By Judie Brown
In our quest to defend innocent preborn boys and girls, we have always presumed that our fellow human beings understood the meaning of gender. But today one can honestly say, without apology, that the word has become flexible. Sadly, with the advent of the transgender ideology, gullible people are compelled to examine the very foundation of their understanding of what it means to be a male and a female.
Perhaps in their wisdom, the editors of the most current Catechism of the Catholic Church knew this could be a problem because the word gender does not appear in its pages. Rather, the basic teaching that “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” appears.
And that is the point, after all. Each person has an identity given to him or her by God, and regardless of popular aberrations, that identity remains. This is why I love the line written by Phil Lawler on this topic, “In a society controlled by the transgender ideology, society is trained to accept the absurd.”
Tragically, this growing ideological shift is not the stuff of fairytales, it is real. Commentator Paul Kingsnorth writes:
We are following the path of the snake rather than the path of the creator. . . . Once you reject God, you are fated to try and replace him. This is where our path is now leading us. . . . Transhumanism, artificial intelligence, the “transcending” of everything from gender to biology, the growing of food and babies in labs: openly now, we seek to break all given limits, remake nature, build the world anew. We seek to become gods.
Columnist Rod Dreher, who quoted Kingsnorth, writes, “The political and cultural wars are important, but they are of secondary importance. The religious war is the foundational conflict of our time.”
The point is that when we take a step back from the current situation, we see why discussing transgender is a twisted way of spitting in the face of God. It is illogical regardless of headlines, talk show hosts, and the misguided.
More than 10 years ago Pope Benedict XVI saw this, and he addressed it when speaking to the Roman Curia. He said,
The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. . . . When God is denied, human dignity also disappears.
His words challenge us as we confront those who deny that gender is permanent, not cosmetic. While those folks are slowly but surely resetting the dialogue in our country, we remain steadfast. The reason is the people of God do not grovel at the feet of popular foolishness, including the rush to disfigure the human body for the sake of reidentification.
Our quest is to defend innocent human beings as created by God while insisting that only in His truth can a human being find the joy and affirmation every person deserves. We refuse to be transfixed by deception.