Trans-Substantiation

I was raised as a Catholic. I went to Catholic schools. I was dragged along to church every Sunday. At 16 I wrote the Pope a letter asking to be excommunicated, but only received a non-committal secretary-generated reply.

I wrote the letter, not because I was trying to be an arse (being an arse came naturally, I didn’t need to try too hard), but because I disagreed with the principle of infant baptism and wanted to be free to make my own choice, which might include re-baptism into the Catholic Church.

I was taught that during Mass, when the priest mumbled the magic spell, the weird white wafer things (which only identified as ‘bread’) and some sticky sweet red stuff (which only identified as ‘wine’) actually became the body and blood of Christ. It still looked the same, and tasted the same, but after the incantations it was different, allegedly. The miracle of transubstantiation, I guess.

I never believed a word of it - even as a kid. And especially not a miracle mediated by the dopes in cassocks at the altar. I did have a soft spot for Father Hoare, though. His fine Irish brogue meant you never needed to ask the question “where are you from?” and every Sunday he’d get into the pulpit and scream at his congregation “ye’re all miserable sinners, and ye’re all goin’ ta Hell!”

He’d obviously been partaking of too much wine (the real biological stuff - not the self-identifying rubbish) and it was a lot of fun watching him rant and rave.

I feel a bit like one of the congregation when I listen to Gender Idealogues, those modern day Hoares, rant and rave their various mantras, invocations and incantations. All that is required today, we are told, is to say the magic words “I identify as a woman” and, abracadabra, in the modern-day miracle of trans-substantiation, you actually become a woman.

And if you don’t believe - you’re going to Hell because you’re a vicious hateful transphobic bigot. Burn the TERFs at the stake! Nobody expected this Spanish Inquisition a decade ago, although the Monty Python team did anticipate things rather too perceptively in this classic clip from The Life of Brian (it’s Stan wanting to be known as Loretta) which has been age-restricted for some reason.

The last line always cracks me up - “symbolic of his struggle against reality”

And this is where we’re currently at. In the name of “compassion” we are being asked to go along with an ideology that bears little resemblance to reality.

Like the supposed ability to turn bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ, I don’t believe a word of it. But we are exhorted to go along with it so as not to heap more suffering on a marginalised community. In some cases, we are told that speaking out against this ideology will lead to violence and hatred.

But what are we being asked to go along with? What are the articles of faith of this new gender religion?

Transwomen are Women (TWAW)

This is probably the most common claim you’ll see (along with the vacuous claim that “trans rights are human rights”).

There are a number of issues with this claim. The most obvious of these is the definition of the word ‘woman’ here. The second definitional issue is with the word ‘trans’ itself.

There’s a subterfuge going on with both terms, and I believe it’s deliberate¹.

An awful lot has been written about the difficulty with defining the word ‘woman’ when that word refers to a ‘gender identity’ (whatever one of those is) but the word ‘trans’ is important here, too. What they want you to think of is the small number of people who suffer from severe gender dysphoria - that’s the linkage they’re trying to establish in terms of evoking an emotional response and compassion. What they actually mean by the word ‘trans’ is anyone under the so-called trans umbrella. It’s well-worth asking for clarification here, because, using their own terminology, I would say that ‘transness’ exists on a spectrum.

Someone who has struggled all their lives with a distressing mismatch between their biological sex and their inner perception of their sex, and who has undergone a traumatic series of surgical steps in order to finally arrive at some measure of peace should not, in my view, be seen as being equivalent to Stan who slaps on some lippy and flounces around in high heels in an exaggerated way and talking (with that characteristic head tilt) about ‘Barbie pouches’.

It’s almost as if there were a binary here.

Of course, it’s nowhere near as simple as this and there are some very grey areas². The problem with the gender religion is that it has forced a lot of people to draw simple, fixed lines in the sand and that’s only going to create problems (which may be another goal of the queer theorists).

There’s another aspect to this claim that is pernicious, too. It’s that it sets up a (largely) subconscious expectation; it’s another example of one of those ‘nudges’ we became familiar with during the AoC (Age of Covid). Have these surgeries, take these drugs for the rest of your life, and you will actually BE a woman is the implicit message. I try to imagine myself in the position of someone who has taken this road, mired in this belief, only to be faced with the utterly heart-breaking reality of biology.

Would it be compassion to say “OK, your biology doesn’t perfectly match up, but for the vast, vast majority of social situations I’m going to treat you as if you were a woman, and think of you as a woman”? I would say, yes. In the few conversations I’ve had with (‘traditionally’) trans women this hasn’t even been an issue. You’d think with all the current focus on this topic I’d be having to ‘suppress’ certain thoughts. But not at all. I didn’t find myself thinking things like “I’m really talking to a man”, even though I knew their ‘trans’ status.

If we were only talking about people with gender dysphoria so bad they’d undergone sex reassignment surgery, or were very seriously considering it and working towards that, we’d almost certainly have been able to find decent compromises (and, I think, had been doing so). But, as ever, the ‘progressives’ seem to insist on pushing us all the way into a dark and dangerous corner.

When I think of the struggles of someone who is ‘traditionally’ trans I do have a lot of empathy and compassion - I suspect many of us would upon hearing their stories - and this is exactly the response that is being nudged with the claim TWAW. They want you to link the same emotional response and compassion you have for a ‘traditional’ trans person with any old Tom, Dick or Harriet under the trans umbrella.

But here’s the problem - how do we tell? How on earth do we distinguish between someone we might describe as ‘genuine’ trans and someone who is, for want of a better word, ‘fake’ trans?

It is all, to put it mildly, an unholy mess. A rainbow riot of ridiculousness with the odd random ray of rationality.

This ‘how do you tell?’ loophole is important for both ‘sides’ of this debate. If you can’t tell, then we must treat everyone as genuine (and who are you to decide what’s “genuine” in this context?) would be one position. An opposing position might be if you can’t tell, then we can’t adequately assess risk on this basis either, and so best to err on the side of caution in the interests of safeguarding.

For quite literally thousands of years human beings have been able to determine the sex of one another with extremely high levels of accuracy. As 2022 draws to a close we, are told, in another one of those progressive prestidigitations, that it’s not possible to tell whether someone is a man or a woman by sight alone.

And so, we come to the next article of faith, which may be the most dangerous one. If we keep the ‘traditional’ understanding of trans, then TWAW is not that much of an issue; it happens rarely, and we’d been quietly accommodating this (albeit not perfectly). The next piece of dogma is dangerous, deranging and destabilizing and is where a lot of the problems lie.

Anyone who identifies as a woman IS a woman

This has to be one of the most stupid things to have emerged, via Queer Theory, from the legacy of post-modernist doggerel.

If merely identifying as something is sufficient to BE that something, then that ‘something’ isn’t anything at all.

This is music to the ears of a queer theorist³ because dismantling categories and systems and normative thinking is what it's all about.

It’s the same old, same old, thinking we see in religions when religious leaders tell you they know what God is, or how God behaves, or what God says. They are, of course, only ever talking about their own IDEA of these things.

When a man identifies as a woman, they are only ever identifying with their IDEA of what a woman is - and not the actual thing.

This claim is closely related to the TWAW claim - it might even be the same claim if the definition of ‘trans’ basically means anyone who falls under the trans umbrella. It’s a more (subconsciously) provocative phrase, though. With TWAW there’s this explicit association with the word ‘trans’ who most people still think of as individuals who have undergone (or are undergoing) a process of sex reassignment.

The IAW (Identify as Woman) claim doesn’t even try to fool you. It straight out implies that if Peter Perfect-Pecker wakes up one morning and feels like he’s Daphne Delightful-Diva, then erstwhile he has actually become a current ‘she’.

In maths terms the difference between TWAW and IAW might be stated in terms of necessary or sufficient conditions. In ‘traditional’ terms, in order to be classed as trans it would be a necessary condition that one is progressing towards transition - merely identifying as a woman would not be sufficient in itself. With IAW, the act of identification is, in itself, a sufficient condition (it is not necessary to do anything⁴).

I can understand why a compassionate person would be OK with the TWAW claim if it applied to ‘traditionally’ trans people - it would be a compassionate legal and societal ‘fiction’ that isn’t difficult to either accommodate or adhere to in the overwhelming majority of social situations.

The IAW claim is quite different. It’s clearly absurd. That it has gained so much traction is indicative of how much progress the gender religion has made.

It might also be demeaning (if not harmful) to ‘traditionally’ trans people; “why did I spend so much time and money and effort, so many tears and so much pain, trying to become as close as I could be to being a woman, when all I needed to do was to identify as one?”. The answer here is to pull another religious term from the Holy Gender Bible and talk about “gender expression”. Even the devil can quote scripture, it is said, which means that the words can be twisted to suit. But with gender religion their scripture is explicitly designed to accommodate anything goes (gotta ‘queer’ that society) - the twists are all built in from the outset.

Trans is not a mental illness

The intent with this item of the trans-catechism is to remove any stigma that is associated with the term mental illness. In part, I agree with the thrust here.

However, it’s so obviously an issue (or condition) that occurs as a result of a mind/body interaction. What the gender acolytes would have us believe that in the case of ‘trans’, and for no other kind of body dysmorphia, the issue is with the body and not the mind. We thus arrive at a kind of religious notion here; the implied existence of a ‘gendered soul’. It’s not a problem with the mind - just that this precious perfect mind has been born into the wrong body.

But is it even a ‘problem’? According to some, not only is it not a problem, it’s a cause for celebration.

I actually really struggle with this, and I will say those typically dreadful qualifying terms, “as a” parent. There was stuff I did wrong, stuff I regret, when it comes to my kids. It’s not like there’s a step-by-step manual and some of it has to be sort of made up on the spot. I think I got some things right.

But I really, really struggle to understand what in the name of God’s beautiful green earth is going through the mind of a parent who celebrates their child ‘coming out’ as trans?

My kids are, thankfully, way past this now, but it still has the power to almost immobilize me with fear when I imagine what might have happened had things been different back then and they’d had their heads filled with gender shite. I’d be absolutely terrified, distraught, sick with worry, and would be trying to move heaven and earth to prevent/persuade them not to undergo medical disfigurement and start on a path of lifelong medication.

They have this covered, too, with the “would you prefer a dead son, or a living daughter?” scripture. Anyone who expresses suicidal thoughts should be taken seriously. But “taken seriously” is not synonymous with acceding to emotional blackmail.

It’s another area where there’s no clear-cut line to be drawn because there are some (a few) individuals who do appear, from a young age, to have an ‘innate’ sense of their sex which differs from their bodily sex. This is persistent and seems resistant to any kind of psychotherapy.

However, until we have a pretty near fool proof method of determining whether this mismatch of mind/body sex is ‘innate’ (in some sense) or driven by other pressures and factors (eg childhood trauma or mental health conditions such as depression) then, especially when it comes to kids, we need to exercise the utmost caution before setting them on the road of lifelong medicalisation.

This is the opposite of the approach taken by the current model of gender affirming care, which rests on the foundational belief that children know best, are best able to self-diagnose, and must be affirmed in their ‘identity’. In short, it relies on the implicit notion of something like a gendered soul in the wrong body.

But here’s an interesting hypothetical question to ask

If, say in 50 years, psychotherapy had progressed to the point of being able to prevent people from medical transitioning and go on to live a happy and fulfilled life, would you view this as a good thing or a bad thing?

The obvious retort here is to ask the same question but this time apply it to homosexuality. But there’s a big difference. As far as I know, being homosexual does not require extensive surgery and a lifelong dependence on the pharmaceutical industry.

Transcendence

I was going to go on to list several more article of faith associated with the gender religion, but I’ve already exceeded even your extensive reserves of patience and forbearance.

The thing I most struggle with in all of this is the question of what’s the way out of this hideous mess we have created for ourselves?

There are real people, real lives, affected by all of this, whatever we think of the current ideological position on ‘gender’. We’re not going to prevent non-conformity, or ‘trans’, and so the question must be how to ‘deal’ with these things in a way that is both compassionate to people and respectful of the truth?

Biology IS important. You cannot change your sex. Given the inordinate focus on stereotypes that is evident in current gender ideology it might seem paradoxical to say that this ideology rests on an implicit notion that (average) sex differences in thinking or behaviour are learned (socially ‘constructed’). However, a statement like TWAW can ONLY be true if we hold the position that being a ‘woman’ has nothing to do with biology⁵.

The notion that the behaviours (and thought, emotions and feelings) of men and women have not been (in my view, heavily) influenced by their biology, and that the societies they have constructed have not similarly been influenced, and that there is not a dynamic interplay and feedback between the two, is absurd. The extent to which biology is significant is another matter. It’s the old nature vs nurture debate. But to posit that it is not significant at all, which is the position one must hold if TWAW (or IAW) is accepted as a truth, runs counter to the actual evidence.

The parallels between gender ideology and religious zealotry are stark and evident. I’ve tried to emphasize some of those parallels here. It’s very clear that the promotion of gender ideology represents a religious crusade rather than a scientific one.

The irrationality and religious character of this ideology (and others based on ‘critical’ theories) has been noted for some years. The good news is that we’re beginning to see a shift as more and more people are starting to wake up to the moral dimension of this gender ideology and raise legitimate concerns about safeguarding, particularly when it comes to children and the availability single-sex spaces for women.

The importance of Twitter and Musk’s takeover cannot be overemphasized here. If Musk manages to make it more of a ‘free speech’ platform than before (and it doesn’t need to be ‘absolute’ free speech - just significantly better than before), and resists the authoritarian impulses of governments, then more people are going to realize that they’re not alone, not the ‘odd one out’, in the gender crusade. I’m seeing this effect in my feeds (anecdotal evidence I know) where there is much more pushback on gender-woo than before.

There’s a reason why gender ideologues opposed Musk’s takeover. There’s a reason they continually cry for censorship and the banning of ‘hate speech’. It has only been the restriction of free speech and the classification of previously normal views on sex as ‘hate’ that has allowed the metastasizing of this new gender religion.

1. The queer theorists who originally promoted this stuff wish to de-construct pretty much everything surrounding sex and sexuality and so this meaning-fluidity of words is important and deliberate.

2. For example, what about the person with severe sex/body image issues who is just starting to live as a member of the opposite sex (whatever that means - but you get the drift)? Do we require every trans person to “pass the test” of surgery etc? I don’t think these issues are simple, and lines drawn in the sand (either way) are probably not going to work too well.

3. Music played, no doubt, by getting one’s girl penis out and thwocking it against a keyboard

4. Other than to think/feel a certain thing

5. Or perhaps more accurately we might say that biology only has superficial and unimportant influences on what it means to be a ‘woman’