Welcome, Big Pulpit readers. Here’s a new (8/6) post on these issues.
Well, we don’t, for some reason, have Camille Paglia to eviscerate this stupid moment in time, but American-born, now UK-residing novelist Lionel Shriver (who is female, btw – here’s a brief review of one of her novels), is able to fill some of the gap here. In the UK Spectator, she writes on the Tavistock decision, but runs gender ideology through the gauntlet in a general way. It’s:
Anti-reality. Astonishingly, fanatical activists have brainwashed many otherwise, you would think, intelligent people into reciting like zombies: ‘Trans women are women.’ I can’t be the only one who reflexively translates when reading ‘trans women’: ‘Oh, right. “Men”, then.’ Thus our activist motto decodes: ‘Men are women.’ We might as well recite ‘Lamps are carrots’ or ‘Knitting needles are tractors’…
…
Anti-nature. Screen junkies forget this, but we live in bodies. They are not our invention. They’re not toys, like Barbie and Ken. They’re not infinitely malleable, mere canvases for our fantasies. It can’t be a coincidence that so many young people are suddenly determined to change their perceived sex during the digital era. But our bodies aren’t video-game avatars and cannot be rearranged at will with a pull-down menu. In elevating the subjective experience of self above the physical reality of us breathing, rutting bipeds, trans activists express an utter alienation from nature, to which the same younger generations claim to be so attached.
Anti-science. The notion that some people are ‘born in the wrong body’ belongs right up there with belief in phrenology (the Victorians), ‘wandering wombs’ (ancient Greece) or the vital medical balancing of ‘the four humours’, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (Hippocrates). We’ve come a long way, you say? Maybe not. Having embraced wrong-body folklore, ideologues are pumping children full of puberty blockers with no clue about the long-term consequences of this experimental off-label medication for their patients. No one really knows the results of cross-sex hormones over a lifetime delivered at scale. The drugs are distributed like Smarties anyway.
According to the above conceit, I was born in the wrong body. I am 5ft 2in. But inside? I feel tall. My soul is tall. I experience myself as 6ft 5in. And because a terrible mistake was made when I was born and ‘assigned’ as this short person, I’m going to force everyone to look me in the eyes by staring 15 inches over my head.
We’re not nearly as sophisticated as we imagine. We’re as prey to nonsensical manias, untruths and superstitions as we were in the 1600s. You’ve got to wonder, too, what’s wrong with a culture obsessed with pretending to switch sexes when hardly short of genuine problems. We’re fiddling with our genitals while Rome burns. And the trans fetish is doing untold, often permanent damage to children who deserve the protection of proper grown-ups.
Looking at her next-to-the-last paragraph, that’s a notion I’ve taken up here as well as, more recently, here, in a reflection on an article on a female artist’s self-portrait of her aging self:
My spirit looks nothing like my body…
Well, proclaims the modern age, fix it up! Become the self you know you are inside! Lift, tuck, go to the dermatologist and the surgeon, get a makeup and hair consult, and let me tell you about the best filters!
Or…just accept? Accept not only the reality of who we are and our physical state, but accept the dissonance we live with in these bodies, on this earth, in this life.
Sorry, it’s not going to “match.” Ever. It’s just going to be. That’s the curse, that’s the gift.
Charlotte was Both 
Great stuff. Brings to mind the following: “… metaphysically and theologically, the notion of acedia means that a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being; that beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not at one with himself; that, as the Middle Ages expressed it, sadness overwhelms him when he is confronted with the divine goodness imminent in himself.” — Josef Pieper, “Leisure: The Basis of Culture”
Amazing how the modern world denies science while claiming everything they’re doing is based on science. And interesting that a former high school chaplain told me that every time a student claimed to be trans, they had been sexually abused. Maybe they think if they were a different sex it wouldn’t have happened.