Cultural Conflict Regarding Sexuality:
Philosophical Roots of Our Current Debates
Richard Klaus
February 27, 2018
Glendale Community
College’s “Critical Dialogues”
Gender and Sexuality: Current Controversies and the Common Good
1. Introduction
a. “Thank you’s”
i. Glendale Community College
for sponsoring this event
ii. Professor Peter Lupu, my
friend for inviting me to be part of this panel
iii. Drs. Saint-Amour and
Ventrella for their participation and interaction
b. Importance of “Critical
Dialogues”
i. Differing perspectives are
brought into conversation publicly in a civil and, hopefully, rational manner
ii. Views expressed today—not
the only views available
·
Hope to start a conversation today that will continue
2. Let me begin by saying…
·
As a Christian I am a follower of Jesus.
·
As such I am committed to his view of truth
·
In a particularly well-known lecture Jesus gave (“Sermon on the Mount”)
he used a striking metaphor at the end of this teaching
·
“Therefore everyone who
hears these words of mine, and acts upon them, may be compared to a wise man,
who built his house upon the rock.
And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and
burst against the house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded upon
the rock. And everyone who hears
these words of mine, and does not act upon them, will be like a foolish man,
who built his house upon the sand.
And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and
burst against that house; and it fell, and great was its fall.” --Matthew 7.24-27
·
Jesus is, of course, making a profound claim about his teaching and its
centrality to one’s life but notice also the view of truth…
a. Truth exists and can be
known
b. Truth has consequences…
i. To live in accord with truth
brings human flourishing
ii. To live against the grain of
truth and reality is destructive
3. I want to remember those
points as I probe into the issue of Transgenderism as it affects people and
policies.
4. Our culture is awash with
controversy in regards to transgender issues…
a. Every day seems to bring
another fault-line of division… Consider the following from the within the last
two weeks:
b. A proposal in Delaware to
let children as young as 5 years-old choose their race and gender
identity—without informing parents of the decision.
c. “On February 16, 2018, Ohio Judge Sylvia Sieve Hendon handed
down a decision in Hamilton County Juvenile Court
that removed a gender dysphoric child from the
custody of her biological parents and awarded custody to the child’s
grandparents. The decision was made on the grounds that the grandparents are
affirming of the seventeen-year-old’s desire to undergo “transition” through
hormone therapy, while the parents question the child’s judgment and object to
the transition on religious grounds.”
5. Underlying these cultural
controversies are differing worldview presuppositions
a. Elements of a WV:
metaphysics, epistemology, ethics
b. Issues of sexuality involve
differing conceptions of the human person
6. My goal: examine some of the
philosophical underpinnings of those who promote transgender ideology
7. NOTE: Crucial distinction
between…
a. Transgender individuals—those
who experience gender dysphoria
b. Transgender ideology—my
focus today
8. At the heart of ideologies
are ideas—two points about ideas…
a. Ideas never stand alone—always based on WV
commitments and a philosophical substructure
b. Ideas never stand still—implications and
applications in the social, cultural, political, medical realms
9.
Ideas never stand alone
a. Ideas of transgender
thought…
i. The brain can be at war with
your body (Pearcey, 194)
1. Usually we consider this a
disorder to be treated with psychological counseling and therapy
a. Body Dysmorphic Disorder
(BDD)—harbors the erroneous conviction that she is ugly
b. Body Integrity Identity
Disorder (BIID)—identifies as a disabled person and feels trapped in a fully
functional body
c. Anorexia Nervosa—a
persistent mistaken belief that one is obese
2. But in the case of Gender
Dysphoria—transgender ideologues…
a. Do NOT seek to change the
person’s feelings of gender identity to match the body…
b. But, rather, engage in a
process of changing the body through hormones and surgery to match the feelings
ii. Rests upon two convictions…
1. There is a de-coupling of
sexual identity from the body
2. An act of the will seemingly
creates gender reality.
iii. Indicative of a “postmodern
view of psychosexual identity” (Pearcey, 201)
·
“pomosexual” view (Pearcey, 201)
b. Transgender ideology (TI)
rests upon key philosophical concepts: postmodern, antirealist assumptions
i. Gender is fluid
ii. Transgender activist Judith
Butler argues in her book Gender Trouble…
When “gender is
theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a
free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine, might
just as easily signify a female body as a male one and woman and feminine a male
body as easily as a female one.”
iii. “At the heart of the
transgender movement are radical ideas about the human person—in particular,
that people are what they claim to
be, regardless of contrary evidence.
A transgender boy is a boy,
not merely a girl who identifies as a
boy. It is understandable why
activists make these claims. An
argument about transgender identities will be much more persuasive if it
concerns who someone is, not merely
how someone identifies. And so the
rhetoric of the transgender movement drips with ontological assertions: people are the gender they prefer to be. That’s the claim.”
iv. “At the core of the ideology
is the radical claim that feelings determine reality.”
v. Philosopher Elliot Crozat
argues that…
“These claims appear to rest on the postmodern
antirealist assumption that what one takes as reality is a mere subjective or
sociocultural construct.”
vi. Professor Crozat goes on to
give the implications of such a view…
“Hence, there are no objective natures, no human
nature, no male nature, no female nature, and no such thing as human
flourishing that results from the proper functioning of the essential
properties and capacities of a human nature.”
c. It this notion of postmodern
truth that underlies the transgender ideology that must be noted.
d. The cultural conflicts
remind us that Ideas never stand alone.
10.
Ideas never stand still—there are always
implications and applications in culture, science, law, and medicine
·
Ideas have trajectory—they go somewhere
·
“[T]ransgender policies follow from transgender ontology.”
o
Can be conceptualized: when you see a debate about transgender issues
watch for the underlying philosophical issues!
11.
Some negative implications flowing from transgender ideology…
a. Hurts and undercuts women’s rights
i. “To protect women’s rights,
we must be able to say what a woman is.
If postmodernism is correct—that the body itself is a social
construct—then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer
fact of being female. We cannot
legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category.”
ii. Not just a philosophical
abstraction
iii. Ashley McGuire—Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and
Female—“the unintended consequences for women”
iv. Example: Kimberly v. Vancouver Rape Relief Society
1. Fight to keep a biological
man out of a woman’s rape crisis center
2. Kathleen Sloan—prominent
liberal feminist and pro-choice activist
“The threat that the gender identity movement poses
to women is that ‘gender’ is detached from the biological differences between
males and females (present in all mammalian species) and consequently male
supremacy and the oppression of women is obscured and ultimately erased…
Without being able to name humans male or female, women have no hope of being
able to protect ourselves from the violence men commit against us, much less
overturn the patriarchal misogyny that has oppressed and terrorized us for
millennia.”
3. “The gender identity
movement, she [Sloan] said, is just and abstraction of Descartes (in)famous
line, ‘I think, therefore I am.’
Today, she argued, it’s become, ‘I think, therefore I demand that
society recognize who I say I am based on my subjective interpretation.’”
b. Undercuts human rights
i. Remember Professor Elliot
Crozat’s contention about the postmodern, antirealist conceptions of transgender
ideology…
“Hence, there
are no objective natures, no human nature, no male nature, no female nature,
and no such thing as human flourishing that results from the proper functioning
of the essential properties and capacities of a human nature.”
ii. But this postmodernist view
is at odds with the concept of rights in general.
“If the concept
of natural human rights is sensible, then reality is not a mere construct;
there must be something objectively real and valuable to serve as the basis of
these rights.
“Objective
rights do not exist on the postmodernists worldview, regardless of how
vigorously one believes in them.
For a postmodernist to believe in objective rights is like believing in
centaurs (the character of Greek myth that are half-man and half-horse). One can believe in them, but doing so makes
no significant difference in the world.
Consequently, the supporter of transgenderism cannot deny human natures
and rights but at the same time assert the right to define himself or to use a
preferred restroom. Nor can he
legitimately claim that his rights are violated by gender dichotomist
policies. To do this is
intellectually inconsistent, and perhaps an example of a performative
contradiction.”
iii. Deep internal contradiction
between transgender philosophical presuppositions and the quest for rationally
grounded human rights.
c. Redefines the nature of family relationships. Nancy Pearcey states:
o
“When gender is de-naturalized, parenthood will also be
de-naturalized.”
o
“Until now, the family was seen as natural and pre-political, with
natural rights. That means it
existed prior to the state, and the state merely recognized its rights.
But if the law no longer recognizes natural sex, then it no longer
recognizes natural families or natural parents, only legal parents. You, as a mother or father, have only
the rights the state chooses to grant you.”
d. “Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity”—SOGI laws—lead to an increased
interference by the government into public philosophy and law
i. “By sheer logic, SOGI laws must deny the importance of biology.”
ii. “These legal changes do not
affect only homosexual or transgender people. In the eyes of the law, no
one has a natural or biological sex now; all citizens are defined not by their bodies but by their inner
states and feelings… Your basic identity as male or female, husband or wife,
mother or father, son or daughter, sister or brother no longer follows
metaphysically from your biology but must be determined by an act of will.
“But whose will?
Ultimately, it will come down to who has the most power—which means the
state.”
iii. SOGI laws—presented as
opening up rights to a discriminated class
1. But, in truth, SOGI laws
serve to impose certain philosophical assumptions upon all…
2. Under threat of punishment
and civil sanction.
iv. “Every social practice is
the expression of fundamental assumptions about what it means to be human. When a society accepts, endorses, and
approves the practice, it implicitly commits itself to the accompanying
worldview. And all the more so if
those practices are enshrined in law.
The law functions as a teacher, educating people on what society
considers to be morally acceptable.”
e. Harms children by legitimizing unhealthy medical procedures and
penalizing alternatives that recognize the reality of gender desistance
i. Washington Post (2012) article “Transgendered at Five”
ii. Transgender activists plan
of action: (Anderson, 120-121)
* Form of treatment…
1. Social transition—new
clothes, name, pronouns
2. Puberty blockers
3. Around 16—cross-sex hormones
(the rest of their lives)
4. Age 18—sex reassignment
surgery
iii. NOTES…
1. Age for each phase is
getting lower
·
July 2016 Guardian reported
that “a doctor in Wales is prescribing cross-sex hormones to children as young
as 12…” (Anderson, 121)
2. “There are no laws in the
United States prohibiting the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for
children, or regulating the age at which they may be administered.”
iv. These medical practices are
not driven by science but by a postmodernist ideology.
§ “That postmodern view is
filtering down to even younger ages.
The mother of a twelve-year old told reporters, ‘Some days Annie is a
girl, some days Annie is a boy, and some days she’s both.’ When the pair went shopping for Annie’s
graduation outfit, they purchased both a dress and a suit because they were not
sure which gender the child would align with for the evening. The article helpfully explains, ‘Annie
believes gender is more of a mental trait rather than physical.’ Gender has become a purely mental trait
with no grounding in physical reality.”
v. Dr. Michelle Cretella—board
certified pediatrician and president of the American College of Pediatricians
writes in the Journal of American
Physicians and Surgeons in 2016:
“To be clear,
this ‘alternate perspective’ of an innate gender fluidity arising from
prenatally ‘feminized’ or ‘masculinized’ brains trapped in the wrong body is an
ideological belief that has no basis in rigorous science.”
vi. What is known? What does the evidence show?
vii. The fact of gender desistance among
children as they move into late adolescence.
§ “Experts on both sides of
the pubertal suppression debate agree that within this context, 80 percent to
95 percent of children with GD [Gender Dysphoria] accepted their biological sex
and achieved emotional well-being by late adolescence.”
§ Dr. Kenneth Zucker—psychologist
who ran the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto along with its
Gender Identity Clinic for 30 years—described by Ryan Anderson…
§ “He is perhaps the most
frequently cited name in research on gender identity and the editor of the
journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Zucker has been at the forefront of
developing treatments for people with gender dysphoria, and he headed the group
that wrote the entry on gender dysphoria for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official
handbook of the American Psychiatric Association.”
§ In an interview with NPR,
Dr. Zucker noted…
“But the follow-up studies I’ve done, and others
too, show [that] a substantial majority of kids seen for GID Gender Identity
Disorder] in childhood show desistance—that is, when they’re older they don’t
want to be the other sex. We just
published a study of 25 girls we first saw in childhood and found that only 12
percent seem to have persistent gender dysphoria when they’re older. We find similar rates of persistence in
boys.”
viii.
The fact of
the side-effects of puberty-blocking hormone therapies… some known and some
unknown
ix. The fact of the “self-fulfilling nature” of
transgender activists’ protocols for puberty suppression
·
“In a follow-up study of their first 70 eligible candidates to receive
puberty suppression, de Vries and colleagues documented that all subjects went
on to embrace a transgender identity and request cross-sex hormones. This is cause for concern. There is an obvious self-fulfilling
nature to encouraging a young man with GD [Gender Dysphoria] to socially
impersonate a girl and then institute pubertal suppression. Given the well-established phenomenon
of neuroplasticity, the repeated behavior of impersonating a girl alters the
structure and function of the boy’s brain in some way—potentially in a way that
will make identity alignment with his biologic sex less likely. This, together with the suppression of
puberty that further endogenous masculinization of his brain, causes him to
remain a gender non-conforming prepubertal body disguised as a prepubertal
girl. Since his peers develop into
young men and young women, he is left psychosocially isolated. He will be less able to identify with
being male and more likely to identify as ‘non-male.’ A protocol of impersonation and pubertal suppression that
sets into motion a single inevitable outcome (transgender identification) that
requires a life-long use of synthetic hormones, resulting in infertility, is
neither fully reversible nor harmless.”
x. Transgender ideology
subjects children to experimentation with life-long consequences
“The treatment
of GD [Gender Dysphoria] in childhood with hormones effectively amounts to mass
experimentation on, and sterilization of, youth who are cognitively incapable
of providing informed consent.
There is a serious ethical problem with allowing irreversible,
life-changing procedures to be performed on minors who are too young to give
valid consent themselves.”
xi. Surely, even among those of
us who differ about adult transgender issues we could come to a common cause
and agreement about the dangers of transgender ideology for children!
12.
Conclusion—What I’ve attempted to argue…
a. Debates we see in the media
in the realms of cultural and law have deeper philosophical issues undergirding
them
b. Ideas never stand alone
& Ideas never stand still
c. In particular, transgender
activists pursuing the implementation of their ideology are working with a
postmodernist view of reality and the human person.
i. An act of the will
determines reality
ii. There are not a essential
human nature; rather we create ourselves and our gender
d. This philosophical
commitment has serious and negative implications for…
i. Women’s rights
ii. Human rights
iii. Family rights
iv. Laws about gender that will
punish those who do not embrace the underlying postmodernist conception of the
human person
v. Children’s medical and
psychological well-being and care
e. My talk—a prod to think more
deeply about our cultural conflicts in the area of sexuality and gender
i. Wrestle with the underlying
philosophical issues
ii. Don’t treat the cultural
conflicts as issues to be decided by mere feeling
iii. Think about the implications
and applications of these philosophical ideas
iv. De-humanizing philosophies
will lead to de-humanizing practices in education, law, medicine and cultural
at large.
v. To circle back to where I
began… Jesus taught…
1. Truth exists and can be
known
2. Truth has consequences…
a. To live in accord with truth
brings human flourishing
b. To live against the grain of
truth and reality is destructive
3. I would urge us all to
listen to him! Thank you.
