A friend recently told me that my refusal to accept concepts like “nonbinary” and “transgender” is hurtful. Similarly hurtful is my refusal to use the wrong pronoun for men and women, such as using “they” to refer to a particular female athlete who identifies as “nonbinary” and has “chosen” they/them as her pronouns. The implication is that, even if I disagree with gender ideology, it is uncharitable not to use a person’s chosen gender identification and pronouns. What is the harm in using preferred pronouns and gender identity for people who are doing nothing other than expressing their lived experiences? The person who made this suggestion is a faithful and knowledgeable Catholic whom I greatly admire and whose devotion to Christ and his Church is beyond dispute.
But I cannot accede to the request. Nor should my friend or any other Catholic Christian.
Words derive their meanings from the broader political or theoretical narratives in which they are coined and used. When one uses the language of those narratives, one is — at least implicitly — affirming their truthfulness. The language of gender ideology is rooted in a fundamentally false and dangerous ideology. Its purpose is to eliminate the very notion of sex, and even what it means to be a human person. Even aside from its falsity, the practical, harmful implications of gender ideology are legion. Among other things, gender ideology is the tool for oppressing women, abusing children, and falsifying sex-based categories and data, such as athletics and other forms of public sex-based recognition. Moreover, it makes a mockery of medicine, forcing health care workers to go down a clinical rabbit hole of nonsensical and dangerous babble, compromising sound medical care.
If, for example, we use the term “cisgender male,” we implicitly endorse the false notion that there is another kind of male, namely a “transgender” one. There is not. Similarly, if we refer to a man by female or plural pronouns, we are affirming a truth claim that a man can change his sex, or that he is “nonbinary.” He cannot and is not. To use these false words and phrases is not just a matter of legitimating a person’s life choices. Rather, to use them is to participate in the very false theory that invented them and gives them meaning. Worse, of course, it is the affirmation that the theory is true. But if gender ideology — and the language it has engendered — is true, then Christianity is not. One cannot simultaneously hold to a religious tradition and yet affirm the propriety of language the provenance of which rejects that tradition as false. This is not a matter of accommodation or politeness. It is a matter of speaking truth against ideological falsehood.
Gender ideology is not merely the theory that one can change one’s sex. Rather, it is the rejection of sex as a naturally occurring, immutable aspect of the human person. Gender ideology is a rejection of the Christian doctrine of creation and the given nature of the human person as either male or female. If gender ideology is true, Christianity is false.
Male and female he created them
On the sixth day of creation, Genesis 1:27 tells us, “God created humankind; … male and female he created them.” Which is to say, an essential, necessary attribute of being human is to be either male or female. We can get to the heart of this passage by slightly paraphrasing “male and female” as “discrete and exclusive sexes.” God did not create a third (or 78th) gender. He created the human person exclusively as one of two sexes. Those sexes are immutably coded by the presence or absence of a “Y” chromosome on every cell of a person’s body. This chromosomal hardwiring produces a number of primary attributes according to whether the Y is present or not. Among these are reproductive organs with the normal function to produce either large gametes (people without a Y chromosome) or small gametes (people with a Y chromosome). The former are women; the latter are men. There is no third gamete and no third sex.
These sexual markers cannot be changed. Every human person ever born has one of these two characteristics. This is the binary of the presence or absence of a Y chromosome. No human person is “nonbinary.” Nonbinary is an ideological term that a person uses either to attempt to identify herself as something that does not exist (a third sex), or to make a public affirmation of the ideology that sex is a spectrum. Nonbinary is a political term rooted in the false ideology either that sex can change or that there are more than two sexes. It cannot; there are not.
Among people with the presence or absence of the Y chromosome one finds a wide variety of what are known as secondary sex characteristics. Men have Adam’s apples and deeper voices, for example, and grow facial hair that women typically do not. Women develop breasts and typically wider hips than men. There are variations among these secondary characteristics. Some women, for example, have deeper voices than the usual range, or may develop body hair more commonly associated with men. Similarly, some men may develop mammary tissue that may be similar to the female secondary characteristic of breasts. These variations in secondary sex characteristics are as old as the human race, as far as we know. But these variations do not suggest that some people are transgender. Nor do they change a man to a woman or indicate that some people are nonbinary. The variations themselves are rooted in the sex binary.
Disorders of sexual development
But wait, you may be saying to yourself, what about people who are born with ambiguous external sexual organs? Aren’t they nonbinary? No. Every human person has the physiological potentiality to produce either a large gamete (ova) or a small one (sperm). There is no third or nonbinary gamete. Approximately 0.018% of people are born with what is called a “disorder of sexual development” (DSD). Depending on the type of disorder, this may cause the external sexual organs to appear ambiguous. For example, the disorder may result in the development of genital tissue typically associated with the opposite sex. These are difficult, and sometimes tragic, cases. They require specialized medical and sometimes psychological care for individuals who are born with them. They require compassion, sensitivity and charity.
But this very small percentage of people is not what gender ideology is about. Gender ideologues like to trot out the existence of DSDs to “prove” that there are more than two sexes. Or they use this phenomenon as cover for ideological terms like “nonbinary” or “intersex,” as though they represent a third (or any other number) gender. They do not. The reality of people with DSD is a medical and social challenge. But it is used as a red herring by gender ideologues to distract us from the real implications of this ideology. Some people are born with webbed fingers or toes. Of course, we universally consider this to be a developmental anomaly. We do not say that there are two kinds of humans, those with and those without webbed digits. Nor does the existence of DSDs suggest a third sex. They are disorders of the development of sexual organs of persons who either do or do not possess a Y chromosome.
But what about the kids?
But what about people who “identify” as the opposite sex to their genetic, chromosomal and physiological characteristics? Am I denying that their identity is real? Don’t we need to show compassion and care to these people, especially children? To be sure, we must be charitable, compassionate and kind to children who suffer from body dysmorphia in the same way that we should exercise those virtues to anyone suffering from any sort of cognitive or psychological dissonance. But to affirm confusion is not compassion. And when that affirmation results in permanent and irreversible harm to vulnerable kids, it is the opposite of charity. Yes, children with body and identity issues must be treated with sensitivity. But this must be in the context of the immutable truth of the human person, “male and female he created them.”
Words have no meaning apart from the story or ideology in which they are coined and which give them meaning. That meaning involves a whole host of metaphysical, ideological and political commitments. If those are false, the language they produce is equally false. “Transgender,” “cisgender” and “nonbinary” are false words born in and borne by a false ideology. We cannot use them without participating in that falsehood.
