For the leaders and followers of the trans movement, the photo accompanying Gabriel Mac's article "I Didn't Need a Penis to Be a Man. But I Needed One to Be Me" is a political statement concerning equality of the sexes.  The ideal human being is neither sex.

Perhaps the symbolic and real significance of Mac's mutilated body can more clearly be seen when viewed as a saintly martyr of the trans cult, for which castration and denaturing of the human being have taken on metaphysical overtones.  Mac may be seen as the trans movement's equivalent of Catholic saints like St. Sebastian, who was pierced through with arrows, or St. Agatha, whose breasts were cut off, or St. Bartholomew, who was flayed alive before he was beheaded.

The tortured prose used to describe the surgical transfiguration of Mac's body exhibits a love of pain and death that amounts to the sacralization of both.  The lurid descriptions of "Gabriel's" wounds, which elevate her to martyrdom and resurrection to a new identity, seem a secularized version of the feelings experienced by devotees such as St. Clare of Assisi, who contemplated the Five Sacred Wounds of Christ.

Like martyrs of old, Mac writes she was prepared to die in order to achieve her transformation.  She adds that as she gazed at the "40-square-inch hole in my thigh where I'd been skinned down to the muscle, I could suddenly feel, in a way I could never have fathomed, that this was what being alive was ... [a]nd it struck me, immediately and only, as another incredibly specific thing I got to love about myself, and I collapsed into the wall, sobbing."

The description of the raptures Mac experiences through suffering resembles the prose of the Marquis de Sade, whose devotion to exquisite pain as a component of sexual bliss is in direct competition with the spiritual ecstasies of Christian saints who sought union with God.

Mac's tortures can be seen as an imitation of the passion of Jesus Christ.  The body of "Gabriel" becomes a living sacrifice to the trans religion. She becomes seen by herself and the devotees of the trans sect as having achieved through her horrifying wounds the status of the sacred. She is now beyond reproach because of her suffering and the death of her former identity.  Resurrected into a new body that is no longer subject to the natural created order, including the limitations of other mortals, Mac is like a god.

Born again into a new identity, Mac and those who have undergone similar transformations are the secular saints qualified to transform society as surely as Christian martyrs transformed Rome.  Christians shattered institutions by establishing a new ideal by which all men and women by the grace of God through Christ's salvific sacrifice may become equal.  In like manner, every institution is to be transformed by the new metaphysical realities of the trans movement, whose martyrs are to be leaders of a world in need of the reformation to be achieved by total equality that breaks all binaries. 

History has seen the equivalent of the trans cult.  The Galli were members of a cult seen by some as a precursor of today's trans movement.  The sect's ideology was roundly repudiated by St. Augustine in his City of God, written in A.D. 426.

Augustine noted that the Galli cult was led by "self-castrating priests of the Earth Mother," priests who defied the "divinely created natural world by de-naturing themselves." He continued: "The Great Mother of the gods has brought mutilated men into Roman temples, and has preserved that cruel custom, being believed to promote the strength of Rome by emasculating their men. ... [Such rites] have been incorporated into the body of divine rites and honors, the deities themselves demanding and extorting that incorporation."

In other words, mutilation was sacralized and the practice incorporated into civic worship promoted by the Roman state.

What we are seeing in the West is a combination of fabulous theology — that is, theology unrelated to and even in contradiction to observable natural order — and a "civil theology" espoused by the state, with multifarious regulations designed to curtail the spread of COVID-19 as but one means to establish a civil theology. 

The end result is that Americans are being persuaded by and even forced to obey the dictates of a government-supported religious cult.  Citizens are being motivated to venerate the new sacred martyrs and to accept the disruption and transformation of every institution, be it sports, academia, public schools, or federal and state governments.  In short, the West is faced with the combination of fabulous theology with civil religious practices enforced by the State, including the indoctrination of children into the new trans faith, whose initiation rites include mental and physical castration.

As Augustine wrote, the approved theology of the city (the government), even though it is clearly false, when combined with fabulous theology, windS up becoming a force that even though "equally disgraceful, absurd, shameful and false," become accepted and demanded by the state.

He quotes Varro, who, speaking of the theatrical and fabulous theology, wrote: "They dedicate images [with] the appearance of man, beasts, and fishes, and some make them of mixed sex, and heterogeneous bodies.  They call them deities. ... But if they should yet breathe and should suddenly meet them, they would be held to be monsters."

While the ideological impulses behind the trans movement may in time weaken and fade, the danger remains that fabulous and civic theology may be promoted by the State, including a complete revision of Church doctrine and liturgy.  A precedent has been set, and as the persistence of the cult of the Galli suggests, such a precedent takes time to undo.

The combination of fabulous and civil religion is resulting in a juggernaut whose stranglehold can be broken only by direct repudiation of and disobedience to a state-sponsored religion.  Leaders must realize the danger of taking on the rites, symbols, and saints of the new fabulous civic religion.

But more is at stake than the decline of institutions.  At stake is the very idea of what it means to be human.  The impulse for the State to become a Frankenstein in charge of the reformulation of the human being is great.  Tinkering with the human body seems to promise a new humanity — but in the end, Frankenstein's tinkering produced a monster.

The current iteration of the Galli cult must be resisted as vigorously as Augustine and the Church resisted the original.  While those who have been ruined by trans ideology must be viewed with the utmost compassion, the sect itself must be disestablished wherever it has dug in.

The Church particularly must recommit itself to the views espoused by Alice Von Hildebrand, a theologian and philosopher who died Friday, January 14.  It must commit itself to the noble and true idea of what she called a "divine invention: man and woman."

It is past time to do so.

Fay Voshell holds an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology.  Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com. 

Image via Pxhere.