Lets talk about Gender/Queer Theory

The canary in the coalmine

When I look back on what exactly it was that shook me out of critical social justice, its pretty clear that the trans activism is what did it.

Like most of my peers, as the LGB community gained rights, including marriage, it seemed obvious that the next goal was affirmation and inclusion of trans people.

I was initially onboard with this idea. It seemed natural to me that someone wouldn’t choose to be trans, maybe less likely to do so than someone might choose to be gay. Gender dysphoria was obviously something that existed and it seemed to me those who had GD were among the marginalized of marginalized.

But almost as quickly as I began advocating for trans folks… something didn’t quite sit right with me. Suddenly, it seemed that trans/non-binary people were everywhere in the activist communities I was around. As far as I understood it then (and as I understand it now) GD is a real condition, but it is exceptionally rare. It seemed very strange that suddenly all these social justice activists suddenly had new pronouns. Even more confusing was that one’s status as a man or a woman, or trans man or trans woman, seemed disconnected from whether one was gay or straight. Presumably, to me, a person who was a woman in a man’s body would be attracted to men, and vv, at least in similar ratios to the population at large. But that wasn’t what I was seeing. Many trans women were also lesbians. It seemed maybe more than half. I still don’t know what the actual number is. But it was strange. I couldn’t shake from my mind that there might be something besides GD going on, that maybe there were mental health issues at play. And if that was the case, was affirming these people the loving thing to do?

Then the pronoun wars started. And the sex segregated space wars. And then, seemingly overnight, non binary became a common thing. And Jazz Jennings and other trans kids. As a parent of a young children myself, who was in the early part of their lives deeply involved in these ideas, my spouse and I had been intentional about not forcing gender stereotypes on our children from an early age. We made sure our first born daughter had “boy toys” and “girl toys”. We tried to diversify clothing and rolled our eyes at family members who bought pink clothes and princess stuff with a knowing “they just don’t get it” at Christmas time. How smug of us.

But a funny thing happened. After our daughter, we had a boy. A boy with a big sister, who looked up to her and played with her toys which were almost exclusively traditionally girly, despite our early attempts. She loved princesses and Disney movies, and cooking, and caring for her baby brother. Her little brother adored her and played with her toys but also was so unbelievably boy in a way that went far beyond our tabula rusa (blank slate) ideology. What we were witnessing was different than personality and it was different than toys. She was risk averse, no matter how much we encouraged her. In his first 18 months he had fallen from beds, chairs, etc and destroyed his forehead at least 4 times. We had to watch him everywhere because he had no fear. While he liked things his sister liked, there was a distinct difference even in how they played with things. From an early age he was building with legos and blocks in a way she never had. Basically - we were watching an experiment play out and it changed our minds on blank slatism. There is something generally different between boys and girls and no amount of nurture can change that. Shape it? Absolutely. But it was clear to us that genetics mattered in a way that goes far beyond how a parent chooses to socialize a child.

Around that time, we started hearing about “theybies” - woke parents were raising their children without identifying them in a gendered way. This pissed me off. This was the last straw (or so I thought until people started medically transitioning teen girls). The woke programming was broken through entirely. Children need stability. They need categories. They don’t need their parents to play games with their psychology for their our virtue signaling. It seemed a lot like munchausen’s by proxy.

Regardless - going forward, as I read more about these phenomenons and observed it play out on social media, I learned about autogynephilia - a condition where a man is aroused by the idea of being a woman. And so many things fell into place. Trans women who were lesbians. The stereotypical male aggression coming from men who had transitioned. The creepy demand to have access to women’s sex segregated spaces. And around the same time, the notion of social contagion among teen girls started being discussed. I remember distinctly a conversation with a friend who had a daughter in high school at the time…. I believe it was 2018…. when I was sharing some of my no longer woke ideas with her (for reference, she and her husband fall seriously on the left side of things politically and theologically as I had for some time) she mentioned that it seemed like every girl in her daughters school was trans or non binary and it seemed odd to her. It was odd. I’m not sure where she stands on it now.

When thought about in terms of social contagion, lots of things started making sense. Just like anorexia and cutting before it, online communities of girls who were struggling mentally were now organizing and finding what they thought was the answer for their confusion about being teenagers —— they were born in the wrong body.

Both of these phenomena are a different animal than those of a person who has true gender dysphoria. Those with real gender dysphoria were never activists. They didn’t read Judith Butler and decide they were trans. The old diagnostic criteria had been “insistent and persistent” and medical treatment was generally only done after a long period of counseling and therapy. Consequentially - most of the original post op trans people, Buck Angel comes to mind, are rabidly against whatever it is that’s going on now.

The root of it is gender ideology and queer theory. Towards the end of the 1970s, gender ideology began developing from the remnants of the new left/post structuralist academics. Gender was socially constructed (which is true to a degree) and then biological sex is socially constructed (completely false). This rejection of reality, and the activism of intentionally queering stable categories moved from Oberlin, and Barnard, and tacked itself onto the successful civil rights movement for gay and lesbian people in the 90s. But their project was not equality for those who are different. Their project was much more radical. The destruction of the reality of biological sex. Once gay marriage was legalized, the trap had been set, social media (and especially Tumblr) were there to pick up the baton, and we began to see the very real evil that occurs when human beings abandon reality for some sort of gnostic understanding of what human beings ultimately are.

It shouldn’t be hard to see how this is at odds with Christianity. Christianity is about human flourishing. Gender ideology hurts young men and women by confusing them in an all ready confusing world (not to mention the lives of those who stand up to its language policing). It results in unnecessary surgeries, destroyed families,