How is it that “transgender” has so suddenly become a household word all over the world?
Mary Rice Hasson says it was an utterly predictable next step following the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision last year.
As Jonathan Grant points out in Divine Sex, “The ‘disembedding’ and ‘liberation’ of sex from its original contexts occurred in five progressive stages throughout the twentieth century. The “journey” began with the separation of sex from procreation, closely followed by the separation of sex from marriage. Then came the separation of sex from partnership, making sex a form of recreational pleasure. This in turn led to the separation of sex from another person; the rise of online pornography is a natural result of this reasoning. And now, the separation of sex from our own bodies: “Our inherited gender was once seen as normative for determining what form of sex we engaged in and with whom. But it has become a core modern intuition that ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are things we choose, or that our ‘orientation’ is part of a deeper ‘sexual personality’ that transcends our gender.”
“Gender ideologues,” says Mary Rice Hasson, an attorney and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., “are bent on dismantling the natural family … and exalting personal ‘will’ and autonomy above everything else.” One example: On June 6th Norway’s parliament gave “trans people aged 16 and older” the right to declare a gender and have it recognized by the state — no questions asked. ILGA-Europe promptly issued a statement promising to continue to support its members and friends in Norway in their fight for full equality, meaning the removal of age limitations. Norway’s LGBT advocates aim to emancipate children — of any age — from parental control, setting them free to select a gender and declare for themselves “who they really are.” ILGA-Europe is the voice of over 400 LGBT organizations and allied groups spanning 45 countries.
“Transgender activists — including now the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education,” says Hasson, “deny the reality that biological sex is intrinsically connected to male and female identity.” And yet, “Too few in our families, churches, neigborhoods, and even political parties seem to have recognized or responded to the ideological reality driving our cultural disintegration.” That’s why we don’t understand what is happening. But we need a reality check: “Gender ideology is not an abstract debate. it’s about people. If we’re willing to confront gender ideology, then there’s hope that we will stop averting our eyes from another reality, a tragic one — the growing numbers of children and young adults who are terribly confused about sex, gender, and basic identity… Unless we — individuals, families,schools, businesses, and political parties — counter gender ideology, we will find ourselves in a world we don’t recognize…”