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 17th 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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