By
Michael Brendan Dougherty
Wednesday,
March 29, 2023
Have you
ever stopped and asked yourself: How, in the year 2023, did humans begin to
debate propositions like “Can men become women?” How can a society that invents
vaccines and sends vehicles to other planets start to doubt the sexual
dimorphism of humanity? Or begin to wonder whether our children were routinely
“born into the wrong bodies”?
How did
these questions not just arise, but seize the cultural heights, become the
day-to-day obsession of all opinion-formers and tastemakers? How could anyone
take seriously the “scholarship” that purports to find support for modern
transgender equality in the life of Roman emperor and sex degenerate
Elagabalus?
Well,
you aren’t so different from your forebears in the twelfth century, who woke up
one day hearing about the latest snobbish doctrines that had traveled —
improbably — from the Balkans to southern France and wondered to themselves,
“How could a society vigorous enough to send armies from Lombardy to Jerusalem
start debating whether marriage and procreation was sinful? How could a society
founding universities and hospitals fall for the ridiculous, primitive
superstition that all matter is evil, and only pure spirit is good? Hadn’t we
put down a similar heresy in Manichaeism five centuries ago?”
Partisans
of the modern age like to think that the age of true metaphysical debates — of
heresies and orthodoxies — was settled by the Enlightenment, and the treaty of
Westphalia. And from Newton on, we would confine publicly consequential debates
to the political. Goodbye metaphysics.
In fact,
the Enlightenment and the secularizing age that followed didn’t end
metaphysical disputes by making them impossible or unattractive. They only
purported to end them by settling on what was basically common metaphysics to
Protestant and Catholic alike: We are rational but erring creatures who live in
an intelligible universe, governed by laws. All other questions were deemed
either impossible to settle, or dangerous to entertain.
But
there is no reason why this settlement should hold, particularly when the
baptism and youthful religious formation common to Protestants and Catholics is
less common than ever in our society. In many ways our transgender debate
resembles heresies from the past, not only in its gnostic content, but in the
way it spreads and maintains itself sociologically.
“The
whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian,” observed Saint
Jerome at the kudzu-like spread of the Arian heresy in the fourth century. The
belief that Christ was not truly equal to God the Father was led by a
charismatic preacher, Arius. Armed with slogans that were deployed in the
streets — “There was a time when he was not” — the Arian heresy became debated
among the common people, not just the bishops. It was fashionable, and it
attached itself to existing political forces for ballast.
According
to Hilaire Belloc, Arianism “became the rallying point for many strongly
surviving traditions from the older world: traditions not religious, but
intellectual, social, moral, literary and all the rest of it.” Later in its
life, the Arian heresy would hang on due to the nationalist, anti-Roman
sentiment in Germania. Belloc frequently wrote about the recruitment of snobbish
opinion in favor of heresies. They were often the vehicle for those with some
power to shake a political order and seek more.
The
twelfth-century Catharist heresy mentioned above has many similarities to the
transgender debate today. It aimed to destabilize the natural family and the
political order that rested on it. It could view the physical body as a
“prison” that hampered the spirit. Catharist dualism led to double-mindedness.
The “perfect” led lives of strict chastity and vegetarianism, but others following
the same doctrines could urge themselves to participate in debauches.
Similarly, trans-identifying persons are tempted toward extremes in sexuality,
either to infantilization, portraying themselves as pre-sexual innocents, or
cold-hearted dissipation and depravity.
The
trans heresy lives in a matrix of tech and biomedical business interests that
thrive on the idea of humanity reconceiving itself as a thing as malleable as a
social-media avatar. It fits hand and glove with a managerial elite that would
prefer to govern a different kind of human subject, one without a soul or
heart, one incapable of loyalties that supersede the managerial apparatus, and
totally dependent on the state to vindicate its dignity.
The
trans movement runs up against the old Christian orthodoxies, of course. But it
also makes an enemy of anyone who is grateful to be a creature of this world,
who appreciates and even piously trusts what Nature bequeaths to us as a
species. We are not contending with a mere political movement, but a
destructive and fundamentally sacrilegious revision of the Western creed. And
the stakes could not be higher. Heresies that triumph take from the orthodox
the tools to establish themselves as the new faith: crusades and inquisitions.
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