On the surface, Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist, and Mattias Desmet might seem to have little in common. Kingsnorth, based in Ireland, is an author of essays and novels. McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist. Desmet, a professor of psychology at Belgium’s Ghent University, studies the dynamics of mass formation and totalitarian thinking. Kingsnorth is an Orthodox Christian. McGilchrist and Desmet have no formal religious affiliation. But all three share a resistance to the ongoing dehumanization of modern life; a world where human genius turns on man himself as raw material, subverts his given nature, and ends up “dis-integrating” the human person into manipulable parts.
Kingsnorth calls our emerging reality “The Machine.” For McGilchrist, the enemy is an “excessive and misplaced rationalism” and “a narrow materialism, which is not intrinsic to science at all.” And Desmet’s thoughts on today’s high-tech disdain for “traditional” human reproduction and its messy carnal relations can be found on his Substack: “imposing clinical logic on reproduction and the creation of life is radical dehumanization.”
For all three, the result is a culture-wide form of mental illness about human identity and purpose; a resentment of the body, its imperfections and limitations. At its worst, this frustration with the “givenness” of flesh and blood reality flowers into violence, like this week’s Annunciation School shooting in Minneapolis. The killer was a man with gender dysphoria. He had transitioned to a “woman”—or rather tried to, since a genuine transition is impossible. He inflicted his fury on innocent children. The murders and woundings were horrific. And in the midst of the suffering, the Minneapolis mayor’s worry that someone might villainize the transsexual community because of the killer’s anti-Catholic hate spree was ill-timed, if not grotesque. But it was also revealing. Gender ideology is infectious. And the first healthy human quality it attacks is common sense.
In his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist warned that the Western Church “has been active in undermining itself. It no longer has the confidence to stick to its values, but instead joins the chorus of voices attributing material answers to spiritual problems.” This is doubtless true, but only partly so. Plenty of Christian voices have argued for a sane anthropology rooted not just in Scripture—“male and female He created them” (Gen. 1:27)—but in the obvious order of nature. It was a constant theme of the John Paul II and Benedict XVI pontificates. And whatever the shortcomings of his own ministry, Pope Francis was strong and articulate in his critique of gender ideology. The fact that our leadership classes refuse to listen, repudiate reality, and instead bless medical mutilation as a “solution” for the sexually confused, places the ultimate responsibility for disasters like the Annunciation School shooting squarely on their doorstep.
Just a few days before and a few hundred miles away from the Minneapolis killings, Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo issued one of the best diocesan-level responses to gender ideology so far. “The Body Reveals the Person” is a skillful blend of compassion, scientific fact backed up by data, and the sanity of Christian teaching. The document opens and closes with an expression of solidarity and love for those who struggle with gender identity issues. It notes that until recently, “the number of people experiencing identity-related distress or identifying as ‘transgender’ was tiny—a fraction of a fraction of a percent.” As the trans phenomenon has established itself as a unique class with substantial media sympathy, its numbers have surged. The record now shows that transgender related surgeries in the United States “tripled from 2016–2020, and included 3,678 irreversible ‘transgender’ surgeries on adolescents aged 12 to 18.” Yet the bitter truth is that such surgeries not only fail in producing a real sex change; they “also [impair], often irreparably, healthy natural functions.”
As Thomas writes, “the net effect of the gender ideology permeating culture and social media is to convince many people—especially youth—that feelings and desires dictate the reality of human identity” and that transitioning “will resolve their unhappiness.” Except they don’t, and it can’t. Nature doesn’t easily bend. Reality doesn’t cooperate, with unhappy consequences. The dualist conception of the human person—the idea that the body is a tool, “subpersonal, instrumental to the purposes of the inner self”—is not merely false but dangerous well beyond any damage to the individual: “It is not difficult to see how the dualist anthropology can be used to justify offenses against life—for example, abortion and euthanasia. People who deny the inherent personal value of the body easily assume that human beings who are not yet capable of certain human activities are not yet persons with a right to life.”
In contrast, common sense is redemptive good sense because
Everyday language captures the truth that, strictly speaking, people do not have bodies, but rather, are bodies. A child who falls off a bicycle does not say, “I hurt my body,” but “I hurt myself.” A man who is shoved by someone does not object, “Why did you shove my body?” but “Why did you shove me?” A woman who is raped is not concerned that her property was violated, but that she was violated. . . . [In reality] the human body in its sexed nature—in its maleness and femaleness—is the visible and tangible revelation of the whole human person, of the unified body-soul reality made in God’s image. Indeed, because body and soul are not two natures but form a single human nature, the body necessarily reveals the person as a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. God did not add the body after creating the soul; rather, as Genesis 1:27 tells us, in creating Man, “male and female he made them.”
The bishop adds, finally, that
Good medicine recognizes the difference between empathy and appropriately acknowledging a person’s feelings, on the one hand, and, on the other, allowing a person’s feelings to dictate medical care, contrary to the objective truth of his or her situation. For example, people suffering from anorexia nervosa feel very strongly that they are overweight even when their body weight is abnormally, and even dangerously, low. Clinicians realize that the proper response is to help the patient see that such feelings must be resisted and, insofar as possible, changed (through psychotherapy, medication, nutrition education, healthful exercise, etc.) because the feelings do not reflect reality. It would be harmful to the patient’s wellbeing for clinicians to “affirm” anorexic feelings or desires as good, or to permit those feelings to determine the course of medical interventions.
So much for excerpts. Read and share the whole text.
In the meantime, it’s worth remembering, as Allysia Finley observed in the Wall Street Journal, that leaders of our medical establishment have “cried science so many times” to support scientifically murky, condescending, and controversial views “that many Americans no longer believe them on anything. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has merely harvested the distrust that the medical establishment [itself] has sown.”
The lesson in all this turmoil is simple: Gender “transitioning” solves nothing, serves no one, and undermines human identity and dignity. It needs to stop.
Image by Scott Olso , via Getty Images.
