Since President Trump affirmed the “biological reality of sex” on the very first day of his second term, Americans have witnessed battles over transgenderism at all levels of governance. Federal employees were ordered to remove pronouns from email signatures, and transgender bathroom policies for federal employees have been rescinded, provoking lawsuits. Federal judges have resisted the Department of Defense’s attempts to bar trans-identifying people from the military. And state legislatures across the country have been flooded with debates over bills related to bathrooms, transgender medical interventions, and sports.
Trans activists have urged aggressive action to preserve their cultural influence. “These are days when, to do the right thing, it might sometimes be necessary not to just follow the law of the land, but to instead listen to the laws of our consciences,” claimed prominent transgender-identifying writer and activist Jennifer Finney Boylan. In a May 8 op-ed for The Washington Post, Boylan urged readers to “fight for the things we know to be true” in resistance to Trump’s efforts to reverse the social and legal normalization of trans ideology.
Yet on what basis does Boylan argue that transgender beliefs trump what other people believe to be true? None at all, besides that the trans-identifying person’s conscience matters more than yours.
An Incoherent Trans Argument
“There’s no shortage of laws, not to mention moral prohibitions, that have changed with the passage of time,” writes Boylan. He’s not wrong. But why do those laws and prohibitions change? Does the very nature of right and wrong change, or simply people’s opinions and perceptions? And how do we know if those changes are good or bad? It’s unclear.
Boylan cites slavery and women’s suffrage as “more serious” examples of changes in morality vis-a-vis legislation. Yet on what basis does a society decide it is immoral to enslave people or grant women the right to vote? “How do we find our truth when the definition of what is moral or immoral can change in a day?” Boylan asks. He doesn’t answer the question. All he can muster is to assert that “each of us, at this fraught and terrible moment in our history,” must “fight for the things we know to be true.” We must “listen to the laws of our consciences.”
Yet what if your conscience tells you that, because of biology, philosophical logic, divine revelation, or even your simple gut intuition, there are only two sexes? What if your conscience tells you it’s immoral, even criminal, to persuade prepubescent children that they are in the wrong bodies and thus need to be aggressively medicated, often with irreversible effects? What if the majority of a given county, state, or nation is simply wrong about the nature of sex? Who arbitrates such divergent opinions and feelings? On these questions, Boylan is silent … Well, almost silent.
The Trans Tactic
Taking the script from ideologues and snake oil salesmen across history, Boylan decides that instead of a real argument, it’s best just to cynically appropriate and manipulate the words of some established authority to validate fallacious reasoning. And in Boylan’s case, that authority is Jesus.
“But support for trans people had another early supporter in Jesus Christ.” The evidence? Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:12: “There are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs by men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.”
You might be scratching your head wondering what this has to do with transgenderism. Boylan graciously explains: Although the traditional interpretation of eunuchs concerns celibacy, “perhaps some of the people whom we call transgender, 2,000 years later, might be included under this description as well.” Kudos to Boylan for making the word “perhaps” do all of the work for an argument. “Perhaps” Uncle Jerry was abducted by aliens. In truth, there is not a scrap of historical or linguistic evidence to support the idea that Jesus’ words amount to an endorsement of transgenderism, especially given that earlier in the very same chapter in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus explicitly affirms the male/female sexual binary.
But this is what transgender activism inevitably reduces to when faced with science and logic. Ignore what you see with your own eyes: men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men. Ignore the mounting irrefutable evidence demonstrating that transgenderism harms the people it claims to cure, aggravating mental illness and damaging generations of confused youth. Jesus, so they say, was the first trans activist!
Remember the Lie That Is Transgenderism
Here’s the truth: Transgender ideology is on its heels. After more than a decade trying to persuade Americans that middle-school girls need to go on hormone blockers that will permanently eliminate their ability to have children, and that biological males should be able to compete in girls’ sports and go into girls’ bathrooms, transgenderism is suffering political setbacks. Americans, whatever our failings, remain a people capable of common sense. Boys are boys, and girls are girls. Politicians across our nation are seeking to codify this eternal truth.
In response, trans activists can only rely on tired, erroneous assertions whose rhetorical power increasingly falls on deaf ears. Just because their consciences tell them males can claim to be females and access female-only spaces does not make it so. Ridiculous claims that Jesus promoted transgenderism have no currency outside leftist circles, such as the comments section of Boylan’s WaPo article, its AI-generating summary noting that commenters hoped that morality and legality would “ultimately align with justice,” whatever that means.
“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are,” declared French philosopher Michel Foucault, a sexual deviant and favorite of leftist ideologues. Such irrational sentiments encapsulate the thinking of trans activist propaganda like that espoused by Boylan. But it need not define the future of America. And, for now, we still get to choose.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
Jesus Christ is King
