The Abolition of Gender
At the height of the French Terror, Maximillian Robespierre recommended that in the name of equality all church steeples be demolished. The reason? They towered over other buildings and thus signified conflict with the principles of equality.
For the Left, destruction is always the means for achieving “equality.” The inexorable logic of leveling differentiations, be they institutional or in nature itself, has now reached the level of insanity.
Today’s revolutionaries have taken the principle of destruction of hierarchies, including religious hierarchies, even further than the most ardent advocates of the Terror. In the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, they have pronounced Nature itself, including the biological distinction between men and women, as inherently unjust.
As the collective “Laboria Cuboniks” posted on Twitter, “If nature is unjust, change nature.”
The annihilation of Nature itself, including the abolition of gender is a goal: “XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology -- the sooner it is exorcised, the better.”
The view of nature as unjust is a succinct description of the neo-gnostic, secularist ideology that is foundational to the transgender wing currently driving the LGBTQ movement.
The neo-gnostics see the material world, including the binary of male and female as inherently evil and oppressive. Sexual identity as given at birth can be reformulated by individual and collective will. The human being can be transformed by pharmaceutical and technological means, with the result that the human being is transhuman.
As Mareile Pfannebecker wrote in an extensive review of Helen Hester’s Xenofemminism, today’s most radical feminism requires “regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.”
Modern trans feminists must combat “the unwillingness to share and change the shape of womanhood, and thus to the defense of an essentialist gender identity category… The overall goal to overcome gender as a system of domination is translated into an offer of creative bodily autonomy.”
The goal: “A ‘fully automated luxury communist gender proliferation’ that includes ‘self-determined healthcare for all impregnatables and access to the tools for changing gendered embodiment for all who want them… the demand for women’s rights also means the right for everyone to be a woman, or not, or anything else. [Italics mine.]
Laboria Cuboniks adds that every human being has the right “to speak as no one in particular.” Admittedly, such a goal “is an arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable… the old order of 'sex'.”
In sum, “Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist… ’Gender abolitionism' is shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power…”
“Nature” will and must yield to technological manipulation. Admittedly, “the project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite task.” But “In the name of feminism, 'Nature' shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!”
O, brave new world in which one is neither male nor female!
But echoing Eric Voegelin’s remarks about the unchangeability of Nature, Benjamin Wilker writes in “The New Gnosticism:”
“Being divided into male and female is not a punishment from which we escape, but a privilege, an intended gift of the Creator that defines, for each person, the very depths of his or her being.”
Wilker adds that the new Gnosticism puts forth a non-Christian plan of salvation:
“Human beings themselves perform the function of the redeeming deity; their increasing technical power saves humanity from the ill effects, the suffering, and the limitations of the human flesh; the scientist himself becomes the savior who reveals scientific knowledge -- gnosis -- that allows us to escape from the evils of the material world into a paradise of our own making… the natural distinction of male and female is one more natural limitation that the new Gnostic seeks to remove.”
Seldom has a movement been more destructive to the very idea of what it means to be human than the LGBTQ religious/political movements. Such are essentially anti-human in their desire to remove gender altogether.
The consequences of the trans movement are unfolding before our eyes as girls are reduced to the status described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, in which women become freemartins intentionally sterilized by the injection of male hormones, thus becoming infertile. Meanwhile, young men are being castrated, essentially becoming eunuchs. Some fifty clinics in America are dedicated to the project of eliminating gender via pharmaceutical and surgical means.
All this could be dismissed as a temporary craze if it were not for the fact the trans movement has gone mainstream and has become a cornerstone of America’s domestic and foreign policies. Such is the ascendancy of the trans madness that the former Bruce Jenner, who now goes by the name Caitlin, is being put forth by some Republicans as a viable candidate for the governor of California.
As for the Christian view of the human being as created male and female in the image of God?
Christian churches are now warned that more than the elimination of steeples is in the offing. The goal of the LGBTQ movement, as now led by the trans movement, is the elimination of male and female and thus also Jesus Christ, the Son of Man.
The current ideas of the LGBTQ movement are a return to the gnostic idea that Christ could not have had a human body. His humanity is become irrelevant, as the trans movement repudiates the relevance of human flesh or regards its current forms as male and female abhorrent and intrinsically unjust. The Christ of history disappears. In place of the Son of Man who came to seek and to save those who are lost is the being redeemed by pharmaceutical and technological means.
In sum, hatred of and the passion to eliminate the distinction of male and female is hatred of the Christian proclamation that the Word could become flesh, die and resurrect as the Redeemer of mankind.
A strong word of warning for the Church: It is quite clear the reason for the rapid spread of neo-gnostic ideas throughout all institutions, including the churches, is that the passion of its adherents is too often far greater than the passion of the Church for the gospel of Christ.
The Church needs passionately committed leaders who understand and stand up against the Gnosticism of the trans movement. Pastors and priests must stand up like Athanasius and be counted among those who believe in the creed named after him:
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirt of the virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.
Amen.
Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology. A contributor to American Thinker for a decade, her thoughts also have appeared in many online magazines. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.
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