Tag Archives: Gender

Gender as a Mental Construct

Marxism, Natural Law, Sexual Ethics, , , ,

In his Poverty of Philosophy, Karl Marx attacked eternal truths and natural law as nothing more than constructs of the bourgeoisie to repress the working class.  This has powered the campaign of his intellectual progeny to take everything that is natural and paint it as a “social construct” that fuels the engine of repression.  The most recent, and perhaps the most pernicious example of this is gender.  By labeling it as a social construct, all natural differences between the sexes, including complementarity, explained away as effects of changing social conditions.  All that needs to be done is to construct the right social conditions and equality and androgyny will usher in a sexual utopia.  

WHO Should We Listen To?

In combating the social contagion of transgenderism, we must first irradicate the mind virus that leads to it.  Ironically, this global mind virus has spread even into the World Health Organization who  defines gender as a social construct in this way:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.  This includes norms, behaviors and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time. Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities…Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs… Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

Notice first the circular nature of the experts’ definition.  They say it “interacts” with sex but is different than sex.  Its definition is teaming with sexual terms—“women, men, girls, and boys”  Those terms are only meaningful in relation to each other.  A women is a human being whose body is ordered towards the gestation of new life while a man is human being whose body is ordered towards the gestation of new life in another.  Girls and boys are merely immature versions of those two.  No amount of verbal gymnastics of degrading a woman by reducing her to her function as a “birthing person” will change this inherent sexual relationality.  The fact that WHO advocates for transition “treatment” modalities such as hormones and surgery which make the person “look” more like the opposite sex also betrays the fact gender and sex are inseparable.  Is it really a social construct that men have beards and women have breasts?  If it is not, then why would it be necessary for a woman to “transition” to a man physically?  If gender and sex can be different, then why all the effort to match them up?  If gender identity is “person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender”, then why is it necessary to touch the external at all?

Why We Shouldn’t Give Them a Hearing

Once we grasp that the purpose of labeling gender a social construct is to apply the magical Marxian dialectic to it, then we are more apt to defend it in a way that combats this directly.  We need to actively reaffirm what is natural.  First there is the fact that we are social creatures which means that society, rather than being a vehicle of oppression is a necessary element of our fulfillment.  Boys and girls are first formed in masculinity and femininity (and their interaction with each other) in the social setting of the family.  They learn how they have a unique capacity for self-giving based on their sex and they enter into society as a whole and form families of their own in order to fulfill this capacity. A further element that must be combated is the overt dualism that animates most people’s thinking.  Because we are a body/soul composite, the inner experience can never be divorced from the outer reality.  Any attempt to do so ultimately leads to a disintegration of the person which manifests itself externally in the mutilation of the body.  Hylomorphism means that essentially everything we consciously experience has its foundation in material reality  We might imagine something like a unicorn, but that image must come from our experience in the real world of either a picture we have seen of a unicorn (from someone else’s imagination) or a mixture of our own images of a white horse with a horn.  Likewise we might imagine what it was like to be Louis XVI, but could never fully imagine what he felt like when he was about to be guillotined.  It is simply outside of our experience.  The philosopher Thomas Nagel has an essay entitled What Is It Like to be a Bat? in which he gives a deeper explanation of this limitation of consciousness in relation to the “inner” experience of other beings.   

The point is that a man feeling like a woman is by definition outside of his range of experience.  He only has experience of being a man who feels like a woman (which is by definition still a man).  He may know what it feels like to be confused, but he is confused as a man.  How can a man struggling with gender dysphoria know that what he is experiencing is “feeling like a woman”?  Doesn’t someone have to be a woman to feel like a woman?   How does he know that what he feels like is exactly what a man should feels like?  This is why he must go to the cultural priests (psychologists) and receive their blessing that his feelings are authentic.

The fact that an expert must authenticate the experience returns us back to the fundamental truth that transgenderism is ultimately a mental construct by those who are seeking to eliminate all hierarchies by destroying nature itself.  It is designed to power the latest instance of the Marxist dialectic.  This is not to trivialize the experience of those who suffer from gender dysphoria but to discredit the so-called experts who are willing to sacrifice them to their ideology.

Bigmouths and Gender Ideology

Bioethics, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Sexual Ethics, , , , , ,

When Our Lord issued the Great Commission to the Apostles, He was telling them, and by extension us, to be bigmouths.  The Lord of all knew that the Enemy of man would never cease telling lies and that the only way to confront those lies is by never ceasing to tell the truth.  The Church has been, throughout her history, the Great Truth Teller.  Until recently that is.  No longer does she breathe truth upon the ideological lies that the World tells but plays the part of the mute.  As proof of this, let’s compare the number of Papal Encyclicals dealing directly with the Socialist/Communist Revolution.  Nearly every Pope from Leo XIII to John Paul II addressed this ideological lie directly, never growing weary of repeating themselves.  Now compare that with the number of Papal Encyclicals against Sexual Revolution—one.  That one, Humanae Vitae, landed with a great thud and has been unceremoniously dismissed.  Whatever work John Paul II did in this area has been caught up in the whirlwind of ambiguity that is the current pontificate (i.e. Amoris Laetitia).  The point is that the Church attacked Socialism and all its incarnations directly while they have left gender ideology unscathed despite John Paul II calling it  the “new ideology of evil”.  As the silence mounts, more and more Catholics fall in line with the ideological spirit, especially during the latest manifestation, Transgenderism.   This should not be read as a complaint or a rebuke of clergy, but an undeniable statement of fact.  Ideologies have a way of silencing dissenters, so I am more interested in mobilizing and arming those willing to speak truth against the lies, than to blame anyone for not speaking out. 

Because of the relative silence on this issue, there are no authoritative statements regarding Transgenderism.  Clarity is not a habit normally associated with this lie, but for the sake of clarity we will distinguish between gender dysphoria as the internal struggle that one has with their sexual identity and Transgenderism as the act of attempting to alter one’s sexual identity.  The former is a psychological condition and the latter is a physical action that is said to solve the conflict.  It is relatively easy to show via Catholic moral principles why Transgenderism is wrong.  It can never be a real solution to the problem and ultimately does great harm to the person.  Nevertheless, because it is cloaked in a medical solution it is important that we understand the principles.

The moral principles involve the recently discussed Principle of Totality.  To summarize and review, this bioethical principle says that “except to save life itself, the fundamental functional capacities which constitute the human person should not be destroyed, but preserved, developed, and used for the good of the whole person and of the community.”  Whether it is a surgical intervention or hormonal replacement, the “treatment” modalities involved always seek to destroy the biological sex characteristics and replace them with simulated versions of the opposite sex.  The use of the term “simulated” is deliberate because “sex reassignment surgery” simply is not possible.  The person may resemble the opposite sex, but they can never actually be the opposite sex.  No matter how much plastic surgery you perform, you cannot artificially manufacture a sex organ.  It will always fail in its primary purpose.

The Harm Done

These principles are masked because the harm that is done to these people is often hidden.  It is a pernicious lie that, rather than solving the problem, puts the person into a sexual void.  They will have mutilated the bodily capacity that identifies one’s true sex and they will never be their “new” sex.  To solve the problem of confusion by causing them to truly identify as neither sex is, self-evidentally, not a real solution.  But anyone who questions this, including doctors and psychiatrists are ostracized and vilified, although never refuted.   

Rather than acknowledge this they cover it with an ambiguous term gender.  It is labeled as a “social construct” because of the inherent failure to construct sex themselves.  This is probably why many gender dysphoric people choose not to have surgery.  It is also why one of the few (semi-)reputable studies done found that those who had surgery were 19 times more likely to commit suicide (and this was a study done in “tolerant” Sweden).

Hormone intervention likewise have lasting effects and often constitute a chemical mutilation of sort because they render the person sterile.  Included in this are so called “puberty blockers” which permanently stunt the growth and development of children.   When a child presents with gender dysphoria, this is the standard treatment modality.  We do not let children under 16 vote, drink, smoke or choose not to go to school because of their intellectual and physical immaturity.  We will however allow them to decide what gender they will be and to begin permanent steps in making that a reality.  There is a built-in mechanism to clear up confusion related to sexual identity called puberty.  That is why the reputable studies of gender dysphoria all show that between 80-95% of children who express discordant gender identity come to identify with their biological sex over time (a statistic cited in Ryan Anderson’s excellent book When Harry Became Sally).  Those two sets of numbers, the 80-95% and the 19 times more likely to commit suicide would suggest that any medical intervention should be delayed until the person has reached full maturity.  The fact that these are never mentioned is because the best interest of the person is trumped by ideology.

The Intersex Exception

There is another aspect of this that is important to grasp.  Abortion supporters often argue from “the rape and incest and mother’s life in jeopardy exception” in favor of abortion on demand.  Transgender ideologues do something similar with their Intersex exception.  The argument goes something like “because intersex are biologically neither sex, therefore there are more than two sexes.”  Even if this was true, it is an example of the exception proving the rule.  Intersex individuals have a genetic defect, that is, they have a deviation from the normal condition.  Transgender ideologues, like the abortion advocates, would have us think the exception should be the rule and therefore a person should be able to decide on his own what sex he will be.

Second, the intersex condition is based upon direct observation. Transgenderism is based upon a subjective belief not rooted in any external condition.  The intersex individual is not changing their sex characteristics but attempting to repair them.  Quite frankly, it is surprising that the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) is so ambiguous in their language and allow the Transgender idealogues to co-opt what is a true medical, as opposed to psychological condition.  The ISNA says that persons with disorders in sexual development are not a third gender, but male or female.  Those are the only two options, even if may not always be easy to decipher.

In order not to appear to be “obsessed” with all of the issues of the Sexual Revolution, the Church has chosen to be silent.  It isn’t the Church that is obsessed but the culture.  In order to break that obsession the Church cannot be silent.  Millions of people are becoming ideological and there won’t be a culture to save unless we speak out.  We must arm ourselves with the truth and a willingness to engage.  We must be the bigmouths that Our Lord calls us to be.