LGB vs. T: Self-Determination Collides with the Need for Common Understandings

The spectacle of a revolution eating its children has not been uncommon in history. Where the imperative of “liberation” is raised above reason and experience, as well as divine revelation and tradition, as it is radical ideologies, there is no way to judge between competing claims. This clash we see clearly in the “cultural Marxism” that has grown in power since the 1960s, and its most radical element, what came to be designated as the “LGBT” coalition, and its accompanying agenda. Even to refer to the LGBT offensive of recent decades as a policy agenda (involving same-sex marriage, civil rights status, public school promotion, etc.) will raise immediate objections that the agenda is instead a matter of “fundamental rights.” To those involved it may seem more important than anything, but true rights, of course, are based on natural law, not on self-assertion.

Pure self-assertion simply does not lead anywhere. Pain and humiliation, even a lot of it, does not in itself make any overarching standard of justice to which all must agree. The current cultural revolution seems to take self-defined happiness as an ultimate good. It may not seem to be real happiness from the standpoint of common sense, but it may not be questioned.

Delusion that one belongs to the opposite sex, or some other sex than the two that really exist cannot be acknowledged as delusion but is just another personal reality to be respected and accommodated. Past responsibilities and future prospects (especially pointed in the case of “gender transitioning”) do not count. Since we are only bundles of sensation and desire, “what I want now” is what counts. And since there is nothing higher to judge radical demands by, any opposition to the demands is “violence.” Objectors are treated as assailants due verbal (and maybe physical, if the situation allows) assault. But violence is all there can be in a world of nothing but competing wills.

Taking self-defined happiness as an ultimate good, acceptance of homosexuality has been demanded. This is necessarily self-defined (no “gay gene” would really be wanted; it would be an objective marker and might limit personal choices). While homosexuality indeed requires the reality of two sexes to be intelligible, it really implies transgenderism, since if self-defined personal happiness governs what is proper sexually, one ought to be able to define oneself as male or female, or some other “gender.” If sex is self-defined, then it is meaningless. “Sex” or “gender” could be defined to include body integrity dysphoria (because “this is really important to me”). People could be legally required to accommodate it – doctors, for instance, required to remove healthy limbs – as people are now, in many jurisdictions, required to accommodate homosexuality and transgenderism.

The instability of the LGBT coalition is longstanding and has long been noticed. The coalition exists only partly for the sake of its components, but more generally to break down traditional morality. As the linked Salon 2007 article observes, its efforts in legislatures and courts are not merely to secure newly contrived “rights,” but to give cultural legitimacy to what Christianity and many other religions have judged sinful behaviors and inclinations. These behaviors are legally declared righteous. What LGBT partisans perhaps failed to see is that transgenderism is really self-defined sex, and thus would deprive homosexuals of their identity. Men can claim to be lesbians, and demand inclusion (culturally, and perhaps in some cases legally) in lesbian organizations, in addition to the use of women’s rest rooms.

Conflict with Feminism

Closely tied to conflict in the coalition is conflict between transgenderism and second wave feminism. Like all radicals, both see deep oppression in ordinary life, but the latter maintains that sex is real, and a source of oppression for real, biological women. Feminists maintain that biological males are privileged, even if they claim to be women. Transgender persons claim they have the greatest suffering, and the least civil rights status (although Bostock decision has now changed transgender status in law as far as employment is concerned). As with homosexuality, transgender ideology makes the claim of suicide risk. But that raises the question, are people committing suicide because of stigma or opposition to transgenderism (or homosexuality), or because of the departure from proper sexual nature? A noted study of transgender persons who went the full extent of sexual anatomy altering surgery in the late twentieth century showed a greatly increased risk of suicide over the long term.

As observed in the linked New Yorker article, as a result of radical feminists’ rejection of self-defined sexuality, they “now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue. It is, to them, a baffling political inversion.”

But it’s also a matter of a revolution (the sexual one) eating its own children, which is entirely reasonable, since revolutions attack rules. There is nothing to moderate extremes, since achieving desired change overrides all other claims. And so there can be no discussion or debate about whether the desired change is right. Noteworthy as well in the linked article is transgender success in denying radical feminists platforms to present their ideology by charging them with “transphobic” ideas. Or, more generally, where a radical ideology is involved with “violence” (opposition to the ideology).

Cited as a typical specific example, radical feminist Rachel Ivey said that “if I were to say in a typical women’s-studies class today, ‘female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction,’ I would get called out … there would also be a question of ‘what about women who are male?’” The non-negotiable nature of radical ideologies means there can be no discussion with either competing radical ideologies or conservative critics.

Nor would any be allowed in the wider society. One transgender advocate concluded that “the pain of radical feminists … can’t trump trans rights. If it were a perfect world, we would find ways to reach out and find ways of mutual healing … but, as it is, ‘I am going to have to say, it’s your place to stay out of spaces where transgender male-to-female people go. It’s not our job to avoid you.’” Since the point in question is “transgender women” (men who say they are women) going to exclusively female radical feminist events, there is really no place where exclusively female events can be held, since a “transgender woman” might want to go there. So the attempt to force inclusion, which has been practiced against social conservatives, is now practiced by one category against others in the LGBT coalition itself and its feminist supporters.

Clash of Identities

Because the initialism “LGBT” is used so often in our society, unreflective people in the wider society think of the people involved as essentially the same. But as has been noted, there are essential differences. Yet the common thread, rejection of traditional sexual morality, binds it together, and the “T” seems to have favor with the cultural left because it is the cutting edge of liberation. A 2015 article in the British periodical The Independent suggested that it’s time for the coalition to divide the “T” from the “LGB” portion. Increasing numbers seem to be identifying as transgender, which suggests that while people identifying with the opposite sex may always have existed, what we see today is a fad.

Indeed, it is mainly the glaring denial of reality that connects the Ts to the LGBs. The latter do indeed deny the reality of sex in denying its purpose, the union of male and female for reproduction, and seek a union opposite of what nature prescribes. But transgender persons are not necessarily homosexual or bisexual, which better explains why some men may want to pose as lesbians. Simply to talk of these things can involve using the twisted language of gender ideology, when we ought to hold to correct terms and descriptions. Even social conservative sources, such as the one in the linked article, are often guilty of this. It maintains that transgender persons “deny the plain and simple truth of their gender.” What is really meant is “the pain and simple truth of their sex.”

And denial of truth naturally leads to coercion, and failure to accept other truths than one’s own. In a publicized case of five years ago, and transgender student at the University of British Columbia burned a rainbow flag because she felt “diminished” by it, due to transgender persons being “marginalized” in the LGBT world.

This has hardly been the case in the years since, and even at the time appears to have been her own personal reaction to what she was seeing, but it does show how emotion and “lived experience” dominate with today’s cultural revolutionaries. As LifeSiteNews observed at the time “homosexuality represents a mistake about the purpose of sexuality; it is not a mistake about biology. Gays and lesbians affirm and even exaggerate their masculinity and femininity.” When the claim of any identity in the LGBT world is contradicted, the suffix “phobic,” and the word “bigot,” are noticeably used to cut off debate. LGBs say they are not “phobic,” but based on gender ideology, which rejects reality as hostile, they are bigoted.

The last few years have seen the British feminist author J.K. Rowling insist on the reality of sex, and the unintelligibility of homosexuality without biological sex, for which she faced the wrath of transgender orthodoxy. She now says she faces “a lifetime of realizing that what you thought and espoused just months earlier now renders you a discriminatory bigot.”

By the end of the decade, the College Fix could say what seems to be evident from mainstream media, that transgender persons have “largely won” the fight with older, second wave feminists, and this “has influenced how the broader public discusses trans issues.” It was observed that “there’s an illiberal streak within trans activism that might make the movement’s goals seem less reasonable to the average person … many of the loudest trans voices, particularly on social media, routinely decry all criticism of their activism as not just wrong but a form of assault.” One activist commented that pro-LGB movie “Stonewall” should be canceled because “the safety and well-being of queer and trans students surpasses the importance of a critical discussion.” This is simply the strategy used by LGBT liberation generally, now directed back at the LGBs. The true violence, of course, is self-assertion against reality of which both the LGBs and Ts are guilty – indeed it is the essence of their liberation. It puts in a sharp light the claim made by many Christian apologists that hell consists in God giving people what they want.

Transgenderism seems now to have become so dominant in the overall public discourse that it is affecting the life course of many LGB identifying young people. As social commentator Andrew Sullivan noted in 2019, LGB young people are being led into transgenderism, including “gender transitioning,” when they might grow up to be LGB adults. This of course is just as sinful a path as transgenderism, but it does show the incompatibility and threat the transgender movement poses to the LGB identities. Also noted is the chaos of claims resulting from the acceptance of transgender license, such as men claiming to be lesbians, dominant males demanding sex with lesbians, and men in women’s rest rooms. But this is to be expected once moral autonomy is accepted, with the result of sexual self-determination.

Many decades ago, when I was struggling with Christian faith and modern doubt, I wondered at Francis Schaeffer’s assertion that if a non-Christian lived entirely consistent with his or her presuppositions, you could not communicate with that person. The fierce moral autonomy of the LGBT movement has shown at least something of what he meant. If there are no limits, no constraints on our understanding of the world, no boundaries within which we have to live, then we cannot even understand the world nor communicate with our neighbor. Transgenderism amounts to meaningless acts of will, while homosexuality involves using our sexual capacity for the opposite of its intent, justifying this in terms of inner life, which in turn would justify transgenderism.

To be free, we must accept order. The natural order tells us something about who we are, and how we are to live our lives. And an ordered world tells us something about the source of order in the world, which is God.