged from the Army... In a statement the day after sentencing, Manning said she had felt female since childhood, asked to be known as Chelsea, and expressed a desire to undergo hormone replacement therapy.”

OK, so Chelsea Manning was really Bradley Manning. Whether Bradley wanted to be known as Chelsea was of no importance to me whatsoever, but what astounded me is that the AP had not only granted Manning’s wish to call him Chelsea, but had also done so without any kind of notice to the public that Chelsea was the faux name of the well-known convicted spy. It was as though Bradley Manning had never existed, just as in O’Brien’s world of “1984,” two plus two had never equaled four if Big Brother said so.

The more I read, the more I was befuddled by how easily the AP and Wikipedia were able to alter reality and turn a man into a woman. The Wikipedia story referred to Manning with female pronouns throughout the story, even in reference to activities that had clearly taken place when he was indisputably a “he” and not a “she.”

Was there some political agenda at work? The AP would never admit to such a scenario, but isn’t calling a man a woman a huge political statement? What concerns me is that massive amounts of people will see nothing wrong with the Associated Press and other news organizations calling a man a woman, because, after all, he asked for it!

As for me, I am asking the same question Winston Smith asked, “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.” Likewise a man is a man, a woman is a woman, and a traitor is a traitor — by any name.

Of course, I haven’t visited Room 101 yet, but until then I am sticking with this formula that I learned back in grade school: XX equals female and XY equals male. No matter how much a doctor’s scalpel and hormones can reshape the exterior of a man, there is one thing that doesn’t change —  and never will. That little old Y chromosome that made Bradley Manning a man is an inconvenient truth that can’t be denied, no matter how much the Associated Press insists that it can.