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Transgenderism is a dagger aimed at the heart of human identity

Transgenderism is a dagger aimed at the heart of human identity

By Daniel Moody
THE CONSERVATIVE WOMAN
http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/
August 8, 2015

It may only be early August, but it is safe to say that 2015 will be remembered as the year in which the cult of Transgenderism stepped out of the shadows of the internet and into the light of society, media and law, bringing with it a new way of speaking about what it means to be a person. Why, though, do so many people believe in this ideology and the phantasmagoria necessary to keeping it afloat? How is it that we as a society have become susceptible to such fantastical ideas as, say, having an identity which is fundamental yet subjective? Why are the names Male and Female now widely used to denote things which are interchangeable? Surely we can go a long way towards answering these questions by first recognising that the notion of 'gender identity' is thriving only because of our woeful understanding of the power and meaning wrapped up inside the word Sex.

Gender versus Sex

John is male-sexed. John either has hands (because of being somebody) or does not have hands (despite being somebody). Either way, hands are a part of a whole - if we were to find a hand in the street, we would say "somebody is missing a hand" not "some hand is missing a body". Just as each part of John's body has a nature and is signified through a name, so it is with the whole of his body - his sex. To take away John's sex we would need to take away his whole body, leaving nobody. John's sex gives him a unified identity. John's body has hands, but it does not have a sex. Rather, John's body is a sex. And, in the same way that John can use his car as transport only because of it first being a form of transport, so too he can do sexual things only because of first being a sexed body. One of the great damaging myths of our time is that sex is something we do. It is not. It is something we are.

But if this is sex, what is gender? One way to find an answer is to compare what is known about sex with what is claimed about gender. Three key areas come to mind. Firstly John is one of two sexes (Male and Female) whereas Transgenderism tells us his available genders are Male, Female, Both and Neither (with Neither containing within it a galaxy of Queer identities). Secondly John's sex represents the whole of his body, meaning his gender can neither represent the whole nor be superior to his sex. And thirdly it is not possible for John to change sex,

whereas 'gender re-assignment' is possible. More and more countries are legally permitting people to re-assign gender without medical intervention (Malta and Ireland are the most recent). The State cannot be using the name Gender to mean sex because, in order for this to be the case, the State would need to believe both a) that it is possible to change sex (re-assign gender) and b) that this is possible without medical intervention! From a legal perspective, then, sex and gender are different concepts.

None of this tells us what John's gender identity represents. The most common definition is that it is his 'inner sense of being Male or Female'. This looks innocent enough: gender is 'the sex you feel you are'. But this cannot be right because it gives only four possible permutations of sex and gender - male feeling male, male feeling female, female feeling male, and female feeling female - whereas Transgenderism says John can also feel Both or Neither. But Both and Neither are not sexes, so if Both and Neither are genders, a gender cannot be 'the sex you feel you are'.

John can have an inner sense of being something, and that something is neither the sex he is (Male) nor the sex he feels himself to be (limited to Male or Female), yet Transgenderism says John can name his somethingness Female - the same name that half the population uses to represent their sex. Trangenderism has parasitically attached itself to the linguistic structure of the sexed body, yet uses those names to describe states of mind. And it is this insight which allows us to accurately translate the innocent-looking definition: 'inner sense of being Male (sex) or Female (sex)' is revealed to be a Mobius strip-like non-definition - John's gender is his 'inner sense of being Male (gender), Female (gender), Both (gender) or Neither (gender)'. His gender (1) is his sense of his gender (2), which in turn is his sense of his gender (3). On and on it goes, without telling us what a gender is. In fact, the only definition necessary is this negative one: John's gender is 'not his sex'.

From Sexual Orientation to Sexless Marriage

This distance, between the body/sex and the mind/gender gives us a good lens through which to see the role that has been played by the relatively modern concept of 'sexual orientation'. Here, sexual orientation denotes John's state of mind as codified in terms of the relationship between the sex John is and the sex of those whom John sexually desires - if the sexes are the same, John is 'gay'; if they differ, he is 'straight'; and if he desires both sexes, he is 'bi-sexual'. Thus sexual identity is of the body (regardless of our mind); sexual orientation is of the mind (with regard to bodies); and gender is of the mind (with regard to the mind only). Sexual orientation, then, has acted like a stepping stone, levering our mind far enough away from our body so as to leave us prone to the suggestion of having a purely mental fundamental identity.

From this we can also see the true nature of the relationship between Transgenderism and so-called Equal Marriage. Popular commentary would have us believe that, with the marriage debate (legally) settled, Transgender rights are nothing more that the new kids on the social justice block. But common sense tells us Transgenderism preceded Equal Marriage both conceptually and legally. After the Gender Recognition Act came into effect in 2005, the names Man and Woman were no longer legally understood to represent non-interchangeable sexually mature bodies; therefore the State understood that any combination of two adults could become any other combination of two adults; therefore it was unsustainable to continue to recognise within law something which could be done only by one specific combination - one man and one woman; therefore legal marriage needed to be reconfigured so that all marriages were understood to be between 'two adults'.

Some call this 'genderless marriage', but we should call it what it is - sexless marriage. That which has always been known to be possible because of sexual difference is now legally understood to be possible despite sexual difference, begging the question, "why does sexual difference exist if not for sexual union and the procreation and rearing of children?" Transgenderism is not following in the wake of sexless marriage. Rather, Trangenderism necessitated sexless marriage - according to the belief that Male and Female are interchangeable, we had the wrong definition of marriage. No wonder the State was deaf to objections. It had an internal error which needed to be flushed out of the legal system. Reality says it is the existence of the cake which allows the cherry to be 'the cherry on top of the cake' whereas Gender says the cake exists only because of the pre-existence of the cherry on top of it. Gender is dependent on sex (how can we have an inner sense of anything unless we are first somebody?) yet has legally dethroned sex. Our Gender is superior to our whole.

The Sexless Revolution

Ultimately, things happen when they are first able to happen. This is the first generation to believe that two women can marry in the same way that a man and a woman can. It is also the first generation to believe Woman can become Man. Coincidence? Do we believe in sexless marriage because of our belief in Transgenderism or despite it? It is not only that contraception, abortion and State-licensed sexual anarchy have made us gullible enough to believe in the insane. It is also that Transgenderism has crept up on us, under the camouflage of language, disguised as sex. A grounded understanding of sexual identity is absent from society to such an extent that this psycho-legal spiritual sickness has been able to infect the population at a terrific rate with little opposition, pouring out of law and into society.

Every ideology relies on propaganda, because he who owns the language owns the terrain. But this has always referred to a manipulation of words within a pre-existing and accepted linguistic structure - white supremacists never claimed that a black man was 'a black men' or 'a blacks man'. Gender, though, asks us to re-learn the language of our own body - members of the female sex must learn that John too can be a She. On that basis, and on the basis that Transgenderism is a law-driven top-down phenomenon, I think we need to accept that the ideology named Gender is an ideology like no other. The sexual revolution has given birth to the sexless revolution. We must stumble blindly into the legal future bodiless and stripped of all natural identity.

Our inextinguishable sexual identity has a name, and that name happens to be either Male or Female. It is not so much a case of us being out of tiny minds. Rather it is that we have lost sight of the enormous meaning of our body.

VOL NOTE: At the 2012 General Convention in Indianapolis the Episcopal Church embraced transgenderism. Both the House of Bishops and Deputies passed resolutions D019 and D002 making the Episcopal Church become the first Christian denomination in history to officially affirm transgender sexuality and allow people who have had sex-changes, or "gender reassignment surgery," to apply to be clergy.

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