GenderQueer

For millennia humans have taken the division of mankind into two sexes, men and women, as axiomatic.  This division is now coming under attack, with many saying they do not fit into the sex assigned to them at birth, or even that they are beyond this division—they are neither male nor female.  How should we respond to this?  Well, before responding to this attack on the classic understanding of the sexes, we should be sure we understand it.  What are these opponents arguing?  I think their argument goes something like this.

Premise One: Gender assignments are arbitrary.  While many people subjectively identify with their biological gender, many do not. 

Premise Two: Being assigned a gender which one does not identify with makes many people subjectively unhappy.

Conclusion: Because gender assignments are arbitrary and some make people subjectively unhappy, there is no good reason to keep perpetuating the classic division of the sexes; people should be allowed to choose their gender.

There are three ways an argument can go wrong.  (1) Your terms can be ambiguous.  (2) A premise or premises can be false.  (3) You can have faulty logic connecting your premises to your conclusion.  If none of these things go wrong the argument is valid.  Now, in the argument given above the terms are clear and the logic is sound.  However, as will be shown, the premises are false and therefore the argument is invalid.

To begin with the first premise, gender assignments are not arbitrary.  Gender is not an artificial construct.  It in fact has divine sanction!  “In the beginning God created them male and female.”  If you are tempted to say that the creation narrative is merely poetic and non-literal, in this case you must argue that Jesus Christ Himself misinterpreted this passage.  For in Matthew 19:4 Christ quoted Genesis 1:27 as literal and used it as an argument against divorce.  

People may want to define themselves from themselves.  They may want to shake off the fetters of what they take to be arbitrary limits on their freedom, but the fact is we live in a created world and the Creator has put limits in place.  It is a fantasy to think we can make up our own moral rules and categories any more than we can choose to make up physical laws to follow.  Gravity is a fact and the wise man will conform to this fact.  In the same way, there is a Moral Law and the wise man will conform to this fact.

The ancients knew this.  If there is any great divide between us and them it is that they defined freedom in terms of conforming to the Moral Law while we define freedom in terms of breaking it.  It was the scientific revolution and thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Descartes that shifted our point of view.  Instead of wanting understanding of the world so that we could conform our wants and desires to natural limits, they sought to change the world via applied science (i.e. technology) so that it would meet our desires.  And change the world they did.  We no longer relate to physical laws as we once did—e.g. we can fly!  But we’ve assumed that since physical laws apply in different ways, moral laws no longer apply as they once did.  If we can remake (to a large degree) the physical world in our image, why can’t we remake the moral world as well?

To begin with, physical, temporal things are subject to change, immaterial (or spiritual) things are not.  In fact physical things are constantly changing—your never walk into the same river twice, Heraclitus noted (for by the time you reenter the river, water has moved downstream and you are in that sense in a different river), but spiritual things are beyond change.  2+2 will always equal 4.  If you have a right triangle, A squared plus B squared will always equal C squared.  What is true will always be true (for after all, Truth is not a thing, but a person, Jesus Christ, and He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow).  Beauty and goodness likewise will never change (though our ability to perceive them can).  Likewise man’s nature is immutable.  Ancient man may have fought over a donkey or have been jealous of his neighbor’s sheep, but we fight and steal iphones and envy our neighbor’s new Lexus.  The things we quarrel over or are jealous of may have changed, but we are as greedy, envious, quarrelsome, lustful, etc. as we have ever been.  Given these facts, morality cannot change.  What is true and just has always been true and just and will never be anything but true and just.  We live in a purposeful world with limits and to think otherwise is to butt heads against reality.

On to the second premise.  There is no question that some people are subjectively unhappy with their biological gender.  The relevant question is: is this of any consequence?  

Subjective happiness (contentment) is not real Happiness for it is short lived and dependent on external factors outside our control.  Real Happiness, what the Greeks called Eudaimonia, is an objective state of blessing, or flourishing (it is the word Christ uses over and over in His Sermon on the Mount).  Contentment comes and goes, but Happiness can never be lost for it is not dependent on any material thing.

Now it is clear that happiness is the purpose, the end (the Telos, the Summum Bonum) the reason for which man was created.  No one ever says: I want to be happy so I can be rich.  Or, I want to be happy so I can be successful.  On the contrary, we covet success and riches precisely because we think they will make us happy.  Though our pursuit of happiness is often irrational, at all times we seek to maximize our happiness.  

But what is happiness?  Are we merely made for contentment?  For many things make us feel content, even bad things.  I may be a psychopath that is only content when I am cannibalizing someone, but will anyone argue that when I eat another human, even though it makes me happy, that I am living out the purpose for which I was created?  Mere contentment, and the futile search for it, is not our purpose.  But Happiness is.  Plato, Aristotle, Cicero—all the great minds of antiquity recognized this.  And the early Christians agreed with them!  But whereas the great pagans were searching for Happiness in vain, Christians knew its Source.  Our goal is indeed Happiness and this Happiness can only be found in Christ our Maker, Redeemer, and King.  

Since happiness is an objective state of flourishing, our perceived happiness and our True Happiness are often in conflict.  What makes me content for a moment may be sinful.  Sin is diminishment—it is a lack, the destruction or perversion of something good.  So when I sin, I destroy something good, something that in God I could find Happiness in, and I destroy, to some degree, myself and my ability to receive Happiness or be Happy.  Plato recognized this.  He said in the Gorgias that the worst thing that could ever happen to a man would be to gain everything he desired.  For this man would have contentment (though an ever diminishing contentment) and this contentment would forever hinder him from attaining True Happiness.   

If it is true that subjective happiness, our contentment, is often a foe to our True Happiness, then it is not good for people to be content if in achieving contentment they diminish their ability to attain True Happiness.  I think this is the case with people who want to change their gender.  Not only are they trying to break a norm of the Natural Order that cannot be broken, but in seeking their contentment in this way they are turning from The Source of their True Happiness.  

It seems insulting to say that someone can be mistaken about their true good, that someone can be confused or otherwise deceived as to what will make them happy.  But this is the case for all of us all of the time!  When we fell we fell completely.  We not only lost our ability to do good, we lost our ability to know what is good.  

Those that want to redefine themselves from themselves are trying to do what they cannot do, for there is a natural order and they are a part of it.  They did not create themselves and they therefore cannot create their own reality.  What is more, as they vainly attempt to recreate their reality, they act against their own good as what they are doing will hinder, not help, them achieve Happiness.  They are acting in ignorance both of the laws of nature and of themselves.   

It should be noted, that while I wrote this from a Christian perspective, you could make this critique from a Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, etc. perspective—basically any perspective save a post-modern or existentialist point of view that denies all order or absolutes.  And for those that think ‘it is modern, so it must be right,’ please show me who has proven our modern assumptions.  When have they disproven the old consensus and how convincingly have they done so?   

Lastly, why is it that we lack deep analysis of this sort in the public forum?  Newspapers and programs, the venues that dominate the public forum, are commercial enterprises!  Their goal is to make money, not to inform.  We prefer to consume media that is geared toward entertainment, not thinking, so they give us what we want.