United Press International Headline:
Drug overdose deaths rise dramatically among pregnant people
Cuz, you see, these days, “men” can get pregnant. Except this guy. He’s too old.
UPI Erases Pregnant Women
A Sex & Gender Fluid World? – Podcast
Podcast Script
I’ve studied this issue for the last 2 years, reading several books on the topic, scouring the Internet etc., and I’ve come up with only one physiological reason for why Gender Identity Activists insist thatGender is on a spectrum. And, counter-intuitively for most people, that Sex is ASSIGNED at birth, as opposed to recognized at birth. Which leads a growing number of Activists to claim that Sex too is on a spectrum. Because since sex is “assigned” it is therefore a social construct that can be reconstructed thus leading activists to claim you can change your sex. And even more radically some say there are more than two sexes. Yep. That’s what some are now saying. [More about that in an upcoming podcast.]
But before looking at the physiological reason, let’s look briefly at the philosophy and real world consequences of what I’m going to call the Radical Disembody Movement.
Gender Ideologues have philosophical reasons for pushing Gender Identity and Expression as valid categories not only for civil rights protection but also because many of them seek a fundamental restructuring of society. That philosophy, with its desire to restructure society, is usually joined at the hip with a Critical Theory offshoot called Queer Theory (I will explore that theory in more detail at another time, but fair warning, by design, QT is virtually an incomprehensible, convoluted mess.) For now let me briefly quote a satisfactory summary of QT from Wikipedia:
Queer theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible difference from norms. These 'Norms' are then exposed to be norms, not natures or inevitabilities. Gender and sexual identities are seen, in much of this work, to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations. Because this definition of queerness does not have a fixed reference point, Judith Butler has described the subject of queer theory as a site of ‘collective contestation’. She suggests that ‘queer’ as a term should never be ‘fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’. Fundamentally, queer theory does not construct or defend any particular identity, but instead, grounded in post-structuralism and deconstruction, it works to actively critique heteronormativity, exposing and breaking down traditional assumptions that sexual and gender identities are presumed to be heterosexual or cisgender. [emphasis mine]
Queerness in this sense is a very fluid way of assessing the world around us and interacting with it. Judith Butler, QT’s most prominent theoretician, says, Queerness ought to be characterized by “collective contestation.” This is all very much like other 20th Century Critical Theories, deriving as they do from a Marxist analysis of society and its ills. I studied Marxism in college and I’m familiar with a Marxists world-view analysis called “Critical Theory.” One “offshoot” of Critical Theory is Critical Race Theory. CRT like Queer Theory seeks to collectively overthrow “oppressive” narratives or discourses. In CRT racism is opposed. In Queer Theory that “oppressive” narrative is “heteronormativity.” (Remember Ms. Barnes?) All this fluidity has as its goal the destabilization of cultural norms, especially Western Capitalist and Religious cultural norms.
If you’ve been following the recent social movements energized by the various Critical Theories after reading the Judith Butler quote above about “collective contestation” you will understand why these various movements. the Antifa movement, CRT, & QT are so relentless to shutdown, shout down, and outright cancel, or “deplatform” any dissent. For many, fighting “oppression” by any means necessary is the animating dogma.
Previously relegated to feminist and gender studies departments of academia QT has now “hit the big time.” In the Western world, QT is reforming cultural consciousness and shaping public policy. Let me give just one example of the in-roads that Queer Theory has made in our popular culture by linking to the following 2016 CNN story “What It Means To Be Gender-fluid.”
CNN starts off the report by writing that gender identity and expression “can change every day or even every few hours,” and this fluidity “can be displayed in how we dress, express and describe ourselves.” Moreover, it added, “Everyone’s gender exists on a spectrum.”
Of course “expression” is variable. But I want to highlight “identity” here. This view of humanity explicitly states that our subjective mental state is the overriding determining factor of identity. And this mental state, as mental states do, can change as often as our shifting moods or needs dictate. If adopted, this point of view renders any effort to form rational public policy hopelessly problematic.
Here is just one example of the practical consequence of aligning society with a movement that idealizes radical disembodiment.1Jews and Christians believe that our invisible natures will one day be separated from our visible natures. This is called Death. But historically most have believed that we will one day get our bodies back. During the interim, a period of restful disembodiment in the loving care of God will be experienced. But there will be a life after life after death when soul and body are reconciled.
Public safe spaces for biological women, spaces that were constructed so that men and women could work and recreate together outside the home will be threatened if today’s radical disembody movement proceeds unhindered. Those safe spaces were constructed with full recognition of the specific biological differences, privacy concerns, AND most importantly differences in vulnerability between men & women. If the radical disembody movement wins the argument public spaces like sex-specific intimate facilities such as restrooms, locker rooms, etc., could be entered by a biological male identifying as a female on Tuesday morning, and then by Tuesday afternoon that same male could revert back to a male identity and access the nearest male restroom “in an emergency.”
Under this logic, saying you are a trans-woman (otherwise known as biological male) with the right to enter female spaces is a totally unfalsifiable assertion.
Real world safety concerns and Law Enforcement problems proliferate under these “Gender-Identity-Based Access Policies” (GIBAPs). Kenneth Lanning, who for 20 years worked in the Behavioral Science Unit and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico, describes this real-world problem:
Law enforcement officers and prosecutors will be less likely to record, investigate, or charge indecent exposure or peeping offenses in a GIBAP environment, because there is no objective standard for determining whether someone born a male can lawfully be present in a women-only facility. It would be more difficult to prove lascivious intent when self-reported gender identity drives access rights, and easier to accuse law enforcement personnel of discrimination. This is made even more difficult when that self-reporting need not be corroborated in any way whatsoever.2Expert Declaration and Report of Kenneth V. Lanning, Defendants’ and Intervenor-Defendants’ Brief, Exhibit M, 18.
Sometimes it is alleged that people like myself or detective Lanning are guilty of falsely ascribing impure motives to those who have actually gone through the transitioning process and identify as Transgender. Actually we are more concerned about the non-transgender male sex offenders who are “driving a truck” through this very real GIBAP loophole in public policy. The examples are multitude!
As every law enforcement official knows, public restrooms are crime attractors. Women and girls are especially at risk in a GIBAP world. You don’t need a PhD in Criminology to know this. Again, it is not the Transgender person committing crimes, but the opportunistic male predator who will commit crime in a world with “Gender-Identity-Based Access Policies” (GIBAPs).
Establishing criminal intent will be much harder in a world where biological males can self-identify “at any time” with the opposite sex and legally enter the safe spaces of women and girls.
Here is another real world example. During an LGBTQ Presidential Forum in 2019 Joe Biden said the following:
“In prison, the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is, not what in fact the prison says it is.”
That is an unworkable public policy.
Today, in the British prison system at least 1 in 50 male prisoners identifies as transgender. Because of a similar prison policy, like the one Biden supported, a convicted rapist and child molester in the United Kingdom was placed in a women’s prison and subsequently sexually assaulted four female inmates.
Is this totally subjective gender fluid world, the world we want to live in?
Companion Podcast
I’m a Classic Christian and regard Gender Ideology as anti-creational to the core. This blog & podcast is about “God’s Good Creation.” That’s why I’m writing about Gender Ideology. And “speaking up” as I’m confident Jesus would.
"Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female.'" [Matt 19:4]
Oil on Canvas
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Love refuses to affirm confusion.
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Abnormal – Podcast
Podcast Script
My brother had a problem – his heart was not normal. The reason was because he had a rare congenital defect called situs ambiguus. And that meant his major internal organs were abnormally distributed in his body. Most of us have our internal organs in the same location. People with my brother’s condition have kidneys, spleen, pancreas in different locations than the vast majority of us.
Was that merely a difference? Unfortunately. No.
Due to abnormal arrangement of organs in situs ambiguus, orientation across the left-right axis of the body is disrupted early in fetal development, resulting in severely flawed cardiac development and function in 50-80% of cases. My brother, unfortunately, was one of those cases.
My brother only had one atrium and one ventricle. Most of us have 4 chambers in our heart. He had two. Which is why he died of a heart attack at 21 years of age. His birth defect was so bad that he had open heart surgery before the age of two. Most of his life he had this long scar down his midsection where they opened him up as a little boy to repair his birth disorder.
The reason I insist on calling his condition a birth defect or birth disorder and the reason I use the word abnormal to describe his biology. Is because it was. Abnormal. His heart did not function properly. It failed him at a relatively early age. His congenital defect occurs in 1 out of every 10,000 live births.
Now to my larger point. We don’t hesitate to use words like abnormal, and birth defect or disorder when someone is born with half a heart, a heart that cannot do what almost all hearts normally do, pump oxygenated blood throughout the body.
But for some inexplicable reason when the subject turns to our reproductive system or more broadly human sexuality, today, we get very squeamish about using terms like abnormal, or defect, or disorder. Why is that? If someone is born with ambiguous genitalia, you know what that means? Their reproductive system doesn’t work as designed. They have a disorder that is not merely a difference. The system doesn’t work. Now fortunately this won’t lead to an early death. But it will mean their reproductive system is incapable of doing what those systems were designed to do, create life.
The creation of human life and the biological sex of that life, as mentioned in a previous podcast, is determined at fertilization. The Father’s sperm decides. Our genetic code, either the presence of an XX or XY chromosomal composition, determines our sexed body. With extremely rare disordered exceptions the human organism begins down a road of male or female bodily differentiation.
Back to our Gender Unicorn for a moment.
You will notice under the section “Sex Assigned at Birth” a blue dot for “other/intersex.” We need to focus on that.
In the past, what used to be called a “disorder” is now called by many a “difference.”
In our decidedly ‘post-modern’ moment, a moment designed to disrupt the very concept of normal or the fact that a natural order exists, as I believe it does, we are told by Gender Identity Ideologues that there are a variety of ways that humans can develop. Normal and abnormal categories, they say, are obsolete and quite frankly hurtful to those who have developed differently.
Of course any sensitive person is going to treat someone who has one of these rare Intersex disorders with love and respect. But we should not ignore the obvious for the purpose of advancing a gender queer philosophical agenda. Christians can’t do that.
Also, it’s bad science.
Clinics are being pressured to reclassify “Disorders of Sexual Development” as “Differences of Sexual Development.” Some have adopted the new terminology over a concern about stigmatizing people.
But the distinction between order and disorder is operative everywhere in science and medicine. Like with my brother’s disorder. It wasn’t called a “difference”. Though it was. But that would not have been an adequate description. It was accurately called a disorder. These categories of order and disorder are indispensable for understanding and directing treatments toward human well-being.
Disorders of sexual development (DSDs) occur in roughly one out of every 5,000 births. These disorders can result in ambiguous external genitalia and the incomplete development of reproductive organs. Chromosomal or hormonal defects produce these abnormalities. They are rightly regarded by medical experts as pathologies in the development and formation of the male and female body. They are exceedingly rare.
But Gender Identity Ideologues use the fact of these rare disorders as a reason for positing a “third sex” “fourth sex” etc., along a spectrum of possibilities.
In the next few podcasts, I’ll go into more detail about these DSD’s. They argue that because of these “differences” the old-fashioned male-female sex binary is simply obsolete. Some people are just non-binary, they say. As I mentioned in a previous podcast (link below) this move is nothing more than the normalization of disorder for the purpose of pushing a gender expansive ideology. (At root this irrationality emanates from an ideology called Queer Theory.)
Remember the staff trainer, Elly Barnes? In a previous podcast? It was about Rev. Randall. Here’s what I said:
In 2018 Rev Randall attended a staff seminar at Trent College, entitled “Educate and Celebrate.” He raised an objection when the leader, Elly Barnes, instructed the staff to chant ‘smash heteronormativity.’ For his anti-celebratory concerns he became a marked man at the college.
Elly Barnes’ ideological, dare I say religious, fervor leaves little wiggle room for those like Reverend Randall and myself who believe God made us “male and female.” And those are the only options.
Also, we don’t believe heteronormativity is oppressive and something to be “smashed.”
And we understand in the normal course of things that if males and females don’t “get together and ‘share’ genetic material” (a completely unsexy way of stating the matter), then it will result in the extinction of the species.
Why would we want to SMASH that!
Companion Podcasts
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Love Refuses To Affirm Confusion