A great delusion

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is not a feminist screed on inattentive husbands but a 1985 collection of essays by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing his patients’ strange mental conditions. What would the professor make of boys today who think they’re girls and girls who think they’re gender-unaffiliated?

In this shoreless moral landscape of ooze falling through ooze, where droves of youth reject the “binary” classification of male and female, what is to prevent one from mistaking himself for a hat? First came the gay movement, then the post-gay movement. First a boy complained he was trapped in a girl’s body; right behind him will come a boy complaining he is a tree trapped in a man.

The universities are tripping over themselves to accommodate. Six years ago, no student health plan covered “gender reassignment surgery,” and now three dozen do, with 25 others offering related hormone therapy.

University of Pennsylvania leaders, proudly supposing they were in the vanguard of the revolution, got their hats (or could it be their wives?) handed back to them by the class of 2016. Incoming freshmen were indignant, and can you blame them—two dozen gay groups on campus, and not one of them represents their needs! So they added to Queer People of Color and Lambda Alliance a new club called Penn Non-Cis (“cis” meaning gender-biology incompatibility).

Memo to the Penn faculty: When exactly did the tail start wagging the dog and 17-year-olds start lecturing the bearded ones? When did educators become sycophants, and the natural order cease that “gray hair is a crown of glory … gained in a righteous life” (Proverbs 16:31)? “Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child …” (Ecclesiastes 10:16).

Psychiatry accommodates by cranking out new categories that barely keep up with the metastasizations. “Homosexual,” move over. Make room for “genderqueer,” “androgyne,” and “non-cisgender.” In 1973, activists removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, bible of the American Psychiatric Association. A group of health professionals named B4U-ACT preaches that it is high time to remove the stigma attached to “minor-attracted people.” If Middle America does not yet connect the dots between gay and pedophile, NAMBLA knows full well that it is just as easy for a guy to fall in love with a 17-year-old boy as with an 18-year-old. Age distinctions are the hobgoblins of little minds.

Jesus said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female …” (Matthew 19:4). Why such an obvious statement made to a culture with no gender identity issues? Perhaps Jesus, peering down through the corridors of time, was speaking to you and me, to a day when the very fundamentals would be at issue.

What could possibly go wrong with these modern trends? Is it not true that while the more-liberal-than-thou snub their noses at “Daddy, Mommy, and Baby makes three,” they must sit on our laps to spit in our faces? For who is it but the traditionalist who keeps society’s machinery running so that the others don’t have to? But what happens when perversity proliferates, and there are more of them than of the upright? Then the foundation itself will become Swiss cheese and the house will collapse, and great will be its collapse.

“Save yourselves from this crooked generation,” Peter urged (Acts 2:40). The invitation remains open but the gate is low and the road narrow. This is for our good, because the one who created us—“male and female”—knows the way to health and life. “Perversity” is defined as “the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state, to a corruption of what was first intended.” Does it not weary to kick against the goads?

On a recent walk I went past a school in a neighborhood, and heard the children before I could see them. I knew by the sounds at recess that it was an elementary school and not junior high or older. Their voices were still happy, innocent, hopeful. I was struck with sadness to think how children change. What have we hippies done who threw righteousness to the wind? Behold our grandchildren: profoundly confused and not even knowing their right hand from a hat.

Email aseupeterson@worldmag.com

Listen to an Andrée Seu Peterson commentary on this topic on WORLD’s radio news magazine The World and Everything in It.