This week’s headlining issue about the lawful use of a bathroom evidences an existential pivot in American Politics and the way American social mores are formed today. Governing the use of a bathroom has become a national issue, one that is forcing the federal government to use its power, time, and resources to resolve. Someone needs to say something, because ‘policing’ the use of a bathroom may define a new course in America’s future.
Firstly, the use of the bathroom should not be subject to legislation nor a reason for lawsuits on any scale. Yet, legislation is the only place the LGBT movement can be legitimized: that is, by policing ‘tolerance’ through the force of law (although I am not sure how bathroom use can be enforced). Legislating access to a bathroom to legitimize the LGBT movement is bad politics, but the arguments used to support the LGBT movement are worse still.
The issues of gender, the meaning of the body and sexuality, are all being fought through legislation and the court system, purported by arguments that are often more sentimental than they are logical. The arguments given to legitimize transgenderism and the larger LGBT movement, follows suit. While this has been the case for a while now, Attorney General, Loretta Lynch’s speech regarding the federal lawsuit filed against the state of North Carolina (NC) serves as the most recent example. In it she declared NC’s recent legislation as “discriminatory” and wrong. Her reasons can be deduced from the following: “What we must not do — what we must never do — is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human” (Paragraph 4). She claims that transgenderism is neither wrong, nor something that can be controlled by those who live the lifestyle. Also implied is that the issue of ‘transgenderism’ is what distinguishes humans from other animals. There are many problems here, but I will only point to a few.
What is transgenderism? It is the willful change of one’s birth-sex to look like the opposite sex.
Transgenderism, the transition from one gender into the simulation of another, is only accomplished through surgery; which is a willful act. Moreover, the “transgender” movement is born from the belief that we can control and choose our gender/sexual identity. Transgenderism regards the body as only a part of one’s identity, a part that does not define who they are. Yet, ironically, it is through their body that transgender people choose to define themselves.
Lynch’s exhortation continues: “Let me also speak directly to the transgender community itself.
Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead.”(Paragraph 9). What Lynch proposes in the first statement she re-enforces with more faulty logic; that is, that transgenderism is the “natural end” of the transgender person’s existence. She does this — perhaps unintentionally — when she effectively says that people were “born to be transgender.” In fact, transgenderism is a solution to the problem people perceive between their identity and their birth-sex, resolved through surgery; that is why they identify themselves as transgender. Transgender people are not “born” transgender, they ‘become’ transgender through surgical procedures and cannot live the life they were “born to lead” until they commit to the physical change.
Another problem provoked by her argument is that she defines a person’s humanity on the basis of ‘sex’ and the ‘transgender’ issue. Sexuality does not define whether someone is human or not: animals have a gender, too. Traditionally, that distinction is human rationality. To reduce someone to their sexuality is a grave injustice to the dignity of personhood.
The most problematic argument Lynch proposes, however, is that gender, or sexuality, is a “distinction without a difference” (cf. Paragraph 8). This is a problem of logic and requires more attentive reflection. Lynch’s point — that sexual difference is a distinction without a difference — is false.
Gender, or sexual difference, is a positive distinction. In the natural order, male and female, together, are naturally fertile. Fertility would not be possible without sexual difference. In fact, what would be the point of the change from one sex to another — transgenderism — if the distinction were inconsequential or meaningless? The distinction is not nominal; it is a necessary one. The fact that the transgender movement exists at all is proof enough that sexual difference is an important distinction beyond that of nomenclature.
The LGBT movement poses challenges to the traditional meaning of the body and its relation to personal identity, but it does so through sentimental, propagandist, and false arguments, winning recognition and tolerance through the policing force of law. This is a dangerous method in American politics. As citizens we should be free to find the truth or falsity of the arguments and judge the issue accordingly, rather than be persuaded by emotional arguments, or the fear of being labelled a “bigot” by our government. We must evaluate the logic of sexual difference and the meaning of identity, but this issue should not be dealt with through federal legislation, especially not over a bathroom.
Father Nicholas Fleming is a priest of the Diocese of Providence and a student at the JPII Institute in Rome.
