“Progressives” promote the lie that “gender identity” is immutable in order to rationalize and normalize an incoherent ideology and destructive medical “treatments.” Leftists desperately hope that the mainstream press, always in thrall to sexual radicalism, will avert its gaze from the growing “de-transitioning” movement. Thankfully, social media is here to occasionally shine light on alternative reality, that is to say, objective reality.

In an illuminating YouTube video, Carey Callahan, a young liberal woman, describes her “de-transition” from identifying as a “transman” and exposes some inconvenient truths about the “trans” community on which the mainstream press never reports:

I used to believe I was…a trans guy, and I stopped believing that….When I was trans…I felt that my trans identity should not be pathologized, that it was a healthy beautiful thing…that I was making these decisions from a clear state of mind….Looking back, I do not think I was in a clear state of mind, and I absolutely think that I was operating under some delusional ideas about what it would take to pass as a dude. The feelings that I had interpreted as gender dysphoria were actually long-term trauma symptoms that I had never addressed.

Every step of the process, every step I took in affirming that trans identity, life got worse….People in my little trans bubble were some of the most anxious people I’ve ever met…and coping with it in a real weird way. Lots of everyday drug use, eating disorders, compulsive working out…lots of over-the-top sex stuff, cutting, alcoholism….It was obvious that people…were not doing well.

Another de-transitioner, this one a young man who had been pretending to be a woman, explains his epiphany regarding his “transition”:

I felt like I was just doing something [i.e., “transitioning”] I didn’t need to do. I don’t feel that it 100% came from me. I don’t feel that organically, by myself, I would have done that. It was just something that the circumstances I was in, and the surroundings I was in, the influences I had…made me make these moves….At some point, I realized…I really didn’t want to do it. People told me that I would have less doubts and I would feel super confident and sure of myself as a female when I took the hormones, but honestly as soon as I got on them, I started questioning myself more and more.

A de-transitioner who calls herself “Crash” shares her convictions regarding the tragic reasons many women adopt a male identity:

Sometimes women take on a trans identity and transition due to trauma that we live through….I don’t think many people know this….I know a lot of other women who feel like their dysphoria or trans identity or transition…were a reaction to trauma. For those of us who transition, we didn’t go into our transitions…thinking that we’re reacting to trauma….We had dysphoria that we were trying to alleviate by changing our bodies….

Some women end up identifying as trans…because we lived through trauma that is in some way connected with us being women, with having a female body….A lot of us survive sexual violence. We were raped or survived some other kind of assault. A lot of us are child sexual abuse survivors. Some of us were attacked for being lesbians…My mom’s suicide played a huge role.

The Left says that “gender identity” is immutable and, therefore, even young children should be able to access medical help to refashion their bodies in such a way as to make them match the sex that corresponds to the cultural conventions these children prefer. In other words, young boys who “identify” as girls do so based on their desire to wear girls’ clothing, have long hair, and play with girls’ toys. But the Left says these are merely arbitrary, socially constructed norms. So, why change their bodies? Rather than rejecting their bodies, why not reject the norms they believe have no objective reality or meaning?

Of the many tragic consequences of this science-denying sexuality dogma is the fact that “transitioning” is harming people. Society is marching blindfolded into a brave new dystopian world whose victims are increasingly children who will one day tell their stories of regret—stories like that of de-transitioner, Cari Stella, who “transitioned socially at 15,” started taking testosterone at 17, had a double mastectomy at 20, de-transitioned at 22, and recently said this:

[De-transitioners] are not just statistics….We’re real people….I’m a real live 22-year-old woman with a scarred chest, a broken voice, and a five o’clock shadow.

Are castration, mastectomies, and chemically-induced sterility for young adults really the signposts on the path to the right side of history?

If physical embodiment has no intrinsic and profound meaning, why are gender-dysphoric persons spending so much money and enduring so much pain to change their bodies? If restroom and locker room usage is so inconsequential that women and men should be willing to share these private spaces with opposite-sex persons, why can’t gender-dysphoric persons share them with persons of their same sex?

Perhaps the extreme measures “trans”-cultists take in their disordered quest to mask their objective, immutable sex as revealed in physical embodiment testifies to the profound meaning and importance of physical embodiment as male and female—embodiment that “progressives” and transgressives are telling the rest of us to ignore.

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One of the best books I ever read is Man’s Search for Meaning by World War II concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl. First published in 1946, the book chronicles his experience in the camp and his struggle to find meaning — and thus a purpose to keep living as many around him died after giving up. Part of what makes the book so fascinating is that Frankl was already a trained psychiatrist when he entered the camp.

Borrowing his title for this piece is done for a couple of reasons. First, to recommend the book. Second, because I have never before connected identity politics with man’s search for meaning. Last December at Public Discourse, Professor Anthony Esolen connected the two in an article titled, “Love, Liberal Education, and the Secret of Human Identity.”

Esolen explains that this identity politics thing didn’t come out of nowhere. This might not be news to the more intellectual types out there — but if that’s the case, why haven’t we heard the case being made? Identity politics is one of the gravest threats to Western culture — and the intellectuals have a duty to help the rest of us grapple with it.

In a nutshell, when people reject Western culture and Christianity (or the Judeo-Christian ethic), they are left in a vaccum. The result is that they seek to find both meaning and community through a childish array of self-identities. Those are my words, not professor Esolen’s.

Before going further, let me say that for the second time in a row in this series we will deviate from our two-part structure and focus on one outside source — in this case, get ready to go deep (in my view, anyway).

Professor Anthony Esolen’s article (noted above) is, like so much of his writing, fantastic. Fans of Professor Esolen are familiar with his intellect and writing style that combines (in my view, anyway) brilliance and humility. In the piece he discusses “how the politics of identity bears on a Catholic liberal arts education.”

To give you a sense of the weight of his topic (in my view, anyway), he touches on a few names you may or may not be familiar with: “Dante and Virgil and their newfound friend, the ancient Roman poet Statius…”

Esolen believes that “a truly Catholic or Christian education in the liberal arts can raise the soul to see a glimmer of what Dante wishes for us to see”:

I have become painfully aware of the chasm between those who love the liberal arts, what I have called the free-making arts, and those whose utilitarianism or whose inverted religion has taken the form of identity politics.

Professor Esolen laments that many of his students “have no such grounding” in the liberal arts, and thus their “self” is “nourished by culture” where the topsoil has been “stripped bare.”

Young people have been starved of beauty: the great majority of them do not even recognize the names of the greatest of English poets, of Milton and Wordsworth and Tennyson, let alone know their songs. They have been taught almost nothing of our nearly three-thousand-year-old heritage of art, no classical or sacred music, no folk music, and no popular music older than a generation. Even many of those who regularly attend Mass on Sunday show no deep familiarity with Scripture. For those who do not darken the church doors, the gospels themselves may as well have come from another planet.

Under the subheading “The Desperate Quest to Fashion One’s Self,” Esolen writes that without that grounding, a person is left to fashion himself “from his own necessarily poor resources, without genuine culture, to bridge the chasm between unmeaning and meaning…”:

This is the source of the desperation with which so many young people, and the teachers and politicians and mass-entertainers who mislead them, hang onto some marker of identity, some sense that they exist, that they belong to a community, even if the community is abstract and notional, no more than an oval in a Venn diagram, designating the collective of people who self-identify in a certain way because of their race or their ethnicity or their sexual desires.

Under the subheading “The Secret of Human Identity,” Esolen writes:

But here is the thing: we must not raise up our young people to be in that condition in the first place. The faith is not something we do, like fly-fishing or playing chess. It is meant to inform every motion of our lives. It is like a royal dye that is to penetrate to the heart of every fiber of our souls. If someone should object that this is but a far-off ideal, I reply that all of our loves are imperfect; we do not therefore cease to believe that love is essentially the total gift of self. The secret of human identity that the politicians seek in the wrong places is the secret of faith and hope and love. We do not only give ourselves away: we become ourselves by the gift. We become who we are by forgetting to think about who we are. So it is that a truly liberal education, a free-making education, is in accord with what Jesus says, that he who humbles himself shall be exalted, and with what Saint Paul says, that it is he who acts, but also not he, rather Christ in him, and with what Saint John says, that “what we will be has not yet been revealed, but we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”

Identity politics is a popular topic these days, and as I noted in an earlier article, there are a lot of ways to approach and discuss the phenomenon. One way to see it, clearly, is a search for meaning in the “post modern” world where absolutes are rejected. Without “genuine culture” and faith as a guide, the search for identity is conducted in all the wrong places. (In my view, anyway.)

With Dante, his teacher and authority Virgil, and Statius, Professor Ensolen writes:

We are standing in a history of poetry that spans the centuries. To place yourself among those men, thinking of poetry and of love, with gratitude and manly acknowledgment of one’s superior, is to be lifted beyond yourself.

Click here to read Esolen’s entire article.

Click here to watch Esolen’s keynote address at the 2015 IFI annual banquet.

The text of Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is available in PDF form here.

Up next: Back to the Crazy World of Paraphilias.

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT is Not a Color

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One of the most tragic and unconscionable aspects of the revolutionary movement to normalize homosexuality and the “trans” cult is the grooming of children, whose hearts, souls, and minds the LGBTQQAP community and their “allies” seek to captivate and capture. In that unholy effort, the wizards and other unwitting servants of Wormwood at Disney have a new grooming gift for the world’s little ones: the soon-to-be-released Beauty and the Beast starring Emma Watson (known to Harry Potter fans as “Hermione Granger”) and Dan Stevens (known to Downton Abbey fans as “Matthew Crawley”).

Matt Cain, the editor-in-chief of “Europe’s Number 1 gay lifestyle magazine” Attitude, interviewed Beauty and the Beast’s director, open homosexual Bill Condon who also directed the first two Twilight films and the pro-homosexual film Gods and Monsters. In this troubling interview, they discuss Beauty and Beast’s “queer” sensibility:

So has Condon been able to make even more of the story’s queer sensibility?

“The answer’s yes,” [Condon] replies without hesitation. He tells us he’s introduced a “gay moment” to the film….a gay twist is worked into the plot through the relationship between Gaston and his sidekick LeFou, played by Josh Gad.

Condon explains: “LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston, and on another day wants to kiss Gaston. He’s confused about what he wants. He’s just realising that he has these feelings. And Josh makes something really subtle and delicious out of it. And that’s what has its pay-off at the end, which I don’t want to give away. But it is a nice, exclusively gay moment in a Disney movie.”

Off the record, he tells us what happens in that gay moment. We won’t spoil it for you but we can reveal that the film introduces another minor character who’s also discovering his sexuality, and, at the end, when everyone’s at a lavish ball to celebrate the love between Belle and her new prince, these two characters find themselves with the chance to connect.

But will Disney duck out by de-sexing the connection between them?…Condon assures us that this isn’t the case as the actor playing LeFou’s potential partner is “hot”. We looked him up on Google and trust us, he is. Smoking hot.

Condon admits to being encouraged by positive responses of those who’ve viewed the scene so far. “We test these movies with family audiences,” he says, “and we did two of them and both times they broke out into applause. And that was thrilling, thrilling! And on the [feedback] cards later so many people mentioned loving the gay moment.”

…

Until now, Disney has never given us a single explicitly gay character, although the studio has created several characters of ambiguous sexuality — and ones who can be read as coded gays…. So, when Condon started work on the film, was he aware that there was a glass ceiling his predecessors had never managed to break through?

“Absolutely, but I love coded characters* [see “coded” characters below], by the way.”

Condon admits that as a gay filmmaker there was a political motive behind his desire to build into the new Beauty and the Beast a sub plot that wasn’t in the original script….“What I love about it is it’s completely woven into the fabric of what we’ve built.” 

…

Condon stresses that the studio was supportive of his desire to add a moment of same-sex attraction. “To their credit, no one at Disney ever took any notice or gave it another thought.”

He assures us that the scene will be kept in the version of the film released in all territories, even in countries where it’s illegal or considered unacceptable to be gay. He might be modest, but when we think about the impact this will have on families and children in countries such as Russia or Uganda, this is a big deal. Hopefully, it will encourage Disney to go farther in the future.

For now though, Beauty and the Beast stands as the gayest film Disney has ever made, at least according to its director.

Leftists like to believe that the increasing public approval, worshipful adoration, and celebration (i.e., idolatry) of homosexuality and gender dysphoria is a natural, organic, and inevitable moral evolution. But the truth is that the cultural movement to celebrate unnatural, body-harming, sterile unions and the sterility-inducing, body-mutilating “trans” cult is informed and impelled by many diverse influences going back decades.

These influences include the embrace of the sexual revolution; abandonment of theological orthodoxy; requisitioning of government schools for disseminating pro-deviance propaganda; and wholesale, unquestioning embrace of disordered sexuality by useful idiots in advertising, music, literature, theater, and film who are our story-spinning, myth-making, tall-tale tellers. In a non-rational, touchy-feely culture, heartstring-pulling “narratives” win the day. And souls are lost.

Please do not take your loved ones to this movie.

*These are the “coded” Disney characters as identified and described in the Attitude article:

Ursula in The Little Mermaid The voluptuous sea-witch was modelled on drag queen Divine, perhaps fitting for a film based on a fairytale written by gay author Hans Christian Andersen, who saw it as a metaphor for his own love for a man beyond his reach.

Governor Ratcliffe in Pocahontas There’s a tradition of effete villains in Hollywood, including in cartoons. From Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, to Scar in The Lion King, there’s no saying for sure that they’re gay but they do incorporate stereotypical gay mannerisms. In doubt about Ratcliffe? Get a load of his hair!

Hades in Hercules Yes, the flamehaired have him in our life. demi-god is another villain who can be read as queer but he can also been seen as a riff on the stereotype of every girl’s gay best friend. He’s around to offer Megara relationship advice and if he could get us closer to Hercules, we’d be happy to

Timon & Pumbaa in The Lion King The flamboyant meerkat and warthog bring up young Simba when he’s separated from the pride. Their finest moment is teaching him to sing and dance in Hakuna Matata, a queer anthem about forgetting your worries. Hell, we’d like them to be our gay dads!

Oaken in Frozen In a brief scene, the friendly shopkeeper invites Anna and Kristoff to use his sauna and is seen waving at his family, another mr two children. But it’s unclear whether they’re his husband and kids — and blink and you really will miss it.

IFI is partnering with pro-life advocates to put up pro-life billboards throughout the Chicago metro area with the simple and bold statement “Abortion Takes Human Life,“ but we need your financial partnership to make this a success.  Can you help with a tax-deductible donation to this campaign?

Read more HERE.

Before Christmas, I warned how Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity laws, or SOGI laws, as they’re called, create new protected classes of people based on inclination and behavior, not biological realities of race and sex.

I also warned that so-called compromises to carve out religious exemptions for churches and religious organizations would not only fail to protect people of conscience not in religious organizations, it would mark all of us seeking exemptions as bigots with a Scarlet B.

Now it seems that we’re at an impasse, but not really. I’m grateful how the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson has demonstrated, in a new report, that fighting discrimination and protecting religious liberty do not have to be mutually exclusive.

A key point of the report, which is entitled “How to Think about Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Policies and Religious Freedom,” is that proponents of such wide-ranging SOGI laws have failed to prove they’re even needed. In fact, as Ryan says, there’s “no evidence that people who identify as LGBT have been turned away by a single hotel chain, a single major restaurant, or a single major employer.”

Even so, like all laws, SOGI laws will have a pedagogical role in our society, teaching that the Judeo-Christian worldview is “not only false, but discriminatory and rooted in animus.” They will impose a new orthodoxy concerning human sexuality “by punishing dissent and treating as irrational, bigoted, and unjust the beliefs that men and women are biologically rooted and made for each other in marriage.”

So at their core, Anderson writes, “SOGI laws are not about the freedom of LGBT people to engage in certain actions, but about coercing and penalizing people who in good conscience cannot endorse those actions.”

So what’s the way forward? First, as Anderson suggests, we should identify real-world instances of discrimination and then tailor-focus responses appropriate for the need, rather than implementing sweeping SOGI legislation. We might even find, as we look for specific real-world instances of discrimination, that government action is not even necessary—if “social, economic, and cultural forces” (are) sufficient to address the needs on their own.

Second, Anderson points out, both sides need to carefully define terms. There is a difference, for example, between discrimination and making distinctions. Sex-specific bathrooms and locker rooms, for instance, are not based on discrimination, but upon observable physiological and common-sense distinctions. And here’s another distinction: religious adoption agencies “decline to place the children entrusted to their care with same-sex couples not because of their sexual orientation, but because of the conviction that children deserve both a mother and a father.”

Another term to define is “public accommodation.” If a church holds a spaghetti dinner and welcomes the public, does that make it a place of “public accommodation” subject to SOGI laws? No. But the commonwealth of Massachusetts seems to think so.

Ryan concludes, “if other policies are adopted to address the mistreatment of people who identify as LGBT, they must leave people free to engage in legitimate actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other. This would,” Anderson asserts, “leave all Americans—not just the lucky few who are sufficiently well-connected to be exempted from SOGI laws—free to act on those convictions.”

I encourage you to read Anderson’s report. Then send the report to your state and federal representatives, as well as to friends and relatives open to a common-sense discussion of these very choppy waters. Finally, consider adding your name to our statement on SOGI Laws. You can find it at our website: BreakPoint.org.

BreakPoint is a Christian worldview ministry that seeks to build and resource a movement of Christians committed to living and defending Christian worldview in all areas of life. Begun by Chuck Colson in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends via radio, interactive media, and print. Today BreakPoint commentaries, co-hosted by Eric Metaxas and John Stonestreet, air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. Feel free to contact us at BreakPoint.org where you can read and search answers to common questions.

*Caution: Reader Discretion Highly Advised*

The obscene, sodomy-celebrating, and nasty provocateur; rising GOP star; and Breitbart contributor Milo Yiannopoulos was recently invited to be the keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Fortunately, his invitation was quickly rescinded when an interview with Joe Rogan from ten months ago came to light in which Yiannopoulos gleefully recounted performing a sex act on a Catholic priest when Yiannopoulos was 14 years old–a sexual act that Yiannopoulos insisted did not constitute pedophilia.

The CPAC invitation and dis-invitation to Yiannopoulos are signs of how corrupt and feckless the conservative movement is becoming. The fact that conservatives would invite Yiannopoulos in the first place is repugnant. His repeated perverse and scatological comments should have rendered him an unsuitable speaker no matter what conservative positions he espouses on issues. It’s dispiriting to know that it took his glib defense of sex between adults and adolescents to compel feckless CPAC leaders to rescind his invitation. This provides yet more evidence that appeasement of homosexuals and acceptance of Leftist positions on homosexuality will only corrupt conservatism.

Two days before he was forced to disinvite Yiannopoulos, Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union which sponsors CPAC, tried to defend the invitation tweeting, “We think free speech includes hearing Milo’s important perspective.” Seriously? Is Yiannopoulos’ perspective on policy issues so  unique? Surely there are some conservatives who can offer compelling defenses of religious liberty, the rights of the unborn, capitalism, a strong national defense, and free speech without hearty endorsements of homoeroticism and promiscuity.

Yiannopoulos is trying to clean up the mess he created (including losing a book contract) when he said that he doesn’t view his sexual encounter with an adult man as an incidence of pedophilia. He claims that he views molestation as a particularly heinous crime:

“I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim. I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers.”

Yiannopoulos’ wounds are evident, and we should grieve and pray for him as we should grieve and pray for all victims of childhood abuse, but his public words and actions are harmful to the cause of conservatism and merit criticism.

If his claim that he has exposed child abusers is true, kudos to him. But then why did he say this in his interview with Joe Rogan:

I lived in Hollywood a while ago. I went to… [parties of] people who I won’t name, of a similar stature [to Bryan Singer] in Hollywood. I went to their boat parties and their house parties….some of the things I have seen beggars belief….I don’t want to be indiscreet about specific people because I think it’s going to be dangerous. But I can tell you the truth without dropping anyone in it: Some of the boys there were very young, very young….There was a lot of drugs and a lot of twinks taking drugs and having unsafe sex with older men and some of these boys were very young.

Perhaps some intrepid journalist can ask Yiannopoulos if he reported this child sexual abuse to authorities.

This current Yiannopoulos dust-up confirms what I wrote months ago following his appearance at a  “Gays for Trump” event during which he spoke in front of photographs of hairless, shirtless, skinny young men who look like minors and repeatedly made sexually suggestive comments to off-camera men:

Those within the GOP who understandably seek a bigger tent should stop fawning over the indecent Yiannopoulos simply because he holds some conservative positions and attacks liberals and liberalism. A person who delights in sodomy cannot possibly strengthen a party committed to conservatism. Republicans need to stop being so desperate for the cool kids to like them. The enemy of our enemy is sometimes our enemy.

Exulting in promiscuous homosex is not a sign of conservatism. While Yiannopoulos may expand the Republican tent, he cannot and will not strengthen the Republican Party. He will corrupt it from within like a cancer.

Yiannopoulos is more dangerous to conservatism than is “progressivism.” He especially appeals to Millennials who have already drunk too deeply at the poisoned well that spews forth Leftist dogma on sexuality. Millennials who are becoming more pro-life are at the same time becoming more pro-homosexual. The witty, rebellious, promiscuous, flaming flame-thrower Yiannopoulos will make conservatism “safe” for Millennials who want to preserve their liberal beliefs about sexuality while embracing conservative positions on fiscal issues and defense.

The problem is that a country that no longer recognizes that children need and deserve mothers and fathers, that marriage has a nature central to which is sexual differentiation, and that sexual boundaries matter (including a social taboo against homoeroticism) is a society that cannot and will not long endure. We are a decaying culture, and the left sees our social decay as social justice and progress.

Do I agree with any cultural or political opinions of Yiannopoulos? Yes.

Are his conservative positions exculpatory with regard to the obscene and vicious comments he makes or his giddy endorsement of sodomy? Absolutely not.

Are his conservative sentiments sufficient to justify his invitation to speak at conservative events? Absolutely not.

Matt Schlapp and any other CPAC leaders who supported the invitation to Yiannopoulos should lose their positions within CPAC leadership.

Readers may have noticed that each of these posts has begun with a citation from one or more articles on the topic of identity politics and then closes by highlighting a paraphilia. This time we will only excerpt two of my favorite writers – the Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins and Pastor Scott Lively.

These were first posted back in 2014, I began the article with this introduction:

The term “sexual orientation” is a fictitious socio-political construct invented by the left to promulgate the non-scientific idea that homosexual proclivities and temptations are somehow neutral, immutable characteristics that define a same-sex attracted person’s identity. Two well-respected cultural analysts shared their thoughts on the subject.

Laurie Higgins:

The term “sexual orientation” is a biased, political term created to equate heterosexuality and homosexuality. While homosexual activists and their ideological allies believe that homosexuality and heterosexuality are flip sides of the sexuality coin, others believe–rightly–that homosexuality is a disordering of the sexual impulse.

“Sexual orientation” also connotes the idea that homosexuality is biological determined, immutable in all cases, and inherently moral, all of which are controversial assumptions.

Whereas homosexuality is constituted merely by subjective desire and volitional sexual acts that many consider immoral, heterosexuality is constituted by subjective desire, volitional acts that no one considers inherently immoral, and by biology and anatomy. And in terms of biology and anatomy, everyone is heterosexual.

Homosexuality is not merely one of several healthy and moral manifestations of sexuality. Rather, it is a disordering or perversion of the sexual impulse.

Our side needs to understand this and stop using the term “sexual orientation.”

Scott Lively:

Sexual orientation” is a highly ambiguous term loaded with hidden false assumptions. So-called ‘sexual orientation’ is just a theory that lets people pretend that sexuality is a subjective state-of-mind and not an objective truth based on our self-evident physiological reality.

Sexual orientation” is a fictional socio-politcal construct invented by homosexual activists, and is their religious doctrine.

Another purpose of “sexual orientation” theory is to create a context in which homosexuality and heterosexuality hold equal status.

The notion of equivalency between homosexuality and heterosexuality is very important to pro-“gay” arguments. For one thing, it neutralizes health and safety arguments against the legitimization of homosexuality. For example, it is an uncontested fact that homosexual conduct spreads disease and dysfunction.

When reminded of this, “gay” sympathizers say, “heterosexuals do the same things.” This isn’t a logical defense of homosexuality per se, since two wrongs don’t make a right, but even so, the medical data shows that heterosexual behavior, even when promiscuous, really doesn’t result in nearly as many negative health consequences. However, it is an argument for treating homosexuality equally with heterosexuality, if the two were truly equivalent. But they are not.

A second reason for espousing the demise of equivalency is that equivalency allows “gay” activists to exploit the civil rights doctrines, which otherwise would not apply.” Discrimination, in the civil rights context, means treating equal parties unequally.

An anti-discrimination policy based upon “sexual orientation” is always the first step in the homosexual takeover of an organization, because it locks in pro-“gay” assumptions. From the adoption of this policy, the organization must accept as fact that homosexuality is immutable, equivalent to heterosexuality, and deserving of special protections without regard to public health considerations. Criticism of these positions, or even failure to affirm them, can be considered violations of the policy. Where such a policy is enacted, adoption of the rest of the homosexual political agenda is virtually inevitable. The conclusions are assured by these (false) premises. The takeover process varies slightly depending on the type of organization, but is predictable and easily recognized.

In summary, “sexual orientation” is a term that is used by homosexual activists to deceive both policy makers and the public about the nature of homosexual behavior. It frames the debate about homosexuality in such a way that the average person is tricked into accepting pro-“gay” presuppositions without challenge. This is even true of those people who continue to oppose the homosexuals’ political goals.

Once the presuppositions have been accepted, especially when they become “law” in anti-discrimination policies, resistance to the rest of the homosexual agenda becomes much, much more difficult.

The only effective strategy is to reject and refute the false assumptions of the fictitious “sexual orientation” socio-political theory, and re-frame the issues on a truthful foundation. “Sexual orientation” must be exposed for what it is: a nonsensical theory about sexuality invented by “gay” political strategists to serve their own selfish interests at the expense of the welfare of society as a whole.

Up next: Man’s Search for Meaning.

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders

Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense

COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Man’s Search for Meaning

COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT is Not a Color

Last time we introduced transgenderism, the next letter on the LGB…T march into the new world. There is way too much to cover in just one more post but I’ll do my best. If you’re like me, you’re pretty tired of this topic after the past couple of years.

We left off with the first paragraph from the transgender Wikipedia page — here are the third and fourth paragraphs:

The degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity has been called transgender congruence. Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and some seek medical treatments such as hormone replacement therapy, sex reassignment surgery, or psychotherapy. Not all transgender people desire these treatments, and some cannot undergo them for financial or medical reasons.

Most transgender people face discrimination at and in access to work, public accommodations, and healthcare. They are not legally protected from discrimination in many places.

Later on the page under the heading LGBT Community our Wikipedia friends provide some helpful information:

The concepts of gender identity and transgender identity differ from that of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation describes an individual’s enduring physical, romantic, emotional, or spiritual attraction to another person, while gender identity is one’s personal sense of being a man or a woman.

Got that? Here is Matt Barber:

[T]here remains a larger question still. If a person’s “actual sex” needn’t be rooted in biological reality, then why should anything be rooted in biological reality? […] As long as we’re tinkering with scientific and moral truth, why stop at a person’s biologically determined and fixed sex? Why stop at “gender identity”?

I’ll wager that next year Reuters scores a 150 percent on HRC’s “equality index” if it offers a category for “species identity.” If “a person’s innate, deeply felt psychological identification” is all that matters, then who is Reuters — who are any of us — to discriminate if an employee wants to get in touch with his inner horse and run the Kentucky Derby?

For that matter, what about “racial identity?” Again, why the intolerant and arbitrary “gender-identity” narrow-mindedness? Roseanne Barr is a short, obnoxious white woman today, but who’s to say that tomorrow she won’t develop an “innate, deeply felt psychological identification” as a seven-foot black man? Watch out, NBA.

Three years ago at American Thinker, Chad Felix Greene penned the article, “Transphobia: A Reasonable Response?” In it, he summed up some important recent history:

The DSM – 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 2013 changed the condition from Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria. This was celebrated by the LGBT (the “T” is for Transgender) community as a victory for equality.

The goal was to “remove the ‘stigma’ associated with having a mental illness.” Greene quotes one supporter of the change: “A right-winger can’t go out and say all trans people are mentally ill…”

Green weighs in:

Regardless of the opinion if Transgenderism is a mental illness, a biological error, a personal choice or an emotional and psychological imperative we are free to embrace or dismiss the concept. By demanding that all people accept gender expression as relative to the presenter, we are stigmatizing natural impulses. It is wrong to demand that a person be labeled as a bigot for not viewing another person as that person demands to be viewed. In the end liberals do not create a more tolerant and open world, they merely create new and irrational categories of people to discriminate against. Appreciating the personal journey of an individual changing their gender is equally as tolerant as disapproving of the fluid manipulation of gender in the first place.

It might seem as if we are jumping back and forth between topics — but we’re not — they’re all “identities,” and thus all related.

Up next: Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense.

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Written by Hans Fiens

Imagine that you’re the commissioner of the NFL and a certain Dallas-based football team has been bringing shame upon the league with a litany of domestic abuse and DUI arrests. One day, an underling bursts into your office.

“Good news, Commissioner. Everybody on the Cowboys roster has stopped breaking the law!”

“That’s great,” you reply. “Did this happen because our ‘Stop Being a Terrible Person’ campaign finally worked?”

“Oh, uh, no,” the underling says. “It happened because the team’s plane just exploded.”

As this imaginary commissioner, how would you feel in this moment? Probably the same way I felt after learning that about the sex rates of unmarried millennials.

Millennials’ Sex Lives Are In Trouble

The average millennial has fewer sexual partners than both Gen Xers and the Boomers. In 1991, 54.1 percent of US high school students had had sexual intercourse. By 2015, that number dropped to 41.2. However, during approximately that same time frame, the rate of regular church attendance by Americans dropped by nearly ten points, while moral acceptance of extramarital sex increased. So a return to Biblical beliefs concerning sexuality is certainly not the cause of millennials’ increased avoidance of promiscuity.

What’s causing millennials to be less sexually active, then? As with any trend, there are numerous explanations. But the two biggest factors seem to be the copious amounts of pornography that millennials, in particular millennial men, have grown up consuming, and the widespread use of socially isolating social networking. Just take a look at this profile of a millennial man, courtesy of Tara Bahrampour:

Noah Patterson, 18, likes to sit in front of several screens simultaneously: a work project, a YouTube clip, a video game. To shut it all down for a date or even a one-night stand seems like a waste. “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy,” he said.

It’s not that he doesn’t like women. “I enjoy their companionship, but it’s not a significant part of life,” said Patterson, a Web designer in Bellingham, Wash.

He has never had sex, although he likes porn. “I’d rather be watching YouTube videos and making money.” Sex, he said, is “not going to be something people ask you for on your résumé.”

Will This Trend Persist, Or Will Millennials Change?

For those who believe that sex is something that ought to take place only within the confines of marriage, it’s initially encouraging to hear that millennials are having less sex outside of marriage. It becomes profoundly discouraging, however, to learn that the cause is not a rediscovery of Christian morality, but having their plane shot down by the bazooka blast of smut and antisocial behavior.

This raises an important question: Is this a curious fad or a troubling trend? Will the millennial lack of interest in sex eventually correct itself, once we adjust to life in the internet age? Or will they be unable to pull themselves out of the screen-filled, porn-infested tar pit and rediscover the value of human companionship and physical love?

I worry that many won’t. That tar pit isn’t merely delaying millennials’ pursuit of procreation and human companionship—it’s grinding to a halt one of the most important cogs that moves that machine, a cog known as “developing an appreciation for feminine virtues.”

Marriage Creates Space For Real Love And Virtue

For example, the reason a Christian man asks out a cute young woman in his college Bible study group is because he’s pursuing sex, even if his intention is to not to have sex until they would be married. He sees an attractive woman. He experiences the desire to do what his body was designed for—to unite sexually with hers and to create life. And so he approaches her as the first step to fulfilling this biological need.

As men pursue women, however, they come to develop a more robust appreciation of what women have to offer them beyond physical beauty and sexual gratification. They become more exposed to the various feminine virtues—things like kindness, compassion, selflessness, loyalty, tenderness. And the more decent men encounter “the imperishable beauty of a quiet and gentle spirit,” as St Peter calls it, the more they come to value this inner beauty over raw sexuality.

Likewise, the more that decent women see men valuing their feminine virtues, the more they cultivate them and the more they seek the corresponding masculine virtues, such as bravery and self-sacrifice. We begin the mating dance by following our animalistic urges. But, during the tango, we become human as we discover what it means to love and serve and belong to each other.

Pornography Destroys The Dance And Ritual Of Marriage

So how do pornography and social media destroy the dance?

It’s important to remember that, for the average man, pursuing a woman is both awkward and terrifying. It’s awkward because, when a man asks a woman, “Can I buy you a drink?” he’s ultimately saying, “I want to mate with you, but I can’t just tell you that, so this is the stupid way I’m beginning the process of getting you to have my babies.” And it’s terrifying because, if a woman says, “no, thanks,” she’ll ultimately be saying, “I reject your offer of procreation and therefore declare that you have no value to me as a man.”

But despite these things, a man’s desire for sex still compels him to risk the humiliation and rejection, which sets him on the path to discovering the feminine virtues. Pornography, however, derails this process by becoming the sexual version of eating cereal for dinner instead of dining out on filet mignon—yes, of course, it’s an inferior substitute in every way, but the Cheerios are already in your pantry and you don’t have to do all the hard work that obtaining haute cuisine requires. Quite simply, porn gives men enough sexual satisfaction to conclude that it’s not worth the awkwardness and the terror of beginning the pursuit, nor is it worth the time or money to continue the pursuit. And when men don’t pursue actual, real women for sex, they don’t end up encountering the feminine virtues and therefore don’t develop a high value for them.

The Internet Prevents Us From Developing Relationships

Social media only compounds this problem. The more that social media pulls us away from actual people, the less we’re capable of seeing how much more valuable and rewarding true human interaction is. The more our eyes are locked onto notification-filled screens, the more we become unable to see the superiority of locking eyes with an actual human being, of feeling real emotions with that person, of sharing our hearts and our bodies with them. The more we eschew real human interactions, the more we convince ourselves that digital interactions are real.

For young men, porn convinces them that real women aren’t worth pursuing, while social media convinces them that not pursuing real women is perfectly normal. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when many of the millennial men raised on this toxic combination aren’t interested in waking up from the digital coma—just as it shouldn’t come as a surprise that an increasing number of them can’t wake up from it even when they’re lying in bed with a real person.

Likewise, for women, social media shuts down the human interaction highway, which is the best avenue they have to display the gems of feminine kindness and compassion. Porn tells them, “the only thing you have that’s truly valuable is your body—and, oh by the way, we expect it to look as flawless as the ones belonging to the women in these videos.” So it shouldn’t come as a surprise when many young ladies choose to opt out of a sexual economy that devalues their greatest assets by inflating the worth of fantasy women and their digitized bodies.

It’s Not Too Late To Turn Off The Computer

I’m sure Roger Goodell would love to have a scandal-free Dallas Cowboys roster. But he wouldn’t want it if it came at the cost of 53 men’s lives. In the same way, as a pastor who teaches and believes that sex is a gift God has given to take place only within the confines of marriage, I would rejoice if America’s youth were becoming less sexually active because they’re finding God. There is, however, nothing to celebrate when they’re becoming less sexually active because they’re losing their humanity.

But for those millennials stuck in the porn and social media tar pit, in particular millennial men, it’s not too late to rediscover what’s been lost. Shut your laptop. Turn off your phone. Go outside. Meet a girl. Ask her on a date. Pray for strength to avoid the seedy corners of the internet as you learn what it means to cherish the gems of her heart, gems that will continue shining even after the luster of her youth has faded. Ask her to marry you. Make your vows before God. Be fruitful and multiply, and be at peace.

The first and greatest romantic love song was performed by Adam in the garden of Eden. “This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” he sung about Eve.

It’s not too late for this to be your love song too.

Article originally published at TheFederalist.com.

As with many topics, identity politics can be approached on any number of levels, such as intellectual, spiritual, and emotional.

Yet, too few Americans actually talk about what we’re really talking about when the subject of the “LGBT community”/identity politics comes up. LGBT represents only four letters — thus, 4 identities.

What are the terms of this expanding identity politics phenomenon, and what is the long range impact going to be on our society and culture? What is the nature of human identity, and has God had something to say about it? What’s the proper response to those with deep feelings about who they are? Like the old Almond Joy/Mounds candy bar commercial — sometimes they feel like a nut, sometimes they don’t.

Many people are writing about the increasing difficulty of taking all of this seriously. New York City now recognizes over 30 “gender” identities. Here is Jazz Shaw writing at HotAir.com:

If the government is willing to not only recognize but mandate the acceptance of a person’s desired gender rather than their actual sex, why should there be any barriers at all. What about people suffering from Cotard’s Syndrome? They fervently believe that they are undead… literally zombies walking the Earth. Can Uncle Sam declare them dead just to honor that belief and force the medical community to treat them as corpses? While that may sound like an extreme comparison, it’s actually the same thing. There is precisely as much scientific evidence that a man identifying as a “transgender woman” is actually female as there is that a Cotard’s sufferer is actually a zombie.

Over at First Things, Katherine Kersten writes about “gender conforming” and “gender-nonconforming.” She writes:

The Judeo-Christian vision, which shaped Western civilization for 1,600 years, holds that God created man—body and soul—with purpose and meaning in an ordered universe. But the post-Christian worldview fast replacing it has no place for God, and perceives no purpose in nature. Christian man has become “psychological man” and the soul has become the self, in the words of Philip Rieff. The free-floating self—unconstrained by reality—is now believed to forge its own “identity” through a creative assertion of will.

Post-Christian man views his body as a tabula rasa—a canvas on which to express his identity and exert his will. In fact, the more contrary to nature one’s new self is, the more “authentic” it can claim to be. The recent mania for tattoos and piercings is a case in point. The desire to be free of the human condition and its limitations has ancient roots.

“Today,” Kersten writes, “transgender advocates are creating a Potemkin Village—built on hormones, surgery, and chest-binders—to solidify the illusion on which their magical reality is based.”

In the near term, transgender ideology will further polarize society and diminish the shared civic space where liberals and conservatives can fruitfully coexist… Longer term, it will mount an escalating attack on the family and religious institutions, the perennial targets of totalitarian forces.

So identity politics is not just about the confused emotional life of “progressives.” Instead, it is a threat to family and religious institutions, the very building blocks of Western Civilization. Again, here is Katherine Kersten:

As we enter the world of fantasy—when reality ceases to matter—it is impossible to predict where our society will crash against nature, as it inevitably will.

It’s time for our paraphilia of the day, and it’s one I’ll only introduce today and revisit with more next time: transgenderism. Wikipedia’s “transgender” page has been rewritten since I cited it a few years ago — and the first section runs four paragraphs. Here is just the first one:

Transgender people are people who have a gender identity, or gender expression, that differs from their assigned sex. Transgender people are sometimes called transsexual if they desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another. Transgender is also an umbrella term: in addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex (trans men and trans women), it may include people who are not exclusively masculine or feminine (people who are genderqueer, e.g. bigender, pangender, genderfluid, or agender). Other definitions of transgender also include people who belong to a third gender, or conceptualize transgender people as a third gender. Infrequently, the term transgender is defined very broadly to include cross-dressers, regardless of their gender identity.

Got it? Let’s close with our next question: Will the expression of disapproval of transgenderism be deemed bullying or hate speech? Of course we already know the answer to that is yes.

Up next: Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?

Articles in this series, from oldest to newest:

Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Introducing a Series
Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Incest
Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Body Integrity Identity Disorder
Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Impact & Transgenders
COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Transgenderism a Choice or Disorder?
COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense
COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: Man’s Search for Meaning
COMING SOON: Identity Politics and Paraphilias: LGBT is Not a Color

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video reports & other special presentations!

Equality Illinois, Illinois’ most prominent cheerleader for all things sexually deviant—especially doctrinaire and destructive legislation—is cheering the reintroduction of a bill that would make it even easier for gender-dysphoric persons to have their birth certificates legally falsified.

House Bill 1785, the “Birth Certificate Designation Act,” introduced by State Representative Greg Harris and co-sponsored by the usual suspects, like Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago), Robyn Gabel (D-Evanston), and Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago), would amend the Vital Records Act to allow those Illinoisans who wish they were the opposite sex to enlist the government in their effort to deceive.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send an email message to your state representative to ask him/her to reject HB 1785 and uphold birth certificates as legal documents.  The state of Illinois has no duty or right to make it easier for men and women who wish they were the opposite sex to falsify their birth certificates.

Background
Currently, a sex-rejecting Illinoisan who seeks a falsified birth certificate must present an affidavit from a physician certifying that he or she has performed surgery on the sex-rejecting person. Harris and his accomplices seek to make this process easier by allowing doctors, advanced practice nurses, physician assistants, and licensed mental health professionals from any state provide “declarations” that the patient has “undergone treatment…for the purpose of gender transition.” In an attempt to conceal that this effort enlists government to participate in fraud, the bill’s sponsors change the wording from “sex change” to “change of sex designation,” thereby implicitly acknowledging the science-denying nature of their quest: No one’s sex can change.

For those who are unclear about what this change would mean, we have the confused attorney for the ACLU of Illinois, John Knight (who is suing District 211 on behalf of a boy who wants to be a girl) to offer clarity:

House Bill 1785 protects Illinoisans facing the unnecessary choice between living without a birth certificate that conforms with [sic] who they are and undergoing surgery they may not want or need. The scientific and medical community agrees that surgery is not necessary medical treatment for transgender people and shouldn’t be required to obtain an accurate birth certificate.

It is decidedly not accurate for a birth certificate to state that a person who is objectively male and was identified at birth as such to be changed to state that this person was identified at birth as female.

Many may not know that it can take as little as two visits and filling out some questionnaires for a certified mental health professional to declare that a sex-rejecting 18-year-old has undergone treatment for the purpose of gender transition.

Obama’s Department of Education provides clear evidence of where Leftist thinking is going. His Education Department mandated that schools treat students in every way as if they are the sex they want to be. According to his diktat, no cross-dressing, hormone-doping, or surgical mutilations are needed for students to be treated as if they are the sex they are not. No affidavit from a medical professional certifying that the student is undergoing treatment for gender dysphoria is needed. Not even parental permission can be required in order for a student to access opposite-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and hotel rooms on school-sponsored overnight trips. All that’s required is a student’s declaration that he or she “identifies” as the opposite sex.

That said, it’s critical to remember that cross-dressing, hormone-doping, and surgical mutilations do not turn males into females or vice versa. Compassion and a commitment to truth dictate that we must not treat students who take cross-sex hormones as if they are in reality the sex they are not.

And the government should never be required to participate in a science-denying fiction.

It is staggering to see a modern civilization snookered into accepting (or pretending to accept) the science-denying superstition that surgical tinkering and hormone-doping can turn a man into a woman or vice versa. The ordinary men and women behind the curtain promoting this superstition know full well that no human’s sex can change, so they had to invent new language to confuse and deceive. Thus, we hear the terms “transgender,” “transman,” “transwoman,” “cisgender,” “cisman,” and “cisgender.”

These terms are intended to conceal that humans have an objective, immutable biological sex that cannot change. And these terms are intended to create the illusion that the disordered desire to be the opposite sex (i.e., “transgender”) is ontologically equivalent to being that sex, hence the invention of the term “cisgender.” “Cisgender” refers to people whose “gender identity” (i.e., their subjective feelings about their sex) aligns with their objective, immutable sex. By creating a word that emphasizes subjective feelings about one’s sex rather than one’s sex, Leftists have managed to distract and delude otherwise science-respecting people.

There’s another new word concocted to normalize disordered feelings about one’s sex. That word is “gender marker.” This was invented to smooth passage of laws that permit gender-dysphoric men and women to have their birth certificates legally falsified, thus Equality Illinois’ press release states that current laws allow a person to “correct” the “gender marker” on his or her birth certificate only “if they have undergone a surgical procedure.”

A formerly rational society understood that birth certificates record the sex of a child as identified by a doctor at birth. In a convoluted rhetorical scheme, the Left now says that birth certificates record the “gender marker” that doctors “assign” babies at birth. The ability to get purportedly rational, science-respecting lawmakers to pass laws mandating that government commit fraud depends on the acceptance of this rhetorical non-sense.

What Illinois actually needs is a law prohibiting persons from having the sex designation on their birth certificates changed unless they produce an affidavit from a medical doctor certifying that they have an intersex condition, which are objective diagnosable disorders—wholly distinct from “transgenderism”—that result in “a discrepancy between the external genitals and the internal genitals (the testes and ovaries).” The Left likes to conflate “transgenderism” with intersex disorders in order to muddy the ontological, moral, and political waters.

Anti-nature superstitions cannot endure, so this one will eventually be tossed into the dustbin of history that holds in it scores of other abandoned superstitions. Tragically, countless men, women, and children will suffer before that happens. When that day comes, every activist, school employee, politician, and ordinary citizen who promoted lies or cowardly acquiesced to them will have to confront his or her own culpability for the incalculable damage that will have been done to so many. Don’t be one of those people. Speak truth persistently and courageously.

Read more recent articles from Laurie:

The Radical “Trans”-Formation of America

New Trier High School Avoids Diversity Like the Plague

Highlights Magazine for Children Affirms Homoeroticism

Join IFI at our Feb. 18th Worldview Conference

We are excited about our third annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Frank Turek on Sat., Feb. 18, 2017 in Barrington. Dr. Turek is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture:

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

For decades the Left has embarked on a science- and morality-defying quest to advance a sexuality ideology that undermines human flourishing. There is no better illustration of that than the radical “trans”-formation of America with regard to “transgenderism.”

Rhetorical clarity

“Progressives” invent or reinvent language to serve their ideological purposes. So, let’s simplify and clarify matters. In this article, “sex” refers to one’s objective, immutable biological sex. “Gender” is a synonym for sex. “Gender identity” refers to a person’s subjective feelings about his or her sex. Men who pretend to be women are pretend-women. And men and women who accept their sex are normal men and women (not “cismen” or “ciswomen” as Leftists call them).

Remember, no one has an ethical obligation to accept Leftist assumptions, use Leftist language, or acquiesce to Leftist demands based on those assumptions and advanced through tortured Leftist language.

Safety

The most radical demand made by Leftists is that society must sexually integrate spaces in which private activities are engaged in, that is to say, activities that involve bodily functions and undressing.

Much of the opposition to co-ed restrooms, locker rooms, showers, shelters, and semi-private hospital rooms focuses on the risks posed to women when objectively male persons are allowed in these private spaces.

Leftists respond that there is no evidence that men who wish they were women pose any risk to women and that pretend-women have been using women’s restrooms for years without incident. What this argument ignores is that allowing cross-dressing men into women’s private spaces makes it easier for male predators to access women’s facilities by claiming to be “transwomen.”

The blog GenderTrender illuminates this real danger:

One of the tropes Transjacktivists use to promote and legalize their desire to eliminate female spaces is to assert that males with GID are speshul snowflakes or claim that males wouldn’t adopt transgenderism in order to prey on women. Or that males who are arrested repeatedly for getting off on watching women perform intimate activities (in places they assume they are free from males) wouldn’t go through the trouble of putting on a wig that makes those same activities legal….Are you out of your mind? Why wouldn’t a guy who risks arrest repeatedly to invade women’s space comply with measures which make his activities legal?? It’s considerably less inconvenient to put on a skirt and some lippy than to be arrested and processed, make bail, go before a judge, etc….

Transjacktivists claim that arrest statistics for peeping and perving don’t show a sharp increase in states where men are allowed in women’s spaces. Well of course they don’t! Making a formerly illegal behavior LEGAL seldom results in more arrests for (now legal) behavior. Duh!

The truth is guys do this sh*t all the time. And they’ll do whatever it takes to perv on females. Here are some of the things they’ll do to get into female spaces:

1. Hide cameras and microphones in female spaces.
2. Crawl through ventilation ducts to view female spaces.
3. Install double mirrors to view female spaces.
4. Drill holes in walls to peep women’s spaces.
5. Place cameras in shopping bags next to females wearing skirts.
6. Risking arrest—and repeat arrest—sneaking into women’s restrooms.

Another Leftist argument regarding safety goes like this: If bathrooms correspond to objective sex, then women who wish they were men and are lumbering about looking like burly men would be compelled to use women’s restrooms. Once burly, bearded women with bulging biceps are seen in women’s restrooms, actual men who are predators will be able to freely enter women’s restrooms looking like the men they are (no need to cross-dress). If, upon entering women’s restrooms, these objectively male predators are questioned, they can merely lie, claiming they are actually “transmen” (i.e., women who are pretending to be men) but aren’t permitted to use the men’s restrooms because of archaic restroom policies that require restrooms to correspond to actual sex. Therefore, according to Leftists, the threat of sexual assault actually increases unless restroom policies allow men who are pretending to be women in women’s restrooms. Got that?

The logical outworking of the “trans” ideology

So, let’s make this quagmire a tad more quaggy and miry.

In challenging current “genital-based” restroom policies, Leftists snottily ask who will be performing “genital inspections.” Let’s assume sexuality-perverts (i.e., those who seek to pervert a proper understanding of all matters sexual) manage to win “gender-identity-based” restroom policies. Who is going to do “gender-identity” inspections? What will society do with those who “identify” as genderfluid, bigender, or trigender? What will be required to establish a “transwoman” or “transman” identity? Must they cross-dress? Take puberty-blockers? Take cross-sex hormones? Have their breasts amputated and fake-penises affixed to their nether regions or conversely have their testes amputated and fake breasts affixed upstairs? In Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch’s brave new world, nothing would be required for men to access women’s locker rooms other than their assertion that they “identify” as women.

Now that cross-dressing has been released from the confines of closets and more elaborate disguises are chemically and surgically available, restroom and locker room use has been complicated. Pretend-men whose use of cross-sex hormones, body-mutilating surgeries, and cross-dressing render them visually indistinguishable from actual men does complicate restroom use for actual men and for women who won’t want bearded ladies in their facilities. Allowing pretend-women, whose expensive costumes conceal their immutable nature, to use opposite-sex restrooms and locker rooms becomes equally problematic.

But who’s to blame for this new problem?

The blame rests with those who subordinate commonsense and truth about the nature and meaning of objective, immutable sex to disordered subjective desires and perverse ideas about objective, immutable sex. And now the chief promoters of sin-bred foolishness and confusion are asserting that society has a moral obligation to acquiesce further to the corrosive effects of their sin-bred confusion and foolishness.

Title IX and Title VII

How are Leftist organizations making headway in public schools? They’re doing so by abusing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination based on “sex” in public schools. Unelected Leftist bureaucrats with no lawmaking authority in Obama’s Department of Education decided that the word “sex” in Title IX includes “gender identity.” Based on that fanciful redefinition, they have made the ludicrous claim that schools are prohibited from maintaining separate restrooms or locker rooms for objectively male and female students.

To make this rhetorical leap, these bureaucrats ignored this pesky part of Title IX:

A recipient [of federal funds] may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex.

Let’s hope that the new administration undoes the damage done by the Obama Administration.

Leftists who focus their efforts on delegitimizing concerns over safety ignore that safety is not the only concern. The other and equally important issue concerns the meaning of sexual differentiation. Policies that mandate that restroom and locker room usage can no longer correspond to sex embody the false idea that the objective sex of humans has no intrinsic meaning relative to modesty and physical privacy. Accepting such a subversive notion paves the way to the end of sex-segregation everywhere.

Policies mandating co-ed restrooms and locker rooms in our elementary, middle, and high schools embody and teach lies. They teach all children that in order to be kind, inclusive, and socially just, they must relinquish their privacy. Such policies teach that physical embodiment as male or female has no intrinsic meaning related to modesty and privacy.

The Left is attempting the same rhetorical slight of tongue with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is even broader and therefore more dangerous in its application. Even churches may be vulnerable to federal lawsuits based on charges of “sex” discrimination.

If schools, churches, restaurants, health clubs, hospitals, and shelters are prohibited from “discriminating” based on either objective biological sex or “gender identity” (i.e., subjective feelings about sex), their private spaces will inevitably become co-ed. Once objectively male gender-dysphoric persons are allowed in women’s restrooms, on what basis would normal men be prohibited from entering  women’s restrooms? Prohibiting men from accessing women’s restrooms because they’re men would be unjustifiable because objectively male persons would have already been granted access, and prohibiting men from accessing women’s restrooms because they’re “cisgender” would be deemed discrimination based on “gender identity.” And so the Leftist agenda to eradicate all public recognition and respect for sexual differentiation will have been achieved.

Conclusion

This is a crucial battle to fight.

Language matters. “Progressives” understand this more than conservatives. Do not use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric persons who are pretending to be the sex they are not. Do not use the terms “transgender,” “transman,” “transwoman,” or “cis” anything.

Do not share restrooms or locker rooms with opposite-sex persons. Ignore the false accusation that valuing the feelings of modesty and desire for privacy that derive from sex differences is a sign of hatred and ignorance.

And fight policies in your local schools that mandate the grammatically incorrect use of pronouns and that permit co-ed restrooms and locker rooms. Yes, lawsuits are expensive, but fighting for the right to recognize and respect sexual differentiation in private spaces in public schools is worth the cost.

Read more recent articles from Laurie:

New Trier High School Avoids Diversity Like the Plague

Highlights Magazine for Children Affirms Homoeroticism

Cub Scouts Reject Girl Who Wishes She Were a Boy

Join IFI at our Feb. 18th Worldview Conference

We are excited about our third annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Frank Turek on Sat., Feb. 18, 2017 in Barrington. Dr. Turek is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture:

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

John Stemberger, founder of On My Honor, Chairman of the Board of Trail Life USA, and President of the Florida Family Policy Council released the following statement in light of the Boy Scouts of America’s announcement that they would be allowing transgender boys (biological girls who want to become boys) to enroll in scouting programs:

“This is a profoundly sad but inevitable decision on the part of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA).  The “key three” leadership of the BSA assured its membership less than four years ago when they voted to allow openly gay boys in the program that this would never happen.  Now untold thousands of boys in Scouting will be directly exposed to the serious psychological confusion that is characterized by those claiming to be transgender.  As a society, we should have great compassion for children suffering from gender dysphoria while getting them proper counseling and professional help.  Instead, the BSA is encouraging and facilitating a recognized mental disorder that has far reaching consequences to the health and safety of children.  Recently, the American College of Pediatricians released a formal position paper entitled “Gender Identity Harms Children” urging those working with children ‘to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex.’

Further, knowing that boys and biological girls will be showering, dressing and camping in tents together creates a clear child protection issue which is being ignored.  It’s simply stunning that a leading youth organization which parents entrust the protection of their children with has opted to again appease political activists rather than follow clear, common-sense best practices for child protection.”

In light of this decision, parents across America are even more grateful for Trail Life USA, the distinctly Christian scouting organization for boys and young men, which focuses on adventure, character, and leadership in its 700 troops in 48 states across the country.  Trail Life CEO Mark Hancock responded to the decision by saying, “Trail Life USA is saddened to see this decision by the BSA.  We assure our members and chartering organizations that we are committed to the timeless Biblical values affirmed in our Statement of Faith and Values.”

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Three and a half years ago in an article titled “Frightening The Horses,” writer and editor Rod Dreher opens giving a fellow writer kudos. “Ben Domenech calls it,” Dreher notes, and then excerpts him:

I think they have really been arguing against the rise of something which has a much larger impact than just a small number of homosexuals getting married — they have instead been arguing against the modern concept of sexual identity. And this is a much tougher task, considering how ingrained this concept has become in our lives.

During the sexual revolution, we crossed a line from sex being something you do to defining who you are. When it enters into that territory, we move beyond the possibility of having a society in which sex acts were tolerated, in the Mrs. Patrick Campbell sense — “I don’t care what they do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses” — and one where it is insufficient to be anything but a cheerleader for sexual persuasion of all manner and type, because to be any less so is to hate the person themselves. Sex stopped being an aspect of a person, and became their lodestar — in much the same way religion is for others.

After commenting on that, Dreher goes back to Domenech again:

So the real issue here is not about gay marriage at all, but the sexual revolution’s consequences, witnessed in the shift toward prioritization of sexual identity, and the concurrent rise of the nones and the decline of the traditional family. The real reason Obama’s freedom to worship limitation can take hold is that we are now a country where the average person prioritizes sex far more than religion.

. . .

In a nation where fewer people truly practice religion, fewer people external to those communities will see any practical reason to protect the liberty of those who do.

I highly recommend Rod Dreher’s entire article, where he weaves together several more excerpts from others, including the late Justice Antinon Scalia. Ben Domenech’s article The Future of Religious Liberty is also worth your time. Their point — that opening the door to mandated acceptance of everyone’s choice of identity has serious negative consequences.

Let’s turn to our next identity. A few years ago the Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins wrote an article titled, “Whole: A New Documentary on a Troubling Disorder.” Here is the opening:

The new documentary Whole, which recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival, explores the troubling topic of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). This disorder, which I have mentioned in several articles, used to be called apotemnophilia.

Those who suffer from BIID identify with amputees and seek to have their bodies align with their psychological identity. That is to say, they seek to have healthy limbs amputated. Many of those who suffer from BIID (known colloquially as “amputee wannabes”) recount feeling these desires from a very young age. Some have accomplished their goal through self-mutilation, and at least two have been facilitated in their quest by a doctor in Scotland.

Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page (emphasis added):

Body integrity identity disorder (BIID, also referred to as amputee identity disorder) is a psychological disorder wherein sufferers feel they would be happier living as an amputee…

BIID is typically accompanied by the desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs to achieve that end. BIID can be associated with apotemnophilia, sexual arousal based on the image of one’s self as an amputee.

So, next on our list of basic and important questions: How will society respond to “After the Ball” type efforts to normalize BIID, remove it from the DSM’s (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) list of mental disorders, and demonize those who disapprove of it?

It is their identity, after all, and you shouldn’t be a bigot.

Up next: Transgenderism.

Last week, IFI published a Facebook conversation I had with two “progressives” in the hope that it may be helpful to IFI readers in their discussions with “progressive” neighbors, colleagues, friends, and family members.

Over the weekend another “progressive” Facebook dissenter, Zach Petersohn, picked up where Melanie Silver left off (well, she did find a moment to post a homosexual emoji).

Petersohn employed arguments different from those Silver employed though equally commonplace and weak:

Zach Petersohn:
To answer your question: the “LGBTQ agenda” is harmful because it destigmatizes LGBTQ people, basically. That’s their position—that’s the position Laurie described in the rant she composed addressing these comments.

Laurie Higgins:
How do my points constitute a rant while Melanie’s do not?

As is common with most “progressives,” you have conflated volitional acts with people.

Yes, I think it’s problematic for societies to destigmatize homoerotic activity, just as I think it’s problematic for societies to destigmatize consensual incestuous activity, zoophiliac activity (bestiality), adultery, BDSM (i.e., bondage, discipline or domination, sadism, masochism)  activity, and polyamory. But arguing that a healthy society maintains sexual boundaries is not an argument for vilifying or mistreating those who choose to violate those boundaries.

Zach Petersohn:
And those are exactly the kind of false equivalencies typical of hateful right-wing nutjobs.

Laurie:
Hateful? How so? What specifically did I say that’s hateful? It’s no more intrinsically hateful to claim that homoerotic activity is immoral than it is to claim that those other forms of love or erotic activity are immoral. I don’t hate people because of the beliefs they hold about sexual morality or because of the choices they make about the types of relationships they pursue or erotic acts they engage in. By the way, it sounds very much like you are judging—and judging harshly—consensual adult incestuous love, polyamory, adultery, zoophilia, BDSM—and conservatives. I thought “progressives” vigorously opposed “judgmentalism” and name-calling.

Zach Petersohn:
Right, right—it’s not the people, it’s the activity. Except, the people engaged in the activity say it’s not a choice, it’s not a lifestyle, and it’s not just an activity—it’s an orientation, as natural to them as yours is to you. I know, I know, you don’t believe that, and you have lots of funny little anecdotes about people who choose to stop doing gay and the lack of a “gay gene.” Great, pat yourself on the back, you earned it. But, if sexual intercourse between same-sex partners is an unnatural perversion, why is it so common in non-human species? And why, from a rational, genetic, non-faith perspective, would it not follow that it’s a naturally-occurring phenomenon in humans as well?

See, Laurie, you’re proposing a false dichotomy in order to claim that you “hate the sin, but love the sinner,” which is patronizing and arrogant in its own right, but I digress. In reality, there’s no neat separation – there is, however, an abundance of scientific evidence that indicates it isn’t a choice. So, vilifying the act is, in fact, vilifying the person, which makes you just another hateful old bigot.

So, no, I’m not juding incestuous zoophilic polyamorous BDSM harshly; I’m juding the mean-spirited fake Christians who would equate homosexual love with sexual deviance.

Laurie:
1.) Homosexuals do not choose their attractions/feelings, but they most certainly do choose their behavioral responses to those unchosen feelings. What do you mean when you use the word “natural”? If you mean powerful, persistent, and unchosen, is it your claim that any and all attractions/feelings are automatically moral to act upon if they’re powerful, persistent, and unchosen?

2.) I have never used the word “lifestyle.”

3.) I do know people who have chosen to remain celibate because they know that it’s immoral to act on their unchosen homoerotic attractions. I know people who have identified as homosexual and been involved in homoerotic relationships with persons they loved deeply, but subsequently left those relationships and now are in happy heterosexual relationships (e.g., Rosaria Butterfield). I know people who identify as homosexual and generally are attracted to persons of their same sex but have fallen in love with one person of the opposite sex and that love has generated erotic attraction to that one person.

4.) Of course, you and I both know there is no “gay gene.” And you likely know that homosexual scholars increasingly believe that “sexual orientation” is not fixed but fluid. Leftist scholars now argue that though “sexual orientation” is fluid, persons have no agency in affecting its direction. We’ll see how long “progressives” will be able to cling to that dogmatic claim. How long will it take before this claim is refuted just as the claims that homosexuals constitute 10% of the population and that homosexuality is in all cases fixed have been refuted?

5.) You take your morality cues from the animal kingdom? Yikes. Animals eat their poop, eat their sexual partners, are promiscuous, engage in polygyny, engage in incest, kill the babies of sexual competitors, and excrete publicly. I guess from your perspective all these should be naturally-occurring phenomena in humans as well.

Humans experience all sorts of powerful, persistent, unchosen feelings. Our task as moral beings is to figure out which of these myriad unchosen feelings are morally legitimate to act upon. Since we’re not animals, we ought not take our cues from the animal kingdom. Science can tell us what is—what exists. Science, however, tells us nothing about the morality of volitional behavior. Even if a feeling, impulse, or desire may be influenced by biochemistry does not mean that behavior impelled by such feelings is automatically moral behavior.

6.) What you call a false dichotomy between moral assessments of behavior and feelings toward people is a real dichotomy—a distinction that most people are able to and do make every day. In this wildly diverse world, it is entirely possible to hate beliefs and volitional behaviors without hating people. Most humans do it regularly. We have friends, family members, neighbors, and colleagues who believe things we find wrong, and destructive. They do things we believe are wrong and destructive. And yet, we love them deeply. Perhaps you are unable to love those who believe and do things of which you disapprove, but you ought not project onto others your habits of mind.

It is my hope that these conversations may help IFI readers feel better equipped and, therefore, more willing to engage in this kind of debate with the “progressives” in their lives. For now, our First Amendment right to speak freely is protected. We should use it while we can.

Join IFI at our Feb. 18th Worldview Conference

We are excited about our third annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Frank Turek on Sat., Feb. 18, 2017 in Barrington. Dr. Turek is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture:

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

Mike Miller at the Independent Journal Review posted a Tweet from Fox News’ Brit Hume about the University of Kansas Gender “pronoun buttons” — Hume Tweeted, “Is there no end to this foolishness?”

What foolishness? Miller reports that “Signs in the university’s various libraries explain the purpose of the buttons”:

Because gender is, itself, fluid and up to the individual. Each person has the right to identify their own pronouns, and we encourage you to ask before assuming someone’s gender. Pronouns matter!

Misgendering someone can have lasting consequences, and using the incorrect pronoun can be hurtful, disrespectful, and invalidate someone’s identity.

Misgendering. That’s a first for me — I hadn’t heard that word before. My vocabulary has expanded a lot in recent years.

More and more of the people who considered themselves “enlightened” and “open minded” about the LGBT “agenda” (Brit Hume might even be one of them) are now being pushed to their tolerance limits by the growing list of “identities” that we are all supposed to not discriminate against.

I wonder if Hume has bumped into the list of paraphilias. There is a short list and a longer list. I have not been able to find the entire 549 yet but I will keep looking.

When it comes to “identity politics,” as I noted last time, the list of possibilities are endless. The most common ones are race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and the bogus “sexual orientation” (more on that in a later post). In recent years, the letters following LGBT have begun to come out of the closet, and as noted above, the group wanting to expand the list of “genders,” such as at the University of Kansas — represent even more letters!

Two years ago when I discussed this series of articles with the Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins, she had this to say:

To your question about whether we should iterate and reiterate what distinguishes natural sex between men and women from perversity in all its protean forms, I say, absolutely. As often as the Left says homoeroticism is akin to skin color, we have to say, no, it’s akin to paraphilias, incest, and polyamory.

In this effort to lay out the range of possibilities in identity politics, let us turn to our first paraphilia: incest.

Wikipedia deserves much of the criticism it receives from political conservatives, but I like to refer to it when useful. Here is an excerpt from their page on incest:

Incest is sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in a consanguineous relationship (blood relations), and sometimes those related by affinity, such as individuals of the same household, step relatives, those related by adoption or marriage, or members of the same clan or lineage.

The incest taboo is and has been one of the most widespread of all cultural taboos, both in present and in many past societies. Most modern societies have laws regarding incest or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages. In societies where it is illegal, consensual adult incest is seen by some as a victimless crime.

This series will ask a lot of questions — here is our first: How will society respond when those who practice incest start self-identifying as such and begin clamoring for their “rights”?

Up next: Frightening the horses.