Cleaning up the transgender mess

In the cultural whiplash of the first month of President Trump’s second term, two executive orders on gender ideology have brought government-sanctioned gender activism to a screeching halt. On his first day in office, the president affirmed the biological fact that male and female are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality." Eight days later, he prohibited federal funding for “gender-affirming care” for children. The actions are a welcome step in the right direction, as federal agencies under the Biden administration hailed “gender-affirming care” as “medically necessary and life-saving.”

But lasting social change will take more than executive and legal changes, positive and significant as they are. Because the cultural “ingredients” that created our age of gender confusion have been marinating into our collective consciousness for the last 60 years.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington observed that cultures experience a moral revolution about every 60 years. These revolutions are marked by institutional distrust, social revulsion, and what he called “creedal passion.” In 1981, Huntington even predicted a new moral revolution would erupt in America … right about now. 

But to understand where we are now, we must consider the preceding moral revolution, the previous time of “creedal passion” that occurred 60 years ago. Because, some two generations later, we’re still living its fallout. 

The sexual revolution in the 1960s and concurrent 2nd wave feminist movement upended cultural baseline views on everything from sex, gender, and marriage, to morality, family, and personal fulfillment. Every tradition was held in suspicion. Every social expectation, scrutinized as a preservation of power imbalance. 

Now, 60 years later, the movements have come full circle. Women have become so liberated from their biology that, in the name of gender equality, they no longer have an unquestioned right to sex-specific spaces and sports. Now that they’re free to approach marriage purely in terms of emotional fulfillment., iIf their husband decides to live as a woman, they become a “trans widow.”

This tidal wave of gender dysphoria, gender ideology, transgender identities is not a departure from the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. It’s not as though some kind of ideological tributary originated in the last decade. Rather, the trans movement was and is now, the overflow of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement. The chaos we’re living in is a consequence of the ideas preceding it.  

The trans movement is basically second wave feminism on steroids. With second wave feminism, sex was decoupled from relationships, specifically marriage. The trans movement also decouples sex from relationships, specifically one’s relationship to society, and even to oneself. 

Second wave feminism was enabled by medical innovations—most importantly, the pill. The trans movement has also been enabled by medical innovation—i.e. gonadotropin drugs, called puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and procedures that amputate otherwise healthy reproductive organs and create prosthetic anatomy like the opposite sex. 

Second wave feminism included a political identity as it aimed to subvert the patriarchy and its attendant power structures. The trans movement also includes a political identity as it aligns otherwise majority-culture individuals with oppressed minority-cultures and against the colonizing, capitalist “cisheteropatriarchy.” 

Second wave feminism aimed to make women autonomous from men. The trans movement aims to make individuals autonomous from their own bodies. 

Second wave feminism advocated consent as the only factor to determine whether an act was moral. The trans movement advocates consent as the only factor to determine whether a belief is true. 

Second wave feminism defined women by translating everything into a claim of oppression. By virtue of being born female, a girl or woman is a victim. Her existence presumes the experience of objectification and injustice, and by extension, men as collective oppressors.  The trans movement has the same scaffolding. But now, the oppressed have become oppressors. Women who demand sex-specific spaces in bathrooms, locker rooms, rape shelters, and prisons are guilty of endangering and erasing an oppressed group. This is consistent with critical theories—an existing gender minority is always but a new minority away from being displaced.

Second wave feminism presumed the collective experience of women. Any woman who did not agree that she was a victim was either a captive in need of consciousness-raising, or a traitor to her sex. There was no room for individuals who don’t fit the gender narrative. The trans movement is no different, as a recent congressional hearing on transgender medical interventions typified. When detransitioner Chloe Cole described her experience of being rushed into gender transition, a congresswoman expressed her condolences that Chloe didn’t receive the care she felt she deserved. It may have been meant as a moment of empathy, but it stopped short of acknowledging Chloe's experience as valid—that would defy the gender narrative. 

Finally, second wave feminism rendered women even less happy, less satisfied, and less fulfilled than they were before Betty Freidan lamented the “problem with no name.” The trans movement is already proving ineffective as whistleblowers and medical researchers reveal horror stories of “gender-affirming care” gone wrong, and no statistical improvement in the mental health of those who receive it.

The tide of transgender ideology seems to be turning—and for the countless adolescents and young adults swept up in its gravitational pull, the shift can’t happen soon enough. But laws aren’t enough. We must reach hearts and minds with truth, starting now.