Libido Redux: On Transgerderism

What Christianity shares with Judaism (and Islam,
for that matter) is a belief that God created all things (though all three religions understand God differently). We are creatures. We owe our being, our existence, to Him. We are stewards of His creation, stewards, even, of our own bodies. Acknowledgement of God’s creative power leads to religious awe, a sense of the sacred.

This means that each creature/creation has a nature, a manufacturer’s (God’s) instruction manual. Masculinity and femininity are aspects of that nature for human beings. When belief in God becomes irrelevant, we can throw away this instruction manual and refuse to see ourselves as a creature who has responsibilities to God and to society.

To understand ourselves, we need to start at the beginning. What kind of being are we? The traditional answer–originating with the Greeks, continuing in the Middle Ages, and persisting into our own time -- and the answer given by common sense intuition -- is this: we are a union of both material and immaterial, both body and soul, two realities inseparably united and mysteriously intertwined, interconnected, and interrelated.

That humans are a union of both body and soul, inseparably united was challenged in the 17^th Century with the work of the French philosopher René Descartes, (who famously wrote, “Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am”). Descartes undid this mysterious but evident union by arguing that that the human person was made up of opposing essences, i.e., mind and body, spirit and flesh. This philosophy, referred to as Modernism, was born with Descartes, and, with the writings of his successors had reduced the human person to “ghost in a machine”. The real person is the ghost, i.e., our will or our consciousness, making our bodies into instruments to be used and modified at the owner’s preference. Thus Modernism, which accompanied the birth of science, in effect tried to account only for realities we can see, touch, think and feel.

With the coming of the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche originated the philosophy of “post-modernism.” Modernism (which accompanied the birth of science) tried to account for realities we experience – what we can see, touch, think and feel. But modernist philosophy, Nietzsche professed, was unable to account for itself. What actually justified the Enlightenment’s exaltation of reason and its categorical statements of what was right and wrong, true and false, real and unreal? Nietzsche claimed that reason was just a cloak for a “will to power”. In other words, there is no such thing as truth, just politically enforced versions of the truth – my truth, your truth, his truth, her truth ... To assert that my words are true and yours are false is an act of aggression. Pope Benedict XVI labeled this “the dictatorship of relativism.”

Another post-modernist thinker was Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and homosexual (who, sadly, died of AIDS in 1984), associated with what has been called the structuralist and post-structuralist movements, which questioned the distinction between health and disease, rationality and madness. Foucault said humans are unaware of to what extent our values define what is regarded as a disease. There is no such thing as “normal”, especially in sexuality. Normality is defined and imposed by a hegemony – or redefined. Homosexuality used to be listed in the psychiatrists’ Bible, the DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as a paraphilia, then as a sexual orientation disturbance, then as ego-dystonic homosexuality, and in 1987 it was dropped completely by a minority vote of American Psychiatric Association members.

The post-modernist rejection of truth is the philosophy of our own time – and therefore of most journalists. And not just morality is relative, but reality. The typical post-modernist project is not to learn from reality, but to create a new reality, a new vision of things. This explains the dizzying subtlety of transgender philosophy and science. The more detached from reality it is, the more complex it becomes. Let us listen for a moment to Leah Juliett, an American non-binary, queer, anti-revenge-porn activist, on the lived experience of her gender fluidity:

I see gender as a solar system; it’s so vast and wide with so many options that you can’t really contain it to a small binary scale. Some days, I may feel more male; some days, more female; and some days, I may feel completely neutral and existing in that grey area.

Post-modernism at its contemporary finest.

In my book on modernist influence of the Catholic Church I outlined how “The Pill” made possible the separation of sex from reproduction, along with Pope Paul VI’s forecast of four evils that would result from a disobedience to Church teaching set down in his encyclical Humanae vitae:

· widespread contraceptive practice would lead to “conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.”

· Men… would “lose respect” for women and no longer care for their physical and psychological enjoyment.

· The contraceptive mentality would “place a dangerous weapon…in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.”

· Contraception would lead humans into thinking they have unrestricted authority over their bodies.

For our purpose here, on point four, here is Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. Magazine:

The impact of The Pill was even more radical. It meant sex need not lead to pregnancy. But it wasn’t just another form of contraception, it was an equalizer, a liberator, and easy to take. For the first time in human history, a woman could control her sexuality and determine her readiness for reproduction by swallowing a pill smaller than an aspirin. … The Pill bore revolutionary results. It allowed women to become autonomous decision-makers rather than captives of our biology…

No doubt feminist Pogrebin wasn’t thinking of the link to transgender issues in uttering “Captives of our biology,” but that a derivation conveyed by the contraceptive mentality. If sex is not centrally about reproduction, what is it about? Pleasure, perhaps. Is it about self-definition? Who knows? Artificial contraception has indoctrinated the last three generations in the belief that sex has no essential purpose, no nature. But think about the ramifications of not knowing what the human libido is for. Ignorance of the purpose of one’s sexuality must be a terrible burden, especially for a teen. He or she has never known a world which does not include the pill, one in which sex has a clear purpose. Thus, from his or her point of view, feeling transgender appears as one point on the spectrum of post-modern human sexuality, not an extreme deviation from what is normal. Traditional marriage, with its life-long commitment and a definitive role for sex (the antithesis of post-modernity) might seem countercultural.

So we are proposing that the Transgender Moment is the offspring of new philosophies and technology, Christianity’s decline, Cartesian philosophical dualism, post-modernism and the Pill. As a consequence, transgenderism it is argued that it’s normal and natural. Why shouldn’t people – of any age – solve their psychological problems with mastectomies and castration? Why is transgenderism is being normalized? Here are proposals:

§ Radical feminism.

§ Reproductive rights.

§ Changing family structures.

§ Infiltration of the education bureaucracy.

§ Experience gained from gay activism.

§ The rise of identity politics.

§ The impact of social media like YouTube and Facebook.

§ Corporate bullying.

But even more fundamental are the subjective philosophical ideas which have become deeply embedded in our culture, which help to explain why transgenderism is argued as both plausible and righteous in today’s world.

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