For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Hebrews 4:12
There is almost no rival to the power that gender ideology seeks to wield. It seeks nothing less than god-like power, using language not to clarify what is real but to divide, disrupt, and disorient. It cleaves body and soul (“gender identity”), bringing not peace but a sword. Gender ideology does not deal in objective material facts or diagnosable physical conditions but presents an alternative worldview about the truth and the nature of the human person. This body-soul disunity stands in direct opposition to Judeo-Christian anthropology. Children receiving instruction in gender ideology are catechized into a fundamentally different religion. Whether they come to deal with gender identity issues or not, all who accept the ideology’s premises have now had their world fundamentally re-ordered in echoes from Eden: “ye shall be as gods.” And this divisive thrust of gender ideology not only disintegrates individuals, it also divides parents from their children and undermines their authority both to form and to protect them.
Drawing from the insights of Carl Trueman and others, I consider gender ideology through this lens of a “secular religion,” the central doctrine of which is that human beings have the power to self-define. In Nietzsche’s words: “We, however, want to become who we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!” (GS 335). The Psalmist wrote of such ambitions long before: “With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our own; who is lord over us?” (12:4). Many excellent pieces have been written on this topic in similar terms. What I hope to contribute here is an examination of “gender affirming professionals’” (GAPs) (i.e., doctors, counselors, educators, judges) own words, which reveal that they are driven by secular values as zealously as any sect, and their language conveys the religious tenor of their commitments. These professionals and religious adherents act as power brokers that strip parents of their legitimate authority over their children. They arrogate that authority to themselves, using it both to dangerously empower the children and disempower parents and other professionals who might thwart the “new creation.”
The prerequisite power that GAPs must assert before all else is over language: the authority to name and re-name. In his reflection on the Psalms, Father Patrick Henry Reardon writes:
[A purely sociological] view of language is also egregiously dangerous to spiritual and mental health, for such a view of language dissolves the relationship of speech to the perception of truth, rendering man the lord of language without affirming the magisterial claims of truth over man
Gender ideology names and thus creates a separate kind of human, a special class of being: “transgender” or “gender nonconforming” children. From the perspective of GAPs, this is not an overstatement. For example, Canadian social work professor J. Pyne (who is also a trans-identified activist) writes as if describing a new, almost mythical creature with a different kind of life cycle from other humans.
At the very least, what we can learn from the increasing numbers of young people transitioning to new gender roles, is that the body and its meanings are contingent. For some young people, puberty might be delayed, or might be reversed with cross-sex hormonal treatment. For these young people, transition is part of the life cycle, and must be presented as such in mainstream sexual health education settings. We are badly in need of new tools for teaching about health and the body beyond narrow and normative understandings of sex and gender possibilities.
Note the meta-physical claims: “the body and its meanings are contingent” and for some, a novel life cycle exists that includes transition and may necessarily include medicalization. Yet Pyne insists that these radical, unprecedented claims be taught “in mainstream sexual health education settings.” Because gender ideology has indeed gone mainstream, parents often have to fight for their rights to opt out of this “self-creation” indoctrination. In June, a group of Maryland public-school parents won their battle to opt out in the highest court in the land. The battle only intensifies when children express gender identity differences, and parents have been thwarted many times. For example, in February of this year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld school policy rather than parental rights. The Ludlow School Protocol not only required school staff to use a student’s new name and pronouns and to treat them as the other sex (e.g., permit them to use opposite-sex facilities), but it also forbade parental notification without the child’s consent. The unanimous ruling reads:
a school district had a compelling interest in protecting the physical and mental well-being of transgender children… (“Some transgender and gender nonconforming students are not openly so at home for reasons such as safety concerns or lack of acceptance.") The Protocol plausibly creates a space for students to express their identity without worrying about parental backlash.
Having named the special class of human—“transgender” or “gender nonconforming” children—the three-judge panel asserted that a school district has the right to act in loco parentis in direct opposition to the parents’ wishes. Note that this policy transforms all employees of the school district into GAPs who must deny the material reality of sex and disrupt boundaries or limits parents might set for their children. In a twisted inversion, the court and the school district conspire as GAPs to “protect” children from their parents.
The Hippocratic Oath discarded, good therapy thwarted, good medicine disrupted, all for the sake of a chosen self-creation.
Crucially, school employees are mandated to facilitate and collude with a child’s social transition to another gender without parental knowledge or consent. The ruling also contended that in allowing social transition, the school was not providing “medical treatment.” But social transition is not a neutral permissiveness, simply allowing a child extra emotional latitude. In well-known psychologist Ken Zucker’s words, it is a “therapeutic intervention.” The Endocrine Society guidelines even admit: “Social transition is associated with the persistence of [gender dysphoria] as a child progresses into adolescence.” According to psychiatrist Stephen Levine, transition “is an experimental procedure that has a high likelihood of changing the life path of the child, with highly unpredictable effects on mental and physical health, suicidality, and life expectancy.” In light of this, Dr. Levine also urges those in the child’s life to ask the question, “Why now?” He wisely warns that “today’s passion can be tomorrow’s regret. Making a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is easy. Thinking about what it is a response to is not.” But the GAPs make sure parents are kept in the dark; far from a “parental backlash,” parents aren’t even allowed to ask basic questions that might steer their children away from the dangerous path of medicalization.
Within the realm of gender medicine in the U.S., perhaps no GAP is more high profile than Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy who runs the largest clinic for trans-identified youth in the country at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles. Despite receiving ten million dollars in NIH funding, last year she admitted withholding the results of her study, which showed no mental health improvements from puberty blockers, for fear the facts would be “weaponized.” She has recommended mastectomies on girls as young as fourteen years old (and is currently being sued by a former patient who underwent the procedure). In an interview alongside Aydin, her trans-identified (i.e., female) “husband” who is a social worker and therapist for trans-identified youth, Olson-Kennedy explained how she got into the field of pediatric gender medicine:
This was an incredible kind of a congregation of science and human rights and social justice and medicine and education that really was a remarkable thing to take part in. But then, when I started working with trans youth, I knew that I would never do anything else, really moved by young people who are really chasing authenticity in a way that very, very few human beings are.
Note the recurring and central tenet of gender ideology—there is a special type of human, one who is “chasing authenticity” in ways that other human beings aren’t. This “authenticity” is at odds with the material reality of their sexed body. Enter the GAPs to use language to affirm the child’s new creation, redistribute authority, and enable the child to enact the “authentic self” via medical technology. The power gender ideology wields to divide what should never be separated now becomes even more apparent. The healing professions will henceforth be used to inflict harm, and parents will now be divested of their rights, not only to form their children, but even to name them.
“And a little child shall lead them…” GAPs bestow authority on children to self-define and to self-name. The child now has the authority to discard the name given to them by the ones who gave them life and whose duty it is to protect them. The parents are now placed in a subjugated position—the children now have power over themselves. Parents are now mere “listeners” who must follow the children’s lead and revelations of self-discovery and disclosure. Only affirmation is allowed. GAPs often become the trusted confidants of the children and “mediators” of conversations between parent and child. As Dr. Olson-Kennedy describes:
So I will ask the young person, “Are you comfortable talking about your gender journey with your parent or your parents in the room?” and if they are, then that young person can talk to me and tell me things, and their parent can witness it, and it doesn’t require them to tell their parent specifically. And I can probe about things like, “What does it feel like for you when you’re called your birth name? How does it land for you when somebody uses this pronoun versus this pronoun?” And so that that’s not maybe a conversation a parent would ever think to have, but they’re in it as a listener … and it’s also really important for anyone doing this work as a professional to model the way that we want parents to be communicating with children, using the name that most correctly reflects that human, and using the pronouns that correctly reflect them… being a mediator sometimes can be really helpful.
In keeping with the religious tenor of the discourse, Olson-Kennedy describes feeling similar to an obstetrician and speaks of a child’s gender revelation/transformation in terms of joy and a new birth:
…the relief that they experience, and then when they start moving forward in whatever that way that means to them, just the overwhelming joy. It’s very similar to being present at a birth. It really is. And I've thought about this all like, I want pictures of all my patients, like OBs have pictures of all their patients, but it’s, it’s a profound—many, many profound moments.
With parent and child roles now reversed, parents are further stripped of the power to consider their child’s long-term wellbeing and seek to make decisions for them from a “whole life perspective.” Dr. Jemma Anderson, a gender-medicine doctor in Australia, affirmed this inversion of roles, granting a degree of discretion to children totally out of proportion to their maturity:
From a pediatrician’s point of view, we want to do, to be doing everything we can to support a young person so that they don’t have adverse mental health outcomes, so that they can live their life as they choose without harming anyone else.
Similarly, the Endocrine Society’s guidelines state:
These recommendations place a high value on avoiding an unsatisfactory physical outcome when secondary sex characteristics have become manifest and irreversible, a higher value on psychological well-being, and a lower value on avoiding potential harm from early pubertal suppression.
Hence the sword cleaves again: Doctors and entire medical associations claiming to benefit mental health while knowingly risking and harming physical health, all so that young people—minors—can “live their life as they choose.” In this way, GAPs also thwart the good practice of those in the health professions who want to do authentic therapeutic exploration instead of instant affirmation. One group of Australian clinicians, led by Dr. Kasia Kozlowska, reported that “a large subgroup of children equated affirmation with medical intervention and appeared to believe that their distress would be completely alleviated if they pursued the pathway of medical treatment.” The children acquired these beliefs not only from social media but also from healthcare workers (GAPs). Kozlowska and her colleagues lamented the fact that efforts to discuss risk and undertake therapeutic inquiry “fell on deaf ears.” And with respect to parents, they noted: the “same overall dynamic also put many parents —who were trying to support their children in a more holistic way but who were aware of potential long-term harms—in a difficult and untenable situation.” The Hippocratic Oath discarded, good therapy thwarted, good medicine disrupted, all for the sake of a chosen self-creation.
When GAPs encourage a child in an identity that goes against material reality, they help set the child up for conflict not only with themselves, but everything in the outer world around them. As J. Pyne described, one “gender affirming” father of a trans-identifying child remarked, “My daughter’s gender is not a problem … it’s everything else around her that’s a problem.” The child “empowered” to stand contra mundum. A heavy load to bear. Interestingly, Dr. Olson-Kennedy claims that the individual “trans” child also carries trauma coming down through the generations. She describes it like a mystical body of believers in which the child is participating:
People don’t really understand the magnitude of the generational trauma that’s been inflicted on the community. So people that are even 11, 12, 13 years old, are also carrying the trauma that was inflicted on the trans community in 1910, in 1935, and you know the stories as they roll down through the generations. It's a story of overt and covert violence and that’s very hard to overcome, even with supportive environments, even if your school is supportive, your parents, your family is supportive, you’re getting all of the interventions that you need.
GAPs genuinely believe that it is the world, not the experience of a body-soul disunity, that is the problem. Olson-Kennedy continued: “We still live in a cisgender normative society, and because of that, if you’re a trans or non-binary person, you are experiencing covert and overt aggression.” Aydin Olson-Kennedy concurred: “There will always be accommodations required as a trans person to cope in this world that is not really set up for us, right?” What then is a “cisgender normative society”? And does it really cause harm to people? One recent study, entitled, “Cisnormativity and the Frustration of Core Emotional Needs Among Transgender and Gender Diverse Individuals,” reads:
Numerous studies have demonstrated that the poor mental health outcomes experienced by many TGD [transgender and gender diverse] people are associated with exposure to stigmatization and marginalization...These negative experiences arise in the context of the dominant sociocultural narrative of cisnormativity; cisnormativity posits that there are only two genders (man and woman), and that a person’s gender identity aligns with their presumed sex at birth…
What is cisnormativity? An oppressive system or accurate anthropology in accord with material reality. As for the study’s conclusion: “[T]argeting manifestations of cisnormativity across society is integral to improving the well-being of TGD individuals.”
Dr. Olson-Kennedy agrees. In a comment in the Journal of the American Medical Association-Pediatrics, she attributes “[t]he distress that arises from same-sex attraction or transgender experience” to be external in origin and ascribes this to “sociopolitical rigidity and ideological conviction.” She regards the therapeutic effort to help “transgender” people experience peace and acceptance of their own bodies as a “dangerous practice” of “conversion therapy.” Instead, she advises: “…perhaps humanity might redirect its reparative efforts toward dismantling the harmful hetero and cisgender normative choke-hold that continues to asphyxiate social evolution.”
Humanity needs to “dismantl[e]” the “choke-hold” of reality. Contra mundum. Gender-affirming professionals, rejecting bodies and the world as it is, ply scalpel and sword, demanding they become as they wish them to be. In the interest of a chimerical project, they divide body and soul, fracture the wholeness of male and female, and disrupt the intimate, natural alliance of fathers and mothers with their sons and daughters. Nothing less than the meaning of the world is at stake. Parents, shields up, and battle on.
