Sex and Sanity: Man and Woman He Made Them

The Threat of Gender Ideology and Activism

Elon Musk spoke from the heart to Jordan Petersen during an interview. Not as a billionaire businessman but as a father in deep pain.

He said gender-affirming care is a terrible euphemism. It’s really child mutilation and sterilization.

With pain just etched on his face, it was tremendously moving, he said it happened to one of his older boys. “I was essentially tricked into signing documents giving permission for puberty blockers and hormones for one of my older boys, Xavier. I was told Xavier might commit suicide.

He repeated, “it’s incredibly evil”, but then he continued speaking softly, haltingly, you know the way a person in pain speaks. He said “I lost my son essentially. They call it dead naming for a reason. My son Xavier is dead. He was killed by the woke mind virus.”

Anyone with a heart is certain to feel great compassion for Elon Musk, for his son, and for anyone else who experiences such pain, loss, or alienation because of a child’s so-called transition.

Redefining Man and Woman

Let’s zoom out. We might think that these contested questions of sex and identity are merely medical questions. As of this writing, 25 states have sized up the issue of gender transition from a biological and medical perspective and passed laws that in varying degrees ban medical or surgical interventions in minors for J gender transition purposes.

These laws are based on the state’s police power and the government’s duty to protect its citizens, particularly children, from harm.

However, the mantra of gender-affirming care is let the child lead. That’s pure nonsense.

Deferring to a child’s every want and desire is the very definition of poor parenting.

I’m grateful for these laws and for the courage of medical professionals who expose the harm of medicalized gender transitions; for the lawyers who write the legislation or defend them in court.

But even these laws are not the answer. They can’t reverse the tide because the heart of the problem is much deeper. It’s anthropological.

When a teenage boy identifies as a woman our objection cannot be that he’s simply too young and impressionable to decide for himself. Even if he waits a few more years until he’s more mature, then still claims a female identity, we can’t relax and say ‘you know he must be right’. 

When an adolescent girl seeks a double mastectomy because she’s convinced herself that she ‘feels like a man’ and she hates her female body because it doesn’t match her feelings, our best answer cannot be ‘honey the evidence is just not there right now let’s wait until there’s more research’.

This isn’t an age or a maturity problem or even an evidence problem.

The oldest lie known to man is you decide what’s true for yourself, who you are, what’s good or evil, what to do with your body. In fact, the abortion slogan ‘my body my choice’ is used routinely by the gender activists and they have common cause. Planned Parenthood is now the second-largest provider of cross-sex hormones for transition purposes.

Gender Ideology is a Rebellion Blossoming in Kindergarten

This presents the human person as a bundle of disconnected dimensions with very little meaning except for their feelings and their choice of identity. If you think about it, that’s a pretty heavy burden to lay on a child or a teen.

At the preschool and kindergarten level a more recent image of this false anthropology is the gender galaxy. They are Masters of the Universe and can name themselves like the stars in the sky, choose their identity, set embodiment goals, and change their bodies accordingly.

Man’s rebellion against sex is his rebellion against God himself.

Why do many parents, mature well-educated thinking adults, reflexively acquiesce or even endorse the claims of the transgender revolution? Why didn’t we hear this massive collective outcry across the land?

We know a person’s identity is set at conception. Gender ideology says you are not created by a loving God created for relationship with him, you are a self-creator. Your human dignity is inherent. It comes from being created in the image and likeness of God.

Gender ideology says no, your dignity is contingent. You need validation and legal recognition or your dignity is erased. Gender ideology is at heart atheistic.

Christianity understands we’re a unity of body and soul. Gender ideology says no, what matters is your mind and your feelings. Your body is merely a tool or a canvas for personal expression and if the body has no meaning well then the only purpose of sex is pleasure and becomes degraded into a solo act as opposed to relational and self-giving.

Man and Woman Need Redemption

We’re all broken and we’re all sinful. We need redemption. Gender ideology says if something’s going wrong in your life, it’s not your fault. Figure out who the oppressor is and take him down.

Gender ideology is a preposterous belief system and it’s easy to understand why kids can be convinced of something that’s preposterous. They’re kids! They don’t know anything.

When a trusted adult comes along, and says you have the power to reimagine yourself, to become someone new, leave behind your the body, your mental health struggles, your insecurities and become someone new, that’s a pretty attractive package. It solves their problem and puts them in charge.

I see this with many families, even Catholic families, who who somehow think it’s possible for someone to be born in the wrong body. ‘There must be something else besides male or female and God got it wrong.’

Why would anyone think this plausible? The answer is the transgender deception becomes plausible when we have already bought into its false premises in our own lives.

Perhaps we’ve already accepted the lie that we can choose regardless of the moral law whatever we like. We can disregard the natural order, and that God has nothing to say of value about sex and relationships or family.

When we reject God, we’re making it up as we go along. Suddenly, anything is plausible, anything is possible given the technology.

In my view the birth control pill the very first widely accepted transgender intervention. It established the premises. Its widespread use conditioned people to view God’s natural design for sex, the complementarity of male and female bodies, the purpose and fruits of our union as a barrier to the self-defined human happiness that we seek.

It’s the same thing that happens in the transgender revolution.

Let’s Restore the Meaning of Man and Woman

My worry is this that in the short term we may win that battle against medicalized gender experiments in minors, but lose the war against the bigger evil; the social, cultural, and political embrace of a false and degrading and dangerous vision of the human person.

A false anthropology is embedding itself in our cultural soil, our laws, language, and in the human heart.

This promotes a sexualized, ultimately misogynistic and inhuman culture. 

As Catholics, we need to examine our lives. Are we fully surrendered in our own lives in our relationships with God to his design for our bodies, our sexuality, and our families.

We don’t have to all send Elon Musk the Catechism, so he gets the rest of the story. We can take it slow. There are millions of people like him for whom the truth is breaking through simply because of their own experience because it’s built into the human heart.

Use all the tools at our disposal: prayer, Scripture, Catholic teaching, but also science, personal experiences and genuine friendship. We need to walk with others with great patience and love, and there we will find the Peace of Christ.