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The Gender Binary

Pope Francis disagrees with teaching gender identity in schools, having called this  a "war against marriage."
On a return flight to Rome at the end of a three-day trip to Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Pope recounted a meeting with a French father whose young son wanted to be a girl after reading about it in a textbook.
"This is against nature," he said. "It is one thing when someone has this tendency ... and it is another matter to teach this in school."
    "To change the mentality -- I call this ideological colonization," the Pope said. Well, we are approaching the tip of the iceberg, so says Claire Cretien:

    Bathrooms are just the beginning: a scary look into the trans movement’s end goals

    May 6, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The battle over men accessing women’s bathrooms and vice versa has little do with bathrooms or even transgenderism, a well-known LGBT activist admitted last week.  It has everything to do with re-working society and getting rid of the “heterobinary structure” in which we live—eliminating distinctions between “male” and “female” altogether.
    Riki Wilchins, who has undergone “sex change” surgery and is a far-left social change activist, wrote in the gay publication The Advocate last week that social conservatives and many LGBT activists are missing the point when it comes to the transgender bathroom debate.
    The title of Wilchins' article makes the points succinctly: "We'll Win the Bathroom Battle When the Binary Burns."
    People should be able to enter whatever bathroom “fits their gender identity,” Wilchins wrote, but the fact that we even have “male” and “female” bathrooms reflects something about society that needs to change. 
    There are many “genderqueer” or “non-binary” people, Wilchins wrote, pointing to a student who recently “came out” to President Obama as “non-binary” at a London townhall as a notable example. 
    “Non-binary” people don’t identify as male or female and they often want to be referred to as “they” or “hir” or “zer.”  So the fact that there are even intimate facilities that reflect the “binary” truth about gender should change, Wilchins wrote.
    In the eyes of LGBT advocates, the notion of only two genders (which one can pick, of course) is antiquated. 
    But transgenderism inherently acknowledges and actually reinforces the binary nature of gender. 
    Transgenderism presumes that a man can be “trapped” inside a woman’s body and a woman can be “trapped” inside a man’s body.  It encourages men “becoming” women to embrace femininity and wear dresses and make-up.  Similarly, transgenderism encourages women “becoming” men to make themselves more masculine through hormones and by altering their appearances, reinforcing the notion that men look and act a certain way.
    “The long-term goals of many LGBT activists are actually not just access to the restrooms of their preferred gender identity, but actually destroying the concept of gender or the separation of the genders altogether,” Peter Sprigg, Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at the Family Research Council, told LifeSiteNews.  Sprigg noted that when LGBT activists are appealing to a mainstream audience, they “are accepting or implicitly accepting the separation of male and female facilities” like bathrooms.  
    “They present this framework…that a transgender person is just born in the wrong body…[they say] the woman born in a man’s body is really a woman and therefore should be allowed to use the women’s room,” said Sprigg.  “But then, if you dig down…you find actually these acknowledgements that they want to do away with the gender binary altogether.”
    The challenges faced by “non-binary” people “cut to the heart of arguments that trans advocates and their allies have been making for some time, in the face of furious right-wing opposition to trans identity generally and to ‘boys in the girls' room’ specifically,” Wilchins wrote. 
    Wilchins continued:
    But what happens when a genderqueer individual, who genuinely looks and sounds profoundly non-binary or masculine, declares in a binary world s/he would be most comfortable accessing the girls restroom? To say the least, the optics will no longer work. Nor will appeals to practicality.
    What really needs to be contested here is not just our right to use bathrooms with dignity (which would personally be very welcome), but the entire underlying hetero-binary structuring of the world queers must inhabit.

    The ultimate goal: an end to society’s ‘binary’ structure

    People who advocate for bathroom privacy and transgender advocates who insist boys should be allowed in girls’ bathrooms and vice versa are missing a larger point, Wilchins wrote.  The fact that there are even male and female bathrooms reflects that our society is structured in a “binary” way, and this needs to change in order for the full goals of the LGBT movement to be enacted.
    “Queer activists have been talking about [this] at least since the 1970s of Gay Liberation, even as the movement it spawned has continued to nudge it aside,” wrote Wilchins.
    As the LGBT movement focused on redefining marriage and enshrining in law same-sex couples’ “right” to children, it also quietly introduced lawsuits advocating for the law to recognize one’s self-perception instead of biological reality as truth.  Once the Supreme Court redefined marriage, the media focus on the LGBT movement slowly began to shift to battles over gender and transgenderism.  
    “They want to destroy the concepts of male and female entirely,” Rob Dreher at The American Conservative warned.  “This is what they’re after, and they’re not going to stop until it is accomplished.”
    Dreher warned that parents need to evaluate how much of the prevailing culture they’re willing to submit their children to, and decide what the tipping point for them will be—the point at which they will remove their children from public schools and in some ways retreat from society.
    “It will be very difficult to teach our children to live by Christian sexual morality if we do not teach them how being a Christian requires them (us) to live by a different political and economic code within our society,” wrote Dreher.
    A society in which biological sex is no longer recognized “would be a terrifying society for a lot of women and girls,” Sprigg said, because “they would have the experience of being exposed to and being essentially forced to expose themselves to biologically male individuals in settings that were previously separated by sex” like locker rooms.  This could increase the risk of sexual assault and voyeurism, Sprigg said, and also violate people’s sense of privacy.
    “Developing a strong and consistent and confident sense of your identity as biologically male or biologically female is an important developmental task for any child in the course of growing up,” said Sprigg.  A society that doesn’t recognize the true nature of gender “would make it exponentially harder for people to accomplish that fundamental human developmental task of understanding who they are.”

    ‘The family ends up abolished’

    “What we are really talking about is the abolition of sex,” Stella Morabito, senior contributor to The Federalist and an expert on cults and propaganda, told LifeSiteNews.  “And it is sex that the trans project is serving to abolish legally, under the guise of something called ‘the gender binary.’  Its endgame is a society in which everyone is legally de-sexed.  No longer legally male or female.  And once you basically redefine humanity as sexless you end up with a de-humanized society in which there can be no legal ‘mother’ or ‘father’ or ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife’ without permission from the State.  Government documents are already erasing the terms.  In such a society, the most intimate human relationships take a hit. The family ends up abolished.” 
    “A sexless society is ultimately a totalitarian society because it erases in law the most basic human relationships,” said Morabito, “particularly the mother-child bond.”
    Pro-family advocates have for years warned that the weakening of family bonds leads to a weakened society and greater government involvement in the individual lives of its citizens. 
    Morabito and Sprigg stressed the importance of speaking out when it comes to these issues and the difference that individuals can make by doing so. 
    “Ironically, just at the moment when the LGBT movement has achieved their greatest victory in persuading the Supreme Court to redefine marriage, they may be setting themselves up for a tremendous setback by…grossly overreaching” in trying to enact radical gender laws, said Sprigg. 
    “Sex distinctions are the germ of all human relationships,” said Morabito.  “Abolishing them legally basically abolishes family autonomy.  And this is an act of violence against children because it would serve at some point to separate them from their origins. Every child's first transcendental question is ‘Where did I come from?’  If the law will not allow the child to see his own origins and wholeness in the faces of a mother and a father, it destabilizes the child's sense of self.  It creates personal dysfunction in children and basically ends up spreading more dysfunction and even dystopia in society.”
    Wilchins praised transgender advocates for their work, noting that they have “finally and perhaps unwittingly opened the gender Pandora's Box, and over the next few years all sorts of unexpected non-binary things…are about to come popping out.” 
    Wilchins and the pro-family movement perhaps can agree on one thing, though: “This is going to be interesting.”

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