Bruce Logan
While all the noise around the justice or injustice of Laurel Hubbard competing in the Olympic Games is inevitable, it’s also beside the point. The debate is nearly always about competing human rights: the right of the transgender athlete to compete and the right of women to preserve their female identity.
Progressives will continue to defend their ‘absolute’ right of self-identification and the therapeutic concerns that go along with that. Conservatives will be more concerned about the human rights of privacy in what used to be sex-specific places and the right to object to the whole notion of gender ideology. When rights conflict whose rights are right? That’s the game we play in 2021.
Without noticing it we are sidestepping the obvious question of human design, meaning and identity. What does it mean to be a man or a woman?
For example, a woman’s essence lies in her biology: it is her biology that creatively modifies the interaction she has with others because she’s a woman and not a man. Her experience echoes and reinforces her womanhood and the essential unity of body and mind. She is not somebody of any given age. She is a union of her biology and the sum of all her years.
Transgender ideology would return us to the old Gnostic idea of a split between mind and body. The belief that the body is not really of the person’s essence underpins transgender ideology. The mind can determine what kind of body it should inhabit. Body and mind are not an intrinsic whole, but according to transgender ideology, competing parts of the human being.
Indeed not only does the mind have the power and right but that right should be supported and sustained by law.
Claiming the authority of authentic self-identity poses the danger of the body being considered secondary to the mind. It is the kind of philosophy that permits a government to impose its will on us for our own good.
If we accept a deconstructed and therefore diminished understanding of the body, then transgender advocates have a platform to undermine the veracity of biological sex. They mumble ambiguously about stereotypes and declare gender a social construct, having already denied that the human being is an operating fusion of body, soul and spirit. We must declare that human ‘well-being’ demands the continuous and congruent unity of body and mind or that dislocation of any kind is ‘illness’.
The claim that “one is born in the wrong body”, or more subtle variations of that claim, presume a disjunction between body and mind. A disjunction that may seem possible psychologically, but in fact is physically impossible. And it’s impossible because the mind does not have unconstrained control over the body.
Transgender ideology is an attempt to legitimise the self-creating human being: a religion with its own dogmatic therapeutic faux theology that views the body as less important than the mind. There is a subtle irony. The desire of the transgender man or women to make his or her body harmonise with the dysphoric mind is an open admission that the body/mind unity is central to human identity. “Biology matters but I can’t admit it.”
Self-creation is a religious parasite feeding off the belief in the transcendent foundation of human dignity while denying that transcendency. Again the doctrine of self-creation presumes the primacy of the mind over the body.
In the real world human identity is only partially connected to what we do or what we say we are. Sexual dysphoria is real: confusion about the nature of self and the world. It lacks the moral authority or reason to convert reality to itself. The attempt to do so creates more problems than it would solve.
Neither a man nor a woman can be identified or described by what he or she feels at any point in time. Being a man or a woman is a permanent state: the consequence of being human. The word “transgender” describes a fantasy; it’s a euphemism of the worst kind. It would turn an impossibility into a legal identity.
Please share so others can discover The BFD.