A topsy-turvy 2015: The new politics of identity

It’s a mad, mad, mad world and getting madder. Mark Twain once quipped, “Common sense is very uncommon,” and it’s less common today than ever before. The difference between The Onion, that ridiculous online fount of satire, and a serious news source is becoming ever more difficult to discern.

When I first read that a 52-year-old married father of seven in Toronto had not only declared himself transgendered but was self-identifying as a 6-year-old girl, I thought it was a joke, a reductio ad absurdum mockery of current leftist orthodoxies. But no!

Paul Wolscht now goes by the name “Stefonknee.” He even has adoptive “parents.” And why not? If homosexuals can “marry,” if a person can “self-identify” as the opposite sex despite all anatomical evidence to the contrary, and if oh-so-white Rachel Dolezal can “self-identify” as black, then why can’t this fellow require you to accept him as a little girl?

But if we honor his radically free will and personal autonomy in this way, is he required to have legal guardians and be in school? Can he drive? If he assaults someone (as he has done several times), should he be tried in juvenile court? Would he enter the record books as the first 6-year-old girl to have fathered seven children just as “Caitlyn” Jenner is now the first woman to have won the men’s Olympic decathlon?

Equally absurd, but now equally necessary to respect, is a girl in England who on any given day may identify as a girl, Layla, or as a boy, Layton. She identifies as “bi-gendered.” But she is not just a teenage prankster. “It isn’t a case of me waking up and choosing to dress a certain way,” she told the Daily Mail. “I’ve got no control over whether I’m going to be Layton or Layla on a certain day.” And if you don’t take her seriously, you’re a beast and may be subject to prosecution. Such are the new politics of identity.

Part of the tragedy in such cases is that these people are cut off from the help they obviously need. Love has become, at the very least, morally unacceptable. The reigning ideology of self-creating autonomy cannot distinguish between living as you please and either mental illness or the effects of emotional trauma. For example, any clinical attempt to help youths in the turmoil of confused attractions understand their sexuality based on a religious or philosophic view of human health is condemned as “unethical” and “quackery.” In some states it’s illegal.

This experiment will collapse under the weight of its counter-intuitive absurdity. Like communism, it is in such disharmony with God’s order of creation that it just won’t work. But also like communism, it won’t fall without a staggering harvest of sorrow.

In the meantime, appeals to common sense will sound increasingly medieval. Modern Western culture has no intellectual foundation left from which it can call these behaviors insane. The church of Jesus Christ is the last bastion of sanity and the only hope of life for these wayward souls. But for it to be so, Christians must resist conformity to this world, renew their minds according to God’s Word, and thus discern and adopt the mind of God in all things in the confidence of the risen and reigning Christ. And then suffer faithfully.