Fights for "transgender rights" are ratcheting up across the nation, met with opposition by those who say our sexuality is a biological reality that can't be changed with a scalpel.  The problem is this war against transgenderism has already been settled.  The definition of human sexual identity was already changed — by our society's acceptance of the homosexual identity as a legitimate sexual identity.

The landmark case Obergefell v. Hodges, which declared marriage redefined to include same-sex couples, presupposed the sexual identity of homosexuality and all rights attached to that identity.  This was a necessary presupposition to the ruling.  If homosexuality were only a behavior, then people who engage in same-sex relationships would not have rights as a "homosexual," because homosexuality would not be an "identity" with all the dignity an identity deserves.  It would be an action born of desires and feelings, which don't have rights attached to them.

As stated in our founding documents and the principle on which all American rights rest, our rights do not come from men, including the individual man or woman regarding himself.  They come from God, from an objective source.  Our rights come from God because our identity comes from God.  We are human beings designed with dignity as the image-bearers of God.  We are not mere animals.  Because we have a human identity — and our male and female sexual identities are part of that — we have certain rights.  This is what the whole fight for legitimacy by the LGBT movement is about: identity.

Society has determined homosexuality — through reconstruction of what's considered normative — and the Court recognizes it as a human sexual identity with all rights derived from being human.  This recognition is based on a false premise: that our feelings, our desires, and our actions that follow those desires determine our identity as human sexual beings.

The fact is, our identity is based on a created biological order — we are human beings made male or female for specific purposes determined by our biology and the Creator of our biology.  Our sexual identity is determined not by feelings, but by our bodies (from our genes to our organs) for particular purposes.  They fit together for particular purposes.  They are united for particular purposes.  They function for particular purposes born of a fixed order of being.

Homosexuality, however, says our sexuality, our bodies, the teleological nature of our sex organs and the relationships that create sexual unity are not fixed or determined by our biology or God's order.  Our sexuality, instead, is born of our affections and desires, psychologies, self-perceptions, and expressive individualism.  Our use of body parts is for masturbatory pleasure rather than procreation and cohesiveness of the male and female bodies, and our physical selves are expressed — not designed — for artificial gratification rather than organic unity.

The United States as a culture and within its legal and political spheres agrees.  This is the established precedent regarding how human sexual identity is defined.

The path to get to this point didn't come suddenly.  For decades, American conservatives have engaged in behavior that has disrupted God's ordered purposes for sex and erotic relationships.  With the sexual revolution and ease of contraception, sex became detached from procreation within marriage and morphed solely into entertainment, self-gratification, and pleasure.  Marriage became unmoored from covenantal commitment and was essentially redefined according to personal satisfaction instead of mutual commitment, thus increasing the divorce rates and bolstering the establishment of no-fault divorce.

Each of these has moved the needle from objective truth about sexuality toward subjectivism, to the point that behavior and function regarding sex within a normative relationship isn't all that has been corrupted, but sexual identity itself.

Now we have transgenderism.  Like homosexuality, transgenderism defines sexual identity not according to biology, to a fixed teleology regarding our physical forms as male and female, but according to feelings, desires, psychologies, self-perceptions, and expressive individualism.  The difference between homosexuality and transgenderism is only one of scope.  The person with same-sex attractions chooses to keep his body parts intact but use them contrary to their fixed biological purpose.  The person with "non-binary" self-perceptions chooses to use technology to change his body parts contrary to their physical manifestation.

The two are different in application of their sexual identity, but both base their identity on mutable feelings and perceptions rather than on fixed biological and teleological realties.  They're both subjective rather than objective.  Legally — and culturally — this is problematic for anyone who wants to deny transgender people their "rights."

If sexual identity is based on a subjective identity rather than an objective identity as a human sexual being, then we cannot deny one rights while giving the other rights.  Both must be honored if we have accepted a subjective and self-determined premise about what human sexual identity is.

This logical conclusion is called living with unintended consequences. Conservatives, libertarians, and Christians — anyone on the "right" — who are now up in arms about transgender laws must accept how far down the rabbit hole we have gone. They must face the logical conclusions of premises they have already accepted and even advocated.  You can't recreate the nature of human sexual identity and then deny that new reconstruction to others who simply use technology to take it to the next level of nature's perversion.

Just as Nietzsche forced his own godless society to accept the brutal consequences of living with the reality that "God is dead," so we, as a society that has rejected God's natural design of human sexual identity, must accept the consequences of living with the reality that objective human sexuality is dead.

If we are going to be consistent, transgenderism is here to stay, with all rights, recognitions, and privileges given to homosexuality, including all other human sexual identities being constructed in this world of self-creation — identities limited only by an expressive individual's imagination.

Image: mohamed_hassan via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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