Natural Law And Trans Pathologies

Yesterday I brought up my struggle as I approached adulthood with the idea of "natural law", which I said, having been raised Protestant, was new to me around the time I went to college. I instinctively associated it with Catholic thought, and at least in a way, I was correct. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

If any moral theory is a theory of natural law, it is Aquinas’s. . . . For Aquinas, there are two key features of the natural law . . . . The first is that, when we focus on God’s role as the giver of the natural law, the natural law is just one aspect of divine providence; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective just one part among others of the theory of divine providence. The second is that, when we focus on the human’s role as recipient of the natural law, the natural law constitutes the principles of practical rationality, those principles by which human action is to be judged as reasonable or unreasonable; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective the preeminent part of the theory of practical rationality.

The school where Audrey Hale, the biological woman who is alleged to have identified as a man, shot her way into and murdered six children and adults on Monday, identifies as Presbyterian. I spent my entire childhood as a Presbyterian and was confirmed in that denomination, and neither Aquinas nor natural law theory was mentioned at all in my religious education, which led to my deep suspicion of both when I began to study philosophy. However, it's probably correct to say that whether Presbyterians formally endorse anything like natural law theory, something like Aquinas's view pervades most Christian belief. Tucker Carlson had a remarkably perceptive take on his show last night, March 28:

The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy.

In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you're not God. Christians openly concede that they have no real power over anything, and for that matter, very little personal virtue. They will tell you to your face that they are sinful and helpless and basically absurd. They're not embarrassed about any of this. They brag about it. "That saved a wretch like me" goes the most famous Christian hymn ever written in English.

The trans movement takes the opposite view. Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. We can change the identity we were born with, they will tell you with wild eyed certainty. Christians can never agree with the statement because these are powers they believe God alone possesses.

That unwillingness to agree, that failure to acknowledge a trans person's dominion over nature, incites and enrages some in the trans community. People who believe they are God can't stand to be reminded that they're not. Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other.

What puzzles me, though, is that the Covenant School is pre-K through 6, and I doubt that even a Catholic religious education class would get very deeply into sexual function of any sort with children of that age, let alone same-sex attraction or transgenderism -- and a Presbyterian school even less so. And I can almost guarantee it won't bring up either Aquinas or natural law (the last Presbyterian writer I consulted on Aquinas said he treated reason as an idol, and he was also too fat).

And beyond that, I very much doubt that Ms Hale ever studied Christianity very closely as either a child or an adult -- and at age 28, her Christian schooling was almost 20 years behind her. So it may well be that she associated the school with her family or her upbringing in general. I saw another opinion piece that suggested she was trying to hurt her family in doing the shooting, and in fact her family may have been the next set of victims she had in mind.

So what we're looking at is less a specific objection to Christian doctrine, although the most complete expressions of Christian doctrine do say that same-sex attraction and transgenderism are violations of natural law, but instead more of a free-floating resentment of common sense and a troubled conscience, which in her case are only generally related to Christianity. And this likely involves matters beyond just gender identity. Andy Ngo made an interesting point in his interview on the same Tucker Carlson show from March 28:

. . . in my reporting on Antifa for years now, one observation that I notice was that disproportionately the riot arrestees are gender diverse, they don't identify with their biological sex. On some nights it was as high as 20%, magnitudes higher than what the -- what we held on people in the wider American population who are trans identifying.

Separately, Study: ‘Transgender’ Youth at Highest Risk for Violent Radicalization:

It found that “transgender and gender diverse students reported higher support for VR compared to students who identified as women.” In fact, youth who identified as transgender or gender-diverse were at the highest risk for violent radicalization.

The whole question of transgenderism is highly charged politically, which is preventing any sort of dispassionate discussion. Nevertheless, a body of clinical literature is emerging that suggests transgenderism is a separate paraphilia from same-sex attraction.

Blanchard's transsexualism typology is a proposed psychological typology of gender dysphoria, transsexualism, and fetishistic transvestism, created by sexologist Ray Blanchard through the 1980s and 1990s, building on the work of earlier researchers, including his colleague Kurt Freund. Blanchard categorized trans women into two groups: homosexual transsexuals who are attracted exclusively to men and are feminine in both behavior and appearance; and autogynephilic transsexuals who experience sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body.

This theory is reinforced by empirical evidence that shows that neither cisgender nor same-sex attracted people are sexually drawn to transgender individuals.

The current study sought to describe the demographic characteristics of individuals who are willing to consider a transgender individual as a potential dating partner. Participants (N = 958) from a larger study on relationship decision-making processes were asked to select all potential genders that they would consider dating if ever seeking a future romantic partner. The options provided included cisgender men, cisgender women, trans men, trans women, and genderqueer individuals. Across a sample of heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and trans individuals, 87.5% indicated that they would not consider dating a trans person, with cisgender heterosexual men and women being most likely to exclude trans persons from their potential dating pool.

This is to say that even same-sex attracted people across the board -- we're talking almost 90% of every possible orientation -- won't date trans people. Apparently even among the conventionally gay, trans is just too phony, it doesn't seem to turn anyone's crank. Is this the source of the free-floating resentment that observers are noting among trans people?

For that matter, is this why it's such a key objective in the trans movement to get kids started on hormones and surgery before puberty, which is to say before they can even begin to realize what their sex lives will be like when they become adults?

All I can think are there are lots of questions, and there are limits to what you can do even when you make an effort at violating natural law. We've been in a moral panic, and it's been over more than COVID. We're about done with COVID, but less so with the other stuff.