By Judie Brown
Simple questions oftentimes have challenging answers in today’s free-form perspective on basic biological facts. For our purposes, the case in point is the topic of gender.
President Donald J. Trump seems to understand the evidence. In an executive order entitled Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, he wrote, “My administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”
This is simple enough, but not for one and all.
Some in the media and elsewhere say that Trump’s statement is open to criticism by medical and legal experts. For example, one article claims: “Intersex populations are not noted in the executive order. Intersex people are those with variations in their sex traits such as genitals, chromosomes, hormones or reproductive organs, and differ from expectations of male and female anatomy.”
Note the use of the words intersex and expectations.
Expectations are not the problem, however. What is troubling is the manner in which the framers of this aberration within the social agenda have chosen to contradict common sense, biology, and ethics. The goal is to cater to a new breed of human beings who claim to be the chameleons of our age. We are not talking about those with genetic abnormalities; we are talking about those who claim that they can be the opposite sex, a combination of the two, or none at all.
In his article “How Many Genders Have We Got?” Regis Martin writes:
We are not self-generated, in other words, and our contingent status under God cannot be co-opted by gender theorists, whose hatred of what they call “essentialism” has so consumed them that they are determined to supplant God Himself and the entire order of the universe He inscribed in our bodies. We cannot do as we please with our bodies, trading in one sex for another simply because we happen to prefer a different model. That way lies madness; and now, thanks to its repudiation from the highest elected official in the land, we can relax a bit, knowing the arrangement put in place by God has once again been upheld.
The Vatican has concurred, rejecting gender-affirming surgery and making it clear that God is the author of life and man cannot arbitrarily alter what God has created. According to Reuters, “It acknowledged the possibility of surgery to resolve ‘genital abnormalities’ but stressed that ‘such a medical procedure would not constitute a sex change in the sense intended here.’”
But perhaps the most stunning comments came from retiring Washington, DC, cardinal Wilton Gregory, a strong advocate for LGBTQ Catholics, who said that “Catholics on both sides of the ideological spectrum have heaped vicious and cruel condemnations upon all others who do not view the church as they themselves have decided to be the only valid vision of the Body of Christ.”
But Gregory seems to have overlooked the fact that those of us who acknowledge God’s design for creation also understand that we are called to be merciful toward those who, for whatever reason, have chosen their personal gender without regard to who they actually are. For such people we offer love and truth, not acceptance and moral blindness. Witnessing to the truth of salvation requires courageous defense of what God wants for us.
We are living in confused times. But I recall American Life League’s wonderful spiritual director, Father Denis O’Brien, MM, who always said, when things were totally outrageous, “God is laughing.”
He was referring to this quote from Psalms (Psalm 2:4-5): “He who is enthroned in the heavens laughs, Yahweh makes a mockery of them, then in His anger rebukes them, in His rage He strikes them with terror.”
In our cultural climate of moral liquidity, we cling to our Father God and we thank Him for our very lives.
And we pray for all those who, for whatever reason, have chosen to deny biology, defy their Creator, and rush toward the inventions they have created on earth.