Proponents of the legitimization of transgenderism try to normalize their agenda on three different—yet interconnected—fronts: social, medical, and legal. Activists for the cause seek to dismantle biologically based perceptions of sex and bend them to fit a vision of the human person that ultimately does not make sense. Intellectual Takeout explains how the feminist academics developed and advanced a societal notion of gender to push their theories about men and women:
Feminist academics use the term gender to denote the socio-cultural outworking of sexual difference, existing in the form of expected behaviours and appearances i.e., stereotypes. These folks see gender as a limiting social construct which ought to be airbrushed out of existence for the sake of justice and equality.
By taking the biological realities inherent in sexual compositions and reassigning them as a psychological condition based on an individual’s feelings, transgender theorists effectively take an objective fact about identity and make it a subjective preference. Gender then becomes a complicated medical and legal issue with an infinite number of possibilities. The recent fracas over restrooms demonstrates this point:
Both academia and law say there are more than two gender identities nowadays, so both gender theory and gender laws make a mockery of the whole idea of physically ‘transitioning’. Indeed if gender identity is defined without reference to being embodied, there are infinite possible gender identities. If John has a new-found right to enter a restroom matching his gender identity, how many restrooms do we need according to gender theory? That’s right—infinite restrooms. But the State decides not to build them. Very wise. No, the State chooses to take the two existing restrooms—male and female—and collapse them into one gender-neutral restroom. This is subtraction in the name of addition.
Gender fluidity creates a legal mess by proposing that people adhere to multiple conceptions of gender at the same time:
The State also tells us that our gender identity is fundamental. But it is somehow subjective too. It is fixed, except for those people who are gender-fluid. Is it that their gender-fluidity is fixed? Or is it that their fixed gender is fluid? Who knows? Likewise, gender identity is somehow a part of the established order yet also radically new. It is the same, only different. It is like sex but not sex, and in being self-chosen it cannot ever be wrong.
The hyper-subjectivity of transgenderism is a harmful way to understand oneself and sexual expression. But transgenderism is an extension of the broader movement that endorses gender stereotypes on the one hand, and gender fluidity on the other. It promotes outright contradictions in the social, medical, and legal spheres; the illogical doctrines it leads to should not have a dominating social or legal presence.
Transgenderism is an incoherent concept when thought of as a legally recognised medical condition, irrespective of whether we consider its origins to be physical or psychological. Likewise, the notion of gender identity makes no sense when seen as a social phenomenon which has made its way into law.
