The Church is delivering mixed messages to the faithful, as we speak.
Exhibit one. A front-page story in The Catholic Weekly, titled “‘Gender diverse’ need friendship, stated:
People who identify as “gender diverse” need acceptance and love, said Bishop Daniel Meagher, in response to new research showing they are dramatically more likely to have suffered abuse and neglect.
The study found Australians who identify as having a “diverse gender” are up to 17 times more likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder and up to 52 times more likely to have engaged in self-harm over the last year than the rest of the population.
Well, liberal Catholic bishops will be liberal Catholic bishops. Ironically, the Psalm of the most recent Sunday (Psalm 14) states:
He who does no wrong to his brother,
Who casts no slur on his neighbour,
Who holds the godless in disdain,
But honours those who fear the Lord. (Emphasis added).
Hold the godless in disdain. Hmmm.
Conflicting messages? First question. Are the transgendered godless? Indeed, are they “sinners”? Well, as our present Pontiff says, who am I to judge? Yes, but … one might reasonably argue, what could be more godless than showing the middle finger to the Creator over the sex He has assigned you? Yes, I realise that we are all sinners, from the time of the Biblical Eve. Every sin is showing God the middle finger, if you will.
And yes, transgenderism isn’t the first sin in which humans have defied the natural order of Aristotle and Aquinas. I am thinking, to take one example, of the sterilisation of convenience that is artificial contraception. Widely practised, including by Catholics. But what if we are, as a Church and a people, redefining sin, and/or defining some sins out of existence? It is a bit like Eve’s embrace of the Tree of Knowledge. We become little gods. Or think we are. We become godless. Including the (apparently) Catholic President of the United States, who, this Easter past, declared Easter Sunday to be a “transgender day of visibility”.
There is the old adage, hate the sin, love the sinner. But what if the “sinner” claims not to be a sinner? And to claim that the “sin” isn’t a sin.
The barbarians are well and truly inside the gates. So, on question one, there is an argument that the transgender movement, if not the individual, troubled gender-dysphoric soul, is godless and to be disdained. And this is a key point. It isn’t just about a very small number of men “trapped” in women’s bodies and vice versa. There is a movement afoot, aiming to disrupt the whole natural order. A private matter has become very public. And very consequential, as we shall see. This isn’t some arcane debate in moral philosophy.
This is the central premise of the post-modernist world view and its stand against traditional, organised religion. Here we come to the very core of the sexual revolution and to its rejection of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Transgenderism is merely the latest (the last?) front in the war on traditional forms and beliefs. This is THE war. Few should doubt this. It isn’t just about “the love”.
But …
Is transgenderism a huge qualitative step from a cold war against God to a hot war? It is at least arguable that the seeming widespread acceptance of transgenderism is a category change, being played out in real time before us all.
Is the current age “unprecedented”? A recent book by Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, called The Detransition Diaries, has Amazon’s blurb stating the following:
We live in unprecedented times, when what was known for thousands of years, that we are created male and female, is now up for debate. It is now controversial to see that sex is binary, that a man can never become a woman, nor a woman a man, and that men should not enter women's sports, women's bathrooms, and women's prisons, merely for saying that they are a woman. We are witnessing a rapid rise in gender confusion among young people, especially among young women and girls.
https://www.amazon.com/Detransition-Diaries-Jennifer-Lahl-ebook/dp/B0CWTC6YWR?
Yes, this issue is different. And we are mostly going along, whatever inner queasiness we may have about it all. We are at a point where we seem willing to say, out loud, that “black is white”. And, as we know, the world is run by the people who turn up. Many of us are either not turning up, or are leaning in to the whole transgender position. As, I believe, the good Bishop is by his friendly-to-the-transgendered pastoral position.
Second question. Is the Bishop quoted above just being a typical “liberal Christian” of the kind critiqued as far back as Cardinal Newman, and kowtowing to the secularist zeitgeist? So often, when prelates blur the distinction between sin and sinner, it seems like the Church is, by default and also, perhaps, without intention, ceding important ground to its opponents. So often, Church leaders from the Pope down go quietly on the sin while bending over backwards to praise – yes, praise – the sinner, such that it looks as though we now believe it is a sin no more. We are all quite used to this by now. Hence the jarring note – for those in the pews who might have actually noticed it – of the psalmic instruction to “disdain the godless”.
Bottom line. Have we ourselves “transitioned” to a post-Christian mindset? If so, how has this come about? Well, here we come to weirdness and normalisation. Writing at Compact magazine, Ashley Frawley has noted:
To understand what is weird, we need to understand what is normal. In The Taming of Chance, his 1990 history of probability, Ian Hacking explained how the concept of normality gradually took on a prescriptive edge. As social statistics became a more powerful force in cultural and political life, what had once been a statistical agglomeration of differences became a prescriptive statement about how people “should” be. The statistical average came to define not just what is common or typical, but what is desirable and good. In other words, over time, normal came to be linked to “moral”; by extension, the abnormal became undesirable, bad, or “weird.”
In this sense, the people throwing around the insult are less interested in describing reality than in attempting to manifest it. When Harris and her allies call Trump and his allies weird, they are attempting to bring about a future in which their views will be accepted as the norm for the cultural mainstream, setting the parameters of acceptable discourse.
The most influential social movements of recent decades are symbolic crusades that seek not so much to change the material basis of people’s lives, but to change the way we feel, think, and behave. A key part of this effort are campaigns to “normalize” certain identities and ways of being while recasting what had once been normal as the fringe. The fact that sharing meme-ified images of staid 1950s nuclear families is now a familiar form of countercultural expression indicates how fully this reversal has worked.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/weird-is-the-new-normal/
There is more on the “how has it happened?” question. And why it has occurred at this time. Andrew Petiprin at Ignatius Press has identified five possible drivers:
· Pharmaceutical marketing;
· Ideological capture;
· Social contagion;
· Exposure to toxins; and
· The effects of spiritual warfare.
All these explanations have their merits, and none on its own probably will suffice. Several are either stated or implied by the various positions articulated above. If engineered by forces of evil, or even if the result of convergent opportunism on the part of activists and assorted fellow travellers, all have been in play in the capture by transgenderism of the public mind. And, as Petiprin notes, anyone who questions the direction of travel is demonised as “phobic”. The old inversion of weirdness positioning.
Well, the transgender activists have won. By using the oldest trick in the book, over and over and over. It all reinforces the almighty power of clever propaganda.
Frawley was writing in the context of the recent memes propagated by the American Democrats, led by Obama – more on him, transgender-wise, below – that seek to portray Trump, Vance (especially) and their followers as “weird”. Weird, of course, for supporting ideas and practices that ere considered normal by everyone, including Obama, until eight minutes ago.
Hitler didn’t attempt to get rid of the Christian Churches, especially in overwhelmingly Catholic Bavaria. He instead attempted to nazify them. The same outcome is at work today, post the sexual revolution and the normalisation of the abnormal that has gone hand in glove with society adopting the new religion of moral relativism.
In moving away from disdaining the godless to embracing the sinners, indeed, “affirming” them, it cannot be anything but inevitable that we will come around to embracing the sin. Sooner or later, and every time. Indeed, to reframing the notion of what is a sin.
As Douglas Murray has said:
Everything we all know is forgotten with transgender ideology.
Indeed.
Is the emerging transgenderism not just “the latest” push, but a biblical war of the ages? There is, at the moment, in certain circles, a renewed focus on the end times, the Antichrist and the apparent satanic forces in play. Senator Babet, for example, called the transgendered opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics “satanic”, and he wasn’t the only one.
Less apocalyptically, people are seeing in the current era a great transition away from a system that have lasted several hundred years and to a fundamentally new world. And not a good one. John Seel argues, as Rod Dreher puts it, that:
… the world is going through a 500-year shift — one that the church has to prepare for.
Seel himself states:
We are not in an age of change, but a change of age.
We are amid a 500-year historical geo-political inflection point. The world as we have known it is changing, so profoundly that our histories going forward are going to be altered.
We are not talking here about the accumulation of incremental changes, but the wholesale changes of assumptions, global actors, and personal experiences. We are facing a paradigm shift—the likes of the fall of Rome (475 AD), the collapse of Constantinople (1453 AD), and Luther at the Diet of Worms (1521 AD).
The issues facing the church are significantly deeper and longer lasting than the shift from a Neutral to a Negative World. We are shifting from a Negative World to an outright hostile world.
This hostility is not conscious or explicit but implicit, not personal but foundational, and not political but cultural. It is an invisible hostility that makes it even more dangerous. This makes the new social reality the church is facing far more significant than we have previously imagined. (Emphasis in original).
James Edward Taylor believes we are actually living in the Matrix.
https://substack.com/@jamesedwardtaylor/p-148339465
And, what is worse:
The Matrix is really a re-telling of the Allegory of the Cave. But the horrifying part of the Allegory is not that people are prisoners to the make-believe world presented for them. It is that when the philosopher tries to liberate them, to show them the way out of the Cave into the light of reality, the prisoners think the philosopher is mad, and they tear him to pieces.
These assertions and analyses about epochal change aren’t just occurring at the fringes. Victor Davis Hanson, a mainstream, conservative historian, has called his latest book The End of Everything. Armageddon is often mentioned, generally with VDH, in a military/nuclear war context. The sense of doom isn’t always about transgenderism and associated sexual deviancy. Not by any means. But the relativist cocoon in which transgenderism is located is core to many of the conversations.
Given the crazy times, Katie Hopkins reports that many Brits have been “preparing to leave”, and for quite some time. The new PM there has been referred to as Starmageddon. The alarmed Brits are shaken, and are not always the angry mob that one sees in the Tommy Robinson-infused rallies and protests on the streets. Like the quiet, sullen Australians, they are concluding that “enough is enough”. They are longing for an escape hatch, but are not sure what this might look like. Emigrate? Where to?
Many are privately sullen. Some, of course, are not so silent, including those who push back against the transgender agenda. Take the teacher Enoch Burke, recently (re-)arrested in Ireland for refusing to tow the trans line at his place of employment.
Yes, it is the great Ivor Cummins, on message as always. Enoch Burke’s sin was to not just go quietly, over the issue of pronouns mainly, but also over puberty blockers, the mutilation of young children and the rest. Over 400 days in a tough prison. (Remind you of anyone?) The compulsory use of pronouns enforced in the workplace was the precise issue that led to Jordan Peterson’s initial infamy, of course, over in Canada.
So, not all are silent, about this and all manner of other issues.
There is another strain of debate. This is the proposition that transgenderism has been engineered. Very top-down, as Ivor Cummins says. UN driven. And it has all been so sudden. According to Orthodox Reflections:
Ten years ago, nobody had transgender or non-binary kids. No one talked about transgenderism. Pretending to be a woman was a sick fetish confined mostly to older men. Nobody celebrated them or even remotely considered them role models for children. Teenage girls struggled with all kinds of issues, but uncertainty over their sex was not one of them.
All that has completely changed in a very short period of time. Transgenderism seemingly dominates our lives. High percentages of children in some areas are claiming a trans identity at younger and younger ages. Trans characters are everywhere in entertainment. The legal system, along with our language, are being redefined to erase biological women from existence. All this is happening to widespread acclaim among our societal elites.
Not so long ago, claiming to be “non-binary” would have gotten you therapy. Now Hollywood moms gush over their mentally ill offspring on shows celebrating a perverted male fetish. If you are confused as to how this could have possibly happened, rest assured – your confusion is intentional.
Transgenderism is presented as a human rights movement. A bottom-up reaction of a “marginalized” group of people who were “born in the wrong bodies” and are looking for medical help and acceptance. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Transgenderism is a top-down revolution. It was conceived and funded by billionaires in alliance with Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Foundations, and NGOs. Everything you see now, including the intentional targeting of children, has been done on purpose through the channeling of billions of dollars into all aspects of our society. Transgenderism is not a natural phenomenon we are just now “discovering”. It was engineered.
Perhaps we are on the way to transhumanism, and this is a staging post. A testing ground for the singularity set. Richard Corradi at First Things, writing nearly a decade ago, situated transgenderism in the species of delusional ideas.
Human nature does not change. Despite our postmodern sophistication and our wishful thinking about perfectibility, our nature is immutable—not least in its fickleness, its embrace of irrational ideas and practices, and its suggestibility.
Charles Mackay’s classic work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), chronicles the fads and follies of humankind, our epidemics of irrational groupthink. It illustrates our enduring credulity, covering such follies as alchemy, financial bubbles, the Crusades, fortune-telling, false prophesy, witchcraft, and witch hunts.
… The medieval field of alchemy—the attempt to change base metals into gold and to find the philosopher’s stone capable of bringing about human perfection, even immortality—is ludicrous to the modern mind, a relic of a prescientific time. Yet the ancient belief in transmutation is still with us. Current popular delusions are aspirations not to turn base metals into gold, but rather to transcend the laws of biology and transmute human nature. Among them is the popular belief that gender is fungible, so that whether we are born male or female is of no consequence.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/10/transgender-delusion
This is McKay style delusional thinking, now, in our era, inevitably, enforced as public policy. Like Jonestown, only the mass suicide is slow working. My gender is what I say it is. So there!
There are other ways of looking at all this. Brace yourself for some real weirdness, right here.
If you want an entertaining and at the same time disturbing trip down the rabbit hole, check out James Delingpole’s recent podcasts and Telegram threads on transgenderism. And his theory of elite gender inversion (EGI). This is the idea that many in the ruling elites are men who have “become” women. And that this is part of a global effort at breaking down traditional sexual morality. Google Michelle Obama and Michael Robinson, and you will get the idea. Mrs Macron is also mentioned in dispatches. Spot the transgendered famous person.
Delingpole, a recovered Christian, and his acolytes, certainly see the current gender wars as being Biblical events.
Source: James Delingpole’s Telegram channel, 1 September 2024.
How then, should Christians respond to the (apparently novel in our times) issue of gender dysphoria? One Mark Yarhouse, an American psychology professor, (told through the writing of Robert Gagnon in 2015 at First Things) believes the following:
1. Church members should address a man who thinks he is a woman by her chosen female name and use feminine pronouns, and a woman who thinks she is a man by her chosen male name and use masculine pronouns.
2. The church should not “treat as synonymous management of gender dysphoria and faithfulness” to Christ. The church should allow those with transgender desires “to identify with aspects of the opposite sex, as a way to manage extreme discomfort.”
3. For the most part, the church should give up on the “culture war” battle on this and other issues. “The church is called to rise above [culture] wars and present a witness to redemption.”
Yarhouse refers to three different lenses for interpreting the issue: Integrity (Yarhouse cites me as a proponent; go here for an online discussion), Disability, and Diversity (full affirmation of transgenderism). Although Yarhouse states that he believes “there are strengths in all three lenses,” he clearly operates with a descending scale with Disability at the top and Diversity at the bottom: “Because I am a psychologist..., I see value in a disability lens.”
Yarhouse doesn’t dump the Integrity lens entirely. “Even as Christians affirm the disability lens, we should also let the integrity lens inform our pastoral care.” He rather sees the disability lens as embracing the Integrity lens but going beyond it and even correcting it, at least at two points. First, “the disability lens also makes room for supportive care and interventions that allow for cross-gender identification in a way the integrity lens does not” (it is this allowance that is the main problem in my view). Second, it “rejects the teaching that gender identity conflicts are the result of willful disobedience or sinful choice.”
Gagnon agrees that not all those with gender dysphoria issues are rebelling against God. Fair enough. But it is at least arguable that a society that goes along with the whole transgender package is.
But there are more immediate and often awful consequences for those “transitioned”. If nothing else, our willingness to buy the package holus-bolus has moved many precarious individuals into the danger zone, as the stories of many who have succumbed to the transitioning solution readily attest. If the pathologies identified in the report referred to at the outset are problematic, well, so are the consequences of getting the solution wrong. Far worse, as a matter of fact. We are toying with things we do not properly understand, and mostly for the wrong reasons. And those in charge are malevolent, revolutionary activists.
Irrespective of mocking the Creator, this has been one social experiment too many.
This is especially the case for our already bodily unsettled and often confused adolescents. Puberty blockers, anyone? Slippery slopes abound, here. For many, it is an abject tragedy, and these cases are merely collateral damage on the road to tyrannical, gender-ideological purity. You know, broken eggs and omelettes.
Yarhouse is clearly on the side of both acceptance and of burying the culture wars.
No doubt, some in the Church are on Yarhouse’s team. Some are bishops. Many others, basing their view on the deepish dive above, will find such a course extremely unwise, and leading into the territory of Paris Olympics style God-mocking. The builders of the Tower of Babel had similar McKay-style delusions, and we all saw where it got them.
Paul Collits
6 September 2024
The aim suthl is to sterilise and mutilate children so they cannot procreate and sees try the family. Dr Ryan Anderson and Abigail Shrier’s books show that as does Miriam Grossman’s.