Joanne Woodward, actress and wife of actor Paul Newman, played the role of a timid but troubled housewife named Eve White in a celebrated film entitled The Three Faces of Eve (1957).

The person of Eve White was divided into three separate personalities, all three of whom reveal themselves to a psychiatrist named Dr. Luther.  To the psychiatrist's amazed puzzlement, Eve the timid housewife is also Eve Black, a personality who is lascivious and promiscuous.  To Luther's continued perplexity, a third, more subdued personality named Jane also appears.

Luther attempts through hypnosis and therapy to find the childhood trauma accounting for the three assorted personalities.  He finds that Eve's trinitarian being occurred because as a child, she had been forced to kiss her dead grandmother.  Through hypnosis and therapy, the doctor successfully subordinates the two excess personalities.  Eve White and Eve Black disappear, and the real woman (Jane) marries a man named Earl, whom she had met when she was Jane.

Since the film was produced in the early fifties, the opinions of psychiatrists have changed considerably.

Today's psychiatrist would consider a diagnosis of what was once called a split personality as injudicious at the very least.  If someone today has a personality who wishes to split from the body he was born with, most psychiatrists will give the green light to duality and present the person with all the psychiatric and medical tools necessary to transition to the bodily and personality changes desired.

So much for the corruption of psychiatry, most of whose practitioners will no longer attempt to unify a split personality and many of whom actually work to forbid counseling attempting to unify the entity of any person who exhibits what used to be called "gender dysphoria."

What has been less noted than the capitulation of psychiatry to the legitimization of gender dysphoria is the chaos and confusion engendered by advocates of a mind-body split, including the field of law.

Consider the case of an Australian transgender who has declared himself a woman.  As ABC reported, he has been brought to trial for attempting to kill two men and a woman by bludgeoning them with an axe.  A video of the attack is available.  That the attack actually happened is not in dispute.

But Amati's lawyer claims that his client's true spirit would never have done such a thing.  He says her body was disassociated from her true being, going on a hormonal rampage entirely out of her spirit's control.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reported:

Ms Amati's barrister Charles Waterstreet said there was no dispute that his client's body had committed the axe attack, but the question to be decided was what was happening in her mind.  'It's not whether the body of Evie Amati was guilty of the charges, but whether the mind, brain, soul of Evie Amati bore any legal or moral responsibility for the body's actions,' Mr. Waterstreet said.

"Mr Waterstreet said Ms Amati had a 'brilliant' mind but was 'out of her [sic] mind' on the morning of the attack.  'This is a woman [sic] of super intelligence. Not an axe murderer, you might think,' Mr Waterstreet said."

As the corruption of psychiatry invades the legal sphere of influence, with disintegrated personalities claiming legitimacy before the law, the question is just which personality is prosecutable if one of them commits a crime.  With acceptance of the idea that the mind and spirit are separable from the body, how does the law apply?  Which of the three personalities of Eve would be bound by the law?  Is the body alone responsible for transgressions against the law?  Is the spirit exempt from responsibility for bodily behavior?

The ideology behind the transgender movement presents real difficulties for our legal system, which has been largely based on the idea that body and mind are a single entity working together to break the law – the exception once being a genuinely insane person incapable of discerning any reality at all.

But now people who claim they are trapped in the wrong body, and who were once considered out of touch with reality, are considered sane and so attempt to make law accommodate their dysphoria.  Law is to bend to their concept of themselves even when their bodies break the law.

There is the case involving an Ohio judge who refused a name change for a fifteen-year-old boy named Elliot who wishes to transition to a girl named Heidi.  An MSN news report obviously favoring the transgender ideology of mind over matter describes the judge as holding the "transgender teen's identity 'hostage,'" arguing that the sincere, spiritual belief of the boy who thinks he is a girl is enough to warrant a name change.  The judge argued that adolescence is a time of great turmoil, and so the youth should be given time to reconsider.

Once again, the question is which person is real before the law.  Does Elliot's declaration that he is a girl named Heidi trump the biological reality of his anatomy?  To which identity does the law as it is presently constructed apply?  If the law applies only to the spirit within the boy that seeks to deny his embodiment as a male, then what happens to family law, which is still largely based on the binary distinction of humanity as male and female?  Equally germane: Is the spirit not subject to law at all?

The core issue involves an old philosophical and theological misapprehension about mind and body.  Historically, the acceptance of a mind-body split, one in which the mind and spirit are divided, is called antinomianism.  Antinomianism insists that the law does not apply to the spirit.  The idea that one could do with the body as one wished while the regenerated spirit remains untouched was roundly repudiated by the apostle Paul in Romans 6, who rhetorically asked, "[S]hall we continue in sin [with the body], that grace [given to the spirit] may abound?  God forbid."

Transgender ideology is merely a secularized version of antinomianism. 

The idea that what we do with our bodies is entirely up to our mind and spirit and therefore cannot be judged by the law has been given repeated expression in political circles.  The concept entered into secular consciousness in the '60s, with sexual behavior seen as having nothing to do with a person's real self.  The two spheres of being were considered completely separate.  "What consenting adults do in private has absolutely no bearing on one's abilities to do a good job while in public office."  "My personal life is none of your business.  If I'm consorting with hookers, what is that to you?"  And so on.

As it turns out, there is no end to the amount of grace the autonomous spirit can extend to the bodily self.  People have excused murder because a moment of rage is not deemed to have been characteristic of their true selves.  Thomas the ax murderer's neighbors cannot imagine him doing anything so out of character. Neither can he.  He will insist that his true spirit is that of a gentle, non-violent person who would never conceive of killing his wife.  This, even though the wife is dead because he smashed her head in. 

As Detective Patrick Kennedy said in Born to Kill? Jeffrey Dahmer:

You think of the crimes that he committed, they're so horrific you kinda think only a madman or somebody totally evil – evil incarnate would do this but when you talked with Jeff Dahmer you did not get this idea.  He could be engaging, he could be bright, witty, he could make jokes.  He was able to fool a lot of people.

Those who believe in the mind-body split will argue that Jeffrey Dahmer's behavior does not represent the real person, whose basic goodness resides in the spirit world, where he is angelic – bright, witty, and engaging.

The concept of the human being as united in body and spirit, with transgressions of the law originating from the heart and exhibited in behavior is a core idea behind law and order.  If the spiritual is divided entirely from the body, and each person may decide in his spirit what laws are applicable to one's self, we are looking at the death of law in any meaningful sense.

Anarchy will be the result.

Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines, including National Review, RealClearReligion, The Christian Post, LifeSiteNews, and Russia Insider.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.