As I’ve explained at length, I do have a great deal of sympathy for trans folks. Their feelings of alienation from their gender are real, even if their proposed solution is faulty. And as absurd as we might find that solution, it’s nevertheless understandable given its context. They’ve grown up in a feminist culture which has deliberately sown gender-confusion, gender-hatred, and sexual deviancy in literally every area of their lives. Something had to give sooner or later, and unfortunately, it was their willingness to embrace biological reality. When we offer people nothing but an utterly broken sexual landscape, we shouldn’t be surprised when people begin refusing it en masse, and we shouldn’t be surprised that they do so in chaotic ways.
Sympathy, however, cannot be allowed to overshadow the truth of the matter. And the truth is that the vile and antihuman philosophies many alphabet people have embraced do nothing but devour life and sanity at a faster and faster clip. In just a few short years, we’ve gone from “Shut up and bake the cake, bigot” to “Shut up and wax that woman’s balls, bigot” and are now arriving at “Shut up and try to have sex with me, bigot.”
While this comic I came across on Twitter is by no means the first time I’ve heard that latest sentiment, it’s the first I’ve seen that expresses it with an appropriate level of grotesquery.
It’s transphobic to say you wouldn’t date a trans person. pic.twitter.com/ucqhLlN4If
— Sophie Labelle, cartoonist (@AssignedMale) January 24, 2021
As you can see, each panel is brim-full of a seething hatred for the human body.
The inversion begins with the first panel. Do you find the opposite sex attractive? Do you like the way they look, feel, and sound? Do things like that make you want to join together in exactly the way you were designed to desire? All of these bodily impulses are the nuts and bolts of a healthy sex drive, but the artist would like you to draw a different conclusion: You’re only experiencing some kind of “genitalia fetish.”
That phrase is quite literally a contradiction in terms, of course. Even a quick trip to dictionary.com will tell you that a fetish is “any object or nongenital part of the body that causes a habitual erotic response or fixation.” In other words, a fetish takes something that isn’t sexual, but attaches an undue amount of sexual response to it. The genitals which create life–and even the breasts that nourish it, the strong arms which will provide for it, the hips made to deliver it, the various indications of fertility in the lips, the voice, the skin, etc–are all meant to direct our minds towards the act that creates life. But unlike these things that we’re all designed to notice and appreciate, a fetish involves things like feet, leather, and other non-sexual body parts, materials, or circumstances that activate an unusual erotic reaction in some people.
The artist desperately wants to sell you on the equivalence of those two categories–natural attraction and fetish–and therefore sell you on the contradiction. And so the panel presents the idea of genitalia as a wall of various disembodied bulbous objects–all of them interchangeably disgusting. It would be strange to have an erotic reaction to any of those, and so you’re expected to think it’s strange that you’re attracted to the bodies of the opposite sex. You’re not supposed to care whether genitals are real or some facsimile made of detachable plastic or mutilated flesh. It’s all a puerile attempt to get healthy people feeling like they’re the weird ones.
The second panel directs us to a the core problem in the entire philosophy of the trans movement–and one of the biggest problems in Western culture at large. It presents the desire to have sons and daughters as somehow alien–and even arrogant–despite the fact that having children is the primary biological purpose of sex in the first place.
It starts by acting as though wanting to have children is somehow a mysterious personal preference–one that can only be explained by a self-obsession with your own “exceptional genes.” Lacking any familiarity with a healthy self-respect, the artist cannot conceive of a desire to have children of one’s own as anything other than arrogance. But normal and healthy people tend to love their relatives and see them as blessings. They want to do unto others as was done for them and pay the love they received forward to a new generation. They want a posterity to whom they can pass on their blood and their heritage, just as they themselves are the posterity of their ancestors.
All this, the artist reduces to “biological children.” You’re supposed to believe children are fungible. You’re supposed to believe that they’re are a peculiar lifestyle choice and that your own flesh and blood are merely one arbitrary mechanism among many by which you can achieve that lifestyle. It’s about as sterile a view of children as its possible to have, and it’s meant to deceive you into thinking that sex–both the act itself and the division of mankind into male and female–has no significance with respect to having a family of your own. But this is yet another contradiction, because having families of our own is exactly what sex was designed for.
And yes, I know. A lot of people don’t actually want their sex to be fertile, which is why I already said this was a problem that extends much further than the alphabet people. It’s true that even those who do want their sex to be fertile aren’t thinking of their future children whilst in the throes of passion. It’s likewise true that they sometimes enjoy activities that can’t result in conception. People point that out as though it somehow changes the nature of sexuality, but it doesn’t. If we were machines, it might indeed be indicative of either misunderstanding or of poor design. But we are organic rather than mechanical. We ought to view our sexual capacity as a whole and revel in that rather than trying to dissect each discrete action into meaningless granularity. We are alive; we are not machines with replaceable parts. We should view sex the same way, as it lies at the center of human life in some very important ways.
Moving on to the 3rd panel, we begin to see the artist beginning to exploit the deliberate confusion and uncertainty that was sown and turn it into shame. Having already cast healthy sexuality as a weird fixation on irrelevant biology, the artist now wants you to believe it’s bigoted as well. After all, you have no idea what a trans person’s body is like–you’re just making assumptions based on stereotypes. It’s accompanied by a picture of some androgynous thing in order to underscore that uncertainty.
Well, the sleight-of-hand is seasoned with a pinch of truth this time to make it easier to swallow. You really don’t know what a trans person’s body is like and shouldn’t assume. But that’s far less relevant to the subject at hand than the artist wants you think. After all, you do know exactly what it isn’t–the natural and well-cared-for body of the opposite sex which you’ve been designed to desire and appreciate. Trans can mean any one of a billion entries on an ever-growing list of invented genders, but the one thing it always means is a mismatch between what you claim to be and what you bodily are.
Setting gift-of-celibacy considerations aside, a healthy and mature man wants to be a with a woman, just as a healthy and mature woman wants to be with a man. He does not want to be with a man pretending to be a woman. And while he may find a quirky or eccentric woman entirely desirable, a woman pretending to be something other than a woman and demanding that he do the same is a different matter altogether. There’s neither shame nor guilt in deliberately wanting a genuine woman and avoiding fakes. But a man who pretends to be a woman is claiming to offer something of value that he does not truly possess. That attempt at fraud is what deserves shame–not the simple state of being wise to the scheme.
The 4th panel concludes by dropping every shame-payload in the arsenal and hoping they strike the target. Everybody’s already sleeping with trans people, doncha know? If you don’t join this crowd the artist just invented (for a comic complaining that the crowd is too small,) then you’re a transphobe! Not only that, if you don’t want to sleep with trans people, you’re actually perpetrating violence and putting them in danger!
The extent to which those bombs detonate for the reader will depend on how much they were taken in by the earlier deceptions. The gullible and the foolish will be cowed into submission because that’s the natural reaction when one is disoriented and then vehemently accused of some kind of serious wrong-doing. But the rest of us will see that the artist and those making similar accusations are only engaging in emotional blackmail by holding themselves hostage, and we’ll move on.
If you want to make insanity like this appear normal, you must first treat normal as insane. That’s the only thing going on in this particular piece of propaganda. The real problem is that so much of the West has already rejected normal. We’re vulnerable because we were already both gullible and foolish when it comes to sexuality. We had to be in order to justify the way we’ve already been sexualizing the next generation. We all have much to answer for. But when boys, girls, men, and women become uncomfortable with their bodies because of what our culture has done, the last thing we should do is to turn that discomfort into all-out warfare by telling them their “wrong” bodies really are out to get them.
Sex is and always has been a package deal, no matter how much we struggle against it. That’s how God created it in the first place. Deliberately carving up sexuality by trying to have the parts you prefer while discarding the rest has never been helpful. It was wrong when “cishet” men and women tried to pursue sex without marriage, without children, and without responsibility. It’s no less wrong when alphabet people try to pursue sex without sex.
This trans thing is affecting real people, real families. My wife has a Christian friend who’s husband has decided he is a woman, is transitioning (with hormone therapy) and is now wearing women’s clothing. He tells her she is a lesbian since she’s actually been with another woman the whole time. The wife wants out of the marriage (not surprisingly). She married a man, not a woman. They have three kids together. Now there’s all this confusion with different Christian friends giving her different advice – yes you can divorce and remarry – no you can’t and should stay with he/she. Looniness.
It really is. It’s been an issue with multiple acquaintances of mine as well–including inside the Church.
I recently started at study of Proverbs at my congregation specifically because society has gone so nuts–in this area and many others. As the situations get more bizarre, we all need better judgment to figure out how to deal with them.